Colour Theory Unit

The first thing I thought about when getting this position, was what are some base skills that the students need to learn in order to create successful art pieces and projects this year?

The answer that came to my mind from my art training was colour. While there are many other elements of art explored in this unit including form, texture, line and shape..colour was the main focus. I believe that once students young or old start to understand colour theory then all projects both in 2D and 3D have a higher level of success. 

The wall of my art room, has grown a lot more colourful since my first post! Each year level helped me sort the pencils and markers into different colours, and put them on the counter as a cool/warm colour banquet for the students to easily access for the rest of the year. The bonus of doing this gives them control of their own supplies, and the ability to get it themselves. It also solves the fighting over colours problem that comes from having the colours at different tables. 

I started each year level in a different ways going through what primary, and secondary colours were, testing their prior knowledge! Most students had little or no knowledge of these. After we figured these out, we then talked about warm and cool colours, as well as colour buddies (complementry colours).

This gave us our base for our unit( and the rest of the year!) 

In foundation and 1/2, this was our source image:

The Foundations made crayon and watercolour resisits:

And then framed them, and added their name sticker! I was very pleased (and so were the students!) in how they turned out. 

The 1/2s created paper circles, (see classroom makeover post) and used another one of Kandinskys images to create a crayon and water colour shape composition.

The 3/4s looked at warm and cool colours (and patterns) in melbourne graffiti:

The 5/6s used different Keith Haring images to source their work using complementry colours:

The students really enjoyed this project, as they got to add their own twist to it. Our school has many Samoa students in it, and they did a great job of adding symbols from their culture into their work. 

This brings my colour theory post to an end, but I know the future work by the students at this school, will reflect their in depth learning of how to use colour.