Can You Paint With All the Colors of the Wind?

One of the things that all teachers have to address at some point is color theory. The primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. The secondary colors: purple, orange, and green. The tertiary colors:  blue green, yellow green, red purple, blue purple, red orange, and yellow orange.

Then you have your complimentary colors which are red-green, purple-yellow, and blue-orange. This goes by whichever colors are directly across from each other on the color wheel. Next there are tints and shades, you can create a tint of any color by adding white to it and you can likewise create a shade of any color by adding black to it. Next we have color schemes which are a theme of colors that is in a composition. Analogous is a scheme of colors on the color wheel that incorporates three colors. Cool colors are the blue, greens and some purples, and warm colors are red, orange, and yellows. Triadic colors are colors on the wheel that make a perfect equilateral triangle on the color wheel such as blue, yellow, and red. Split complimentary colors are a little trickier so take red for example to find the split complimentary colors for red you go across the color wheel to green and the split complimentary colors for red are on either side of green so blue-green, and yellow-green.

 A good way for every study to get some basic practice is to create a color wheel and then paint out a gradation scale for a mono chromatic and so on. This will show them how colors mix and also let them prepare for the project we are about to do!

The project is a self-portrait! Now reverse to the beginning of class yesterday. As your students come in the door you are going to get them to make a funny face or smile and take their head shot! You are going to go onto photo shop and create one of these bad boys.

Then you’ll ask them to make a one inch grid on that picture that you printed for them and a two inch grid on the paper which you have cut to be 22 by 16 because you are prepared!

Next your students will draw out their portrait onto the grid; this might be confusing for some of them so be prepared for questions and help when and where it’s needed! Once they have drawn out their portrait and have labeled the areas 1-5 or 1-7 based on the number of tints and shades that are in the portrait. After this students will come to you and tell you what color scheme they want to use, be prepared to steer students away from yellow, as adding yellow and black creates brown. Along with telling the boys who want to use red for a monochromatic color scheme that there will be pink in their portrait then and making sure they are okay with that. 

Here are some examples of finished products and steps along the way!