If you want to see learning, watch young artists mix paint. “I made pink!” “I made GOLD!” “How? Show me how!” Without constraint or guidance, paint-mixing turns into mud-making. Art teachers know the value of process, but parents and administrators often need compelling results to appreciate an art project. My co-teacher and I found a fun way to have both.
The key to this lesson is materials. You will need the usual early childhood painting supplies: tempera paint, water, towels, and an assortment of brushes. You will also need masking tape and the largest sheets of watercolor paper that your space and budget can afford.
Before class, cut the watercolor paper into squares, one per student. Add a student’s name to each square and tape all four edges of the square to create a border on each side. These squares of paper were waiting for our kindergartners when they arrived in the art room. All the other art supplies were waiting in the wings.
I gave students a brief introduction to the color wheel and showed them how primary colors could be mixed to create secondary colors. We experimented with both the red-blue-yellow and cyan-magenta-yellow color wheels.
I gathered students to my table for a demonstration of traditional color mixing. (Swish your brush in water to clean it. Test it on your towel until it is clean. Scoop up one of the colors you want. Place that scoop somewhere else on your palette. Clean and test your brush’s cleanliness again. Scoop up a second color. Place the second scoop near the first scoop and mix them together until you make a color that you like.) “Look at the new colors we made! And we still have clean primary colors that we can keep using all class!” Students actually clapped.
As students returned to their seats, we gave them two guidelines to follow: They must fill the paper with paint, and they must use the primary colors we gave them to add all three secondary colors to their compositions.
We showed examples of paintings that did not mix colors or fill the paper: “Not yet.” Paintings that mostly filled the paper but were muddy: “Getting better.” Paintings that filled the paper with three secondary colors: “Well done!” And paintings that filled the paper with a wide variety of vibrant secondary and tertiary colors: “WOW!” The finished pieces were bold and beautiful, with some compositions being more abstract and others depicting outdoor scenes.
Rama Hughes is an art teacher at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, founder of the Art School of the Future, and a contributing editor for SchoolArts. Rama@RamaHughes.com; ArtSchoolOfTheFuture.com
Creating: Engage in self-directed play with materials.
Art teachers use a process-based approach to engage students in art-making. Young students apply color-mixing to create vibrant watercolor paintings, elementary students are introduced to the unique process of paper quilling, middle-school students use critical thinking and ideation skills while drawing meaningful self-portraits, high-school students use fused glass techniques to create functional works of art, and more.
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