Autumn Art Class- Birch Trees

Color Theory. Something I still fully don't understand, possibly because the last formal class I had was in 8th grade, then the art teacher retired and the school turned his classroom into a computer lab, used the darkroom as storage for unwanted, dusty text books and tossed all his supplies in the dumpster.

Bitter? 

Slightly.

Ah, but a glimmer of hope happened with this lesson and I may be getting my brain around some of these concepts!

We started in our art journals with the basics: primary, secondary, cool, hot, and then branched out to analogous. I still don't know if it is pronounced with a short or long O. Oh well.

I had the girls pick one of the analogous color schemes they liked such as: yellow/orange/red or blue/green/yellow but then narrow it down to just 2 of those colors like orange/red or blue/green. 

So.....technically, I don't know if that still qualifies as analogous since it suppose to be 3 colors that are neighbors. I had them choose those because I knew if they were blended together it wouldn't create mud. 

To ready our canvas the girls layered painters tape which would become the trucks & branches. Putting down the thicker tape first to give us the right perspective.

Then, using acrylic painted they painted one color, just on the top half then the other color on the bottom half. 

Lastly blending the two together by either mixing their left over paint or (for some who had lots of paint on their canvas) blending the two sides together with a new brush to create Blue/blue-green/green voila! Either way worked beautifully.

Analogous colors woohoo! 

Take that 8th grade art education! Lol 

We jazzed it up with silver & gold dots and circles created with sponge brushes and baby food jars. Yes, one of the many uses I've found for those handy little glass jars.

Peeling ONE layer of tape off at a time they used an old gift cards to create the texture of the bark. To do this they put a bit of black paint on the end of the card, lined it up to the edge of the tree and drug it across. 

And after all the tape was gone, masterpieces emerged! 

What really amazed me was how their color choices completely changed the mood of their painting, one girl said her's reminded her of spring in China, another said her's was like a cold winters night, and we all agreed that the pink and orange one reminded us of India! Things that were not on my lesson plan by any means but it was so neat to see how color choice can affect something! 

I got this lesson from Angela Anderson's Art blog that has fantastic art lessons for kids check out her website here.