Art Lesson: Rectangle of Destiny

 

Lesson for 9th grade, 6 weeks, acrylics or gouache

Above: Kotoko and Maxine develop their paintings, inspired by the styles and colors inside their rectangles. Students did a few days of color mixing exercises at the start of this project. Beyond color mixing, they leveled-up their composition skills and visual storytelling skills during this project.

This lesson is simple: I print out a few dozen sections of famous paintings. They're so zoomed in that they're unrecognizable. The student has to generate an entire painting inspired by the rectangular printout, the "rectangle of destiny." Ideally, the print out becomes indistinguishable from marks made by the student.

[insert image of choices]

Target Skill: Color mixing - Students learn to modulate the hue, saturation, and value to precisely match colors in the rectangle of destiny.

 

Also, this unit asks them to imagine a non-obvious scene using the reference. Here are notable works from the last 2 years I taught this unit.