First Grade Fleurs- RES

Here in northern Vermont, it has been raining for days and days.  

In case you are starting to feel a little grumpy about it, perhaps this will cheer you up.

RES first graders can remind you that all this rain will bring some stellar summer flowers!

These deceptively simple looking fleurs were made just this week.  What is tricky about them?  The big concepts on which we focused this lesson were color temperatures (warm versus cool) and discerning positive and negative space (or in this case, object versus background).

After using tempera cake to paint big beautiful flowers in bold black lines, artists were asked to choose to paint the object warm and the background cool, or vice-versa, their choice. This was harder than you might think, because it leads to the colors, in some areas, not being at all intuitive. For example, if the artist painted a blue and purple flower with green leaves, then the ground and background sky might be red or yellow.

Alternately, like this one above, if you have a cool background (green grass, blue sky), then your entire flower was warm (pink blossom, orange leaves).

Whew!  Hopefully, not too confusing. It helped to have separate trays of warm and cool colors at separate tables.  I think the physical traveling from one table to another, one paint palette to another, helped these young artists transfer focus and color from one area of the work to the other.

The big idea here is to get students to paint not just what the colors are "supposed" to be, but to instead keep focus on distinguishing between warm and cool in separate areas, leading to unexpected and fun visual results.

 Happy rainy week!  May there be lots of blossoms in your future.