Complementary Color Op Art Assignment

Once you have a color wheel made, you can begin to discuss the relationships and positions of colors on the wheel to form color harmonies. A complementary color scheme consists of two colors that are opposite on the color wheel. They have nothing in common, but that's OK-opposites attract! The contrast in these combos pop in a way that make them perfect for sports teams like the Florida Gators or New Orleans Saints.

yellow-orange/blue-purple compliments

I teach complements by setting three bottles primary colored paint on a table: red, yellow, and blue. These are the first and most essential colors that you need to make all of the other colors (secondary, tertiary and beyond). Two primaries make a secondary. I ask, "What do yellow and blue make?" "Green!" they answer. "And what is left over?" "Red." ":What is the opposite of green?" "Red!"  A primary color's complement is the secondary color that is a combination of the remaining primaries. So in a pair of complementary colors, you get all three primaries. The root of the word complement means "to complete." I continue to hold up a primary colored bottle of paint while students look at the remaining two colors to figure the secondary color that would make up the opposite until the concept is solidified.

Students can also look at their color wheel to find compliments other than the primaries and secondary three combos: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. These tertiary colors are just shifted slightly to be a yellow-orange and blue-purple. or a blue-green and a red-orange.  When naming the tertiary colors the primary color always comes first and secondary color second. The name is the recipe for mixing. You would never have an orange-yellow, because orange can't describe a yellow. yellow is yellow. Once you mix in a little orange it is no longer yellow, it is orange.

Some students chose to work markers. Scented markers can be useful for my students who are blind. Others worked in colored pencil. Some were able to shade and highlight their shapes to make the optical illusion a little more effective. 

I outlined in hot glue the Wiki Stix drawings of students who are totally blind. Then I placed tiny pieces of Wiki Stix in every other space to make a checker board. The students could color each space without the tactile "dot" in one color, then use the complementary color to color each space with a dot, one by one, removing the dots along the way.  Student with very little vision used a VisioBook magnifier to zoom in on his shapes, which were also outlined in hot glue. It had been a dozen years since I assigned this color project, but I think the students were pretty pleased with their final pieces.

 

Op Art and the Element of Line

 

Op Art was a movement in the sixties that played with people's minds: it made 2D lines feel 3 dimensional and still lines seem to vibrate or move in unexpected ways. 

Line is the first element we will cover in our Elements of Art lessons. One idea for a project is to use the edge of a bulletin board border. (To my virtual students, I sent you each a piece of this in your last packet of supplies). Hold it vertical and trace the bumpy edge near the left hand side of of a vertical piece of paper. Then move the boarder template to the left and down just a tad and trace another line. Repeat the process until the entire paper is full. If you are using a chisaled marker, consider using the wide edge on the in stroke and the thin edge on the out stroke over visa versa. When you turn the finished drawing on its side it gives the illusion of bumps or waves.

For students with little to no vision, there's an option to use Wiki Sticks to create a few simple shapes. You may use a circle in the middle of the page, or squares poking in from edges or a combination of those ideas.

 

Hold your paper horizontally and draw vertical, parallel lines in the background (around the shapes). You can use a ruler if you like. Move the ruler a little to the left each time and make sure it stays parallel to the sides of the paper. If you would rather it be tactile lines, use puffy paint, liquid glue, glued, strips of paper, or Wiki Stix to create your lines. 

Then rotate your paper 90 degrees or in an angle that aligns with the edge of one of your shapes, and create parallel lines going in that direction.

For a modification of this option, I have included paper with stripes of puffy paint. Cut the bottom 1/3 or 1/4 of the paper off. Cut it into simple shapes, like square or triangles. Glue it on the larger striped sheet being sure to change the direction of the stripes.

For my students with some vision, there's yet another option, Create a funnel shape, draw two lines coming in and down from either side of the paper. Start at the bottom of that funnel ad make a frown arch going up and off the top of the page. For the background make smiles lines going behind the funnel.

To create a funnel form a higher point of view, looking down into the top, make the lines curving up on the sides on top of the form. Verticle lines can come straight up and out of the top "smile" shaped line, and move out to the corners. (Lines on the right curve right and left lines curve left at the top of the page.

You may draw straight, parallel, horizontal lines in the background, for the illusion of flat space, or you can make frowny arched lines to make it look like the sides are curving towards you. I chose to make a flat space in the example below.

There are many ways to use lines to create optical illusions. Make spheres or cubes; fill the space. Play around and have some fun with it.

Squiggly Lines Op Art

Most Op Art projects are formulaic and therefore not hard to do, but they yield a wow factor. Plus it is just fun to talk about optical illusions, even to students with optical challenges.  

For the squiggle project, you draw curved lines from one end of the paper to the next. Most of mine went top to bottom for a horizontal piece of paper. Then they drew a curve from the middle of one line to the next, like a smile. When you get to the next line make it a frown, and continue going smile, frown, and switching direction at each line. After that every line above the line will be frown lines, and every line below the line will be similes. This is the same principle that is used when drawing cylinders with the horizon line (eye level) somewhere in the middle.

For my students who have no vision, I used hot glue to trace their initial lines, so they could draw their "smiles" and "frowns" within those boundaries. Then I created construction paper stencils of crescents of various widths and thicknesses. I would have to help pick out the right size stencil, but at least these students could color their piece independently.

It is not only the repetition and color contrast that creates the optical illusion, but the value. By shading the colored pencil on the edges, or the ends of each crescent shape, it gives the illusion of three dimensions. This project took a couple of weeks, but it was well worth the extra time to see the sense of accomplishment in my students' faces for a job well done.

Teaching Art to Blind Children: My New Job

I have a new job teaching art at the Academy for the Blind. Until I saw on the school's marquee that there was an opening, it hadn't occurred to me that such a job could exist. It does. Considering that there's only one (maybe two) schools for the blind in any given state, and each of those schools may or may not have an art teacher, I feel especially lucky to land such a challenging and fulfilling position!

My students' ages range from four to nineteen, and their visual and learning abilities are as varied as their ages. Because the needs are diverse, the classes are small, sometimes only two or three students at a time. This has allowed me to get to know and love the children very quickly.

I started my first full week, ironically, with an Op Art assignment. Optical illusions may not mean much to most blind, but the line is the simplest of art elements and repetition isn't a hard concept to grasp.

This student exclaimed, "I did it!" after drawing each line. It warmed my heart to think of all the encouragement she's received during her short life. I love the sense of movement in this simple piece.

Week two I plunged into color theory, which is difficult, even students without visual disabilities. In fact, I have taught many college students with 20/20 vision who made it through childhood without learning their color wheel. Luckily, these kids were up to the challenge of mixing the three primary colors to get secondary and tertiary colors in even steps.

Here is another Op Art project using line and repetition in complimentary color schemes.

 Piet Mondrian and Roy Lichtenstein are favorite artists to study when learning about primary colors and triadic color schemes. You can see from this picture how close most of my students need to get to the paper in order to see what they are doing. This Mondrian-style piece was done on braille paper.

The student who created the red piece in the upper right said, "This is really beautiful. Do you think people will like it?" We discussed Picasso's Blue Period before making our own monochromatic paintings. I believe that teaching art history and formal design principles is what separates real art lessons from mindless craft time. I want to give kids the tools to make informed aesthetic choices to better communicate ideas.

The youngest students have done crayon rubbings of various textures and created textures in salt dough by stamping it with objects. We are also making and decorating newspaper hats. I've only been at the school for a few weeks but so far I am loving it. I pinch myself every morning.