Creating New Colours - Nightmare or Heaven?

Adults often look in horror when a paintbrush enters a child's hand, the child has a look of delight, visualising their next masterpiece and the elder has a look of anxiety! What will happen to their clothes and the surrounding area? Let battle commence!

I love letting my students loose with a paintbrush, I have never had many problems using paints during class, apart from the odd spill or painting of arms, nothing that can't be washed out with some water and good old elbow grease!

So for the first paint-based art lesson of this year I set the class with a task of creating new tones from three base colours red, green and blue. (If green had been swapped with yellow they would've had the three primary colours, on reflection we can try that next time!) Oh, I also provided them with white to help lighten tones if necessary.

Newspaper down, aprons on(for some who remembered) paints out and it was time to get painting! Each group table had a set of brushes, water to clean their brushes, palettes to mix their new colours on and their base colours to create their new shades.

For the first task I explained to the children that we would be experimenting with mixing the base colours to create our own new colours. I asked them to create a swatch of colours in their art sketchbooks, giving them a chance to see what colours could be made and which ones caught their eye.

Off they went, experimenting with tones and creating a field of beautiful hues, below are a few shots of the aspiring Van Goughs in action and some samples of their colour swatches.

During this process their was a calmness in the air, it seemed that the painting had created a sense of relaxation, the children were focused and composed in their own artistic worlds. It looked like they had entered into their own bubbles, nothing could disturb them and believe me, afternoon lessons often fork off in an alternative direction!

Swatches were complete and it was time for the students to receive their final task of the lesson. For the the current term our main topic has been The Anglo Saxons. The children were given the task to paint an Anglo-Saxon instrument,or weapon, using some of their newly created colours. They were able to look at images projected, or create their paintings from memory, using support if needed. Below are the final results and I believe they did very well for their first painting project of the year!

This lesson turned out really well and I would recommend this to other teachers or parents. It provided a great opportunity to experiment, creating a therapeutic atmosphere (a 'heaven' for learning) and allowed the children to create their own interpretations of Anglo Saxon artefacts. The end task could be easily changed to suit the topics you are teaching/ the interests of your child.

As a follow up we may delve into making specific colours and utilise the three primary colours rather than the substituted green we used!

Thank you again for reading my post, I hope you enjoyed it! If you would like to see more please follow for future projects.

Bye for now fellow Steemians!