Art Lesson: Inventive Color Painting

 

Here's one for 10th, inspired by Claudia Carr. 

Students took heavyweight white or beige paper, crumpled it, and then brought it into a dark room. A partner lit the paper from the side (with iPhone flashlights), and the student photographed their own paper with dramatic shadows cast from the side. Like this:

Each student cropped her photo to make it interesting (sometimes going off 1 or 2 sides), and then began a painting from the photo. 

Featured skills and understandings (in descending order of importance):

1. Skill: Mixing neutral colors (students may not use brown or black. They mix neutrals from primaries and secondaries.)
2. Skill: Simplifying and grouping values
3. Understanding: colors can be arbitrary and inventive if you get the value right
4. Skill: Simplifying geometry (I compare this exercise to drawing rocks and show <this> slideshow)

For the first 2 years, I had students make these pretty small, about 13x18. They spent 5 classes plus homework on this. I thought it more of an exercise than a proper artwork, so I didn't want to commit too much time to it.

Year 3, I had students make them 18x24 (not pictured) and gave an extra class, which was plenty. Because the larger size didn't take much more time, I suggest 18x24 or larger for this.

18" x 24" Results:

Related:  Side-lit cumulus cloud paintings. Students focus on relative values when they paint clouds because they don't need to make decisions about composition, color. They also practice hard/soft shadows, and they love the project. If feasible, they photograph their own clouds as refs for their paintings.