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. 

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.