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. 

Back on the Bus Y'all Art Project

My art class didn't waste any time getting back into the art making mode this school year. In fact, the first week, we made bus safety posters for a contest. 

Students were invited to use marker, colored pencil, watercolor or acrylic.

I am always amazed at the range of abilities my students have. About half have some sight and half have none. Their cognitive abilities are varied as well. I am thrilled when I find a student who can understand concepts such as two-point perspective.

But my heart skips a beat when someone uses their unique twist, by adding things such as the interior aisle on the outside of the bus, or representing a wheel chair lift as a blue circle. This student used Wiki-stix to provide tactile lines for the paint. I had challenged my students to consider a different point of view, but most of my students drew the side view of the bus facing right. I can't blame them though, that's exactly what they see when they get on and off the bus each day.

Collaborate Cardboard Relief Sculpture

I recently revisited a project from four years ago, in which I had each student choose a type of shape (rectilinear or curvilinear) and a set of analogous  colors (from yellow to blue, from yellow to red, or from red to blue). After they each painted and arranged their cardboard shapes into a personal relief sculpture, I asked how they would feel about combining them. (They looked so pretty-like a large stained glass window laid out on a large table together).  Eight students agreed, so I got out the hot glue gun and combined them into what now hangs  from the hall ceiling with 2 pieces of wire. It ended up being 6 foot tall, and there are enough individual personal relief sculptures to brighten our classroom as well.