mixing colors

The whole point of this activity is to let my second grade students mess around with primary colors to make secondary colors. I also throw in a little mini-lesson on using the brush appropriately and encourage students to not only use equal amounts of two primary colors, but also to use UNequal amounts to create different shades.

Rather than have all students use all three colors, I set up each of three large tables with two primary colors of tempera paint in small containers: one table with red and yellow, one table with blue and yellow, and one table with blue and red. Students choose which table at which to paint. Each student gets a small paper plate on which to mix paint, and a medium-sized round watercolor brush.

My directions are pretty basic: I suggest that they use the paper plates to mix colors, and make sure they understand that they don't need to paint a picture of something but that they can just play around with lines, shapes, and patterns. I also ask that their finished painting have at least three different colors. This confuses some students, but I try not to say more than that.

The first time I did this activity I figured that, at the very least, students would use both primary colors and one mixed color. I found that some students used only mixed colors and figured out on their own that adding more of one of the primary colors would alter the color. Others needed a little creative questioning: "How much red did you use?" "What would happen if you used more yellow?" and the like.

For some students, color mixing is not new. For others, and a surprising number of them, they are surprised to get green or orange or purple. I find that kind of sad. Some students like to paint a picture of something, others are happy to play with lines, shapes, or patterns. I was surprised and curious to find some students spending an inordinate amount of time painting the paper plate itself and avoiding the paper altogether.

Discussion is pretty basic, relating to which primary colors create which secondary colors. It is during the discussion that I introduce the words primary and secondary, and show a color wheel.

pop art hearts

These Pop Art heart paintings by first and second grade students, painted in mid-February in honor of Valentine's Day, were inspired by the art of Jim Dine and Wayne Thiebaud. I introduced the lesson by showing students copies of several works by these two artists. I asked them to describe what they saw and to make any comments they wanted about their observations. I pointed out how the repeated shapes in these works were painted with slightly different colors or patterns and explained that they were going to do a Pop Art painting of hearts. It seemed appropriate to do something with hearts since it was February, and this activity took the hearts out of the cliche realm.

>To lay out their designs, students were able to cut and trace their own hearts or to trace hearts that I provided. First grade students used larger hearts and were asked to trace four on the page; second grade students were asked to trace six. I initially wanted all the students to cut out their own hearts so they would be really different, but I discovered that this was more problematic than I expected with some of the students and turned out taking more time than I thought it would. Since my classes are only an hour, I was glad that I had thought to cut some of my own hearts "just in case." After a couple of classes, I offered the hearts for tracing as a first choice, and anyone who wanted to cut their own was invited to do so.

Because I wanted students to focus on subtle differences in color and patterns or brush treatments, and because this was the first painting they had done this year, I had them use just two primary colors and white to create as many different variations in color as possible. I modeled for them how to outline each heart first with a narrow brush, and then challenged them to paint each of their hearts a different way or with a different color or pattern. I teach at three schools, for a total of six first grade classes and eight second grade classes with approximately twenty students each, so after two weeks of heart painting, I was pretty much on heart overload, but I am pleased to report that collectively we ended up with approximately 1200 differently-painted hearts!