Specials Night, First Grade

These mixed-media Art projects feature first graders' understanding of the primary colors and how they are used to create the secondary colors. We looked at the paintings of Audrey flack. She was a pioneer in a style of painting known as photorealism. We looked at her painting of crayon a crayons. Why do they look so real? We noticed shadows and highlights and tints (lights) and shades (darks) of the same color. We drew our crayons by drawing cylinders first and then drawing a cone shape on top. We added details like the crayons stripe or the color name. We learned to shade with our crayons, pretending a spot light was shining on them, making one side lighter and one side darker, producing a cast shadow on the table next to each crayon. We then mixed liquid watercolors, in the primary colors, in a resist technique for our backgrounds. En la clase de Espanol, students looked at their artwork and wrote, in Spanish, about how many crayons they drew and how the mixed the primary colors.

Specials Night, Kindergarten

These abstract paintings were created by kindergarten artist using liquid watercolors in the primary colors-red, yellow, and blue. Each square is a mini-painting where students explored and reviewed the primary colors and how to mix them together to create the secondary colors. The watercolor paper we used had masking tape on it, dividing it into sections. We used a watercolor technique called "wet on wet", where we first painted a small section of our paper with water, then added a drop of one primary color. Quickly we added a drop of a different primary color, right next to the first. Because the paper is still wet, the two colors simultaneously combined to make a secondary color.
After the paint dried and the tape was removed, we learned about pattern. We used sharpie markers to create patterns where the masking tape used to be.
Lastly, en la clase de Espanol, students talked about their artwork and wrote down, in Spanish, how they created their secondary colors.