Sunday, May 22, 2011

Splashes of Color


The SCED class at my 4-6th grade school comes to Art separately.  I really enjoy it because there are only 6-8 students so we have the freedom to try some things that might not work as well with a full-size class.

I ordered some droppers for watered down paint last fall and wanted to try them out.  I have 6 tables in the Art room at that school so I put one color of watered down paint at each table (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet).  I put one student at each table and gave them a straw and a 12x18 inch piece of white paper.  I allowed a few minutes at each table for the students to drop paint on their paper and blow it around with the straw.  I showed the students before they started that they can get different results by how they blow the paint around through the straw.  

Both in this class and in 1st grade when we blew branches for the bird nest lesson, I had to teach students how to just blow air through a straw.  Some had a hard time not spitting through it (gross.)  Guess they never learned how to blow bubbles in their drinks!

After a couple minutes, I had the students take their papers and straws and rotate to another table until they had had a chance to use each color.  Even though I KNOW we have talked about color theory a lot, I still had students who were so excited to discover what happens when paint colors mix!  I tried to stay out of what they were saying until I heard something like "yellow and green make orange!" when I felt I had to step in and point out that lots of colors had just gotten mixed together to create that color.  I think I might try this project again some time and only put out the primary colors.


On the 2nd and 3rd days, I told the students we were going to experiment with adding ink to the paintings.  I had tried out two different approaches on my test.  First, I tried using a skinny sharpie to trace around every little change in color and value.  Next, I tried using the sharpie to trace around the negative space.  I liked the results from both approaches so I showed the students both and they picked one or tried a mixture.  By the third class (2nd with ink,) some of the students were ready to quite even though they weren't finished but boy, some could have worked on it all semester!



This student asked if he could cut it out- I said sure, let's try it!

8 comments:

  1. I love how you had the children go from table to table.

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  2. I love this because you could provide this experience for almost any age---early childhood to adult! I am sharing this on my facebook page...learngrowbloom!

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  3. Love this idea! It's a great experiment with color that can create a wide variety of results! Fun :)

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  4. Hello! I love your blog and this project!

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  5. These are totally cool. But what does SCED stand for?

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  6. I just learned that acronym, it means self contained emotionally disturbed classroom.

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  7. Кляксография-это по русски!Klyaksografiya it is Russian.Liked your post.

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  8. Very pretty! So nice when you can have a small group of students! Makes it all worth it!

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