Muted Color Relief Sculpture

Last week, my students helped to create boxy, relief sculpture using saturated colors. This week they helped make a relief sculpture using curvy shapes and muted colors.

A color can only be as bright as it is when you buy it in the bottle. You can however make the color more dull by essentially contaminating it. There are two ways to mute a color: by adding gray or by adding its opposite color and the color wheel (its complement). If you want to make a bright orange into a rust color, add a little blue. A bright yellow can become a brown mustard with a little purple mixed in. 

Every student chose a color to mute and then paint on curved cardboard shapes. I didn't limit them to part of the palette like last week when it was just pink or colors with lots of yellow. The fact that all the colors are moving towards grays and browns means they have the intensity in common, and that's enough to look good tother. 

Analogous Painted Box Tactile Sculpture

 

What can you do with an old coffee table top and a bunch of tiny boxes handed to you in a garbage bag? Make a relief sculpture for a color theory lesson of course!

For this project, students painted the boxes on one side of the color wheel, ranging from pink to green. Students mixed yellow with the pink and yellow with some blue so that most of the colors were warm and cheerful.

Students needed vision to mix the colors but didn't need any vision to feel whether or not their box was covered with paint. We all worked together to finish 135 boxes in 9 rows of 15. The coffee table had a light spray paint coverage with blacks so that some of the old scratches were covered.

Then we used masking tape to make rows and light up the squares.

It was nothing short of a miracle that the width of the tape on each age, and a tape widths between each row and column worked out to fill the space exactly.  It was a real win for the power of eye-balling and guess work. We were just guessing how many boxes we'd need. It took two people to light up the ends of the tape on either side of a box. We didn't use rulers to measure, just the width of a box.

I glued the bottoms down with hot glue and now we have a tactile sculpture that we can use to discuss things like: rectilinear shapes, crystalographic balance, analogous color schemes, and high intensity. 

Adjusting Color and Learning about Color Science.

Students practice finding the right hue, saturation, and value to get match a target color on the smart board

It's been fun helping students understand the science of color. There are so many great videos and podcasts about it. We talk about refracted light, how cones in our eyes receive color, how color can evoke emotions, the history and use of symbolic colors in art, why some of them are color blind...it's all fascinating.

My students responded well to the Science of Color videos and activities on Kahn academy. The color scientist from Pixar explains concepts in an easy to understand way, and shows how color was applied to certain scenes in movies to create a mood and communicate a message.

Students got a chance to try to create and match colors, and edit colors from movie stills to create more contrast or greater harmony. Below is an example of how I adjusted color in a watercolor to make it more coherent. It's important for my students to learn that they can adjust what they've put on paper or in a digital piece of artwork to make things better.

When color range is too wide, it looks chaotic

Adding blue to the yellows makes the composition analogous.

the dark background make the colors look like they're glowing

 

Triadic Color Scheme Compositions

There are three basic classifications of color: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The primary colors are three equally spaced on the color wheel. The Secondary are also equally spaced color wheel and anytime you use three equally spaced colors on the color wheel you get a TRIADIC COLOR SCHEME. 

For this quick project, students put pen to paper and use a line to create either curvilinear or rectilinear shapes. They could go back in and add some overlapping shapes. Then they picked either the primary colors or the secondary colors to make a triadic color study.

I expect my students who are blind to know the names of the primary and secondary colors and to draw their compositions, choosing what kind of shapes they want to make. I traced these drawings in hot glue so they could paint within the tactile perimeters for each color.