Art Education for the Home School

Art is an important, but often overlooked, subject when it comes to educating today's children. Through art, children learn a different way to perceive the world around them, a new way to express themselves, and cultural lessons. However, teaching meaningful art lessons in the home schooling environment can be difficult. This article is the third in a series entitled Art Education for the Home School. This series is designed to give the home schooling parent the lessons and resources necessary to build an effective home school art education curriculum. Lesson one focused on the elements of art and line. Lesson two explored shape and form. This lesson will continue with the elements of color and value.

The elements of art, or the building blocks of all artworks, are line, shape, form, texture, color, value and space. All art education should begin with this foundation. Below are two lessons on the elements of color and value. Color and value are close cousins when it comes to art. A vast majority of the time, when color is present, value comes along for the ride. Color is also a very expansive element. One could teach a whole month simply covering color theory. In the lessons below, I've included much information on color theory, covering national art academic expectations through middle school. Feel free to pair down the information for a younger audience. After this article, be sure to check back for the final installment on art elements. Next up will be texture and space.

COLOR

Definition -- an element of art, technically the wavelength of light reflected by an object. To better understand color in reference to art though, one must break it down.

Hue -- the actual name of a color found in its pure state, i.e. red, violet, blue, etc.

Primary colors -- red, blue, and yellow. The colors from which all other colors can be mixed.

Secondary colors -- orange, green, and violet. Colors achieved by mixing two primaries.

Intermediate colors -- red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. Colors achieved by mixing a primary and secondary color.

Warm colors -- reds, yellows, and oranges. These colors remind the viewer of warm things like fire and the sun.

Cool colors -- blues, violets, and greens. These colors remind the viewer of cool things like ice, water, and grass.

Color wheel -- a circular diagram of the colors (usually primary, secondary and sometimes intermediate colors) arranged in the order of the spectrum. Color wheels can then be read to give color mixing recipes and color relationships. See an example.

Complementary colors -- colors directly across from one another on the color wheel. Complementary colors contrast each other. red & green, blue & orange, yellow & violet

Analogous colors -- neighboring colors on the color wheel.

Bell Ringer (a quick question/pre-assessment at the beginning of the lesson to get your student thinking) - Imagine if artwork had no color. All artwork was only created using black and white. What would you think of that? Would it make art more interesting? More boring?

Art Analysis - Explain the terms above to you student. As you cover each term, have your student play I spy by looking around your house to find examples of each color and color relation.

Studio Project - Color Wheel Collage

This project will enforce the concepts of color taught above. You can take it varying degrees of depth depending on which component below you choose to include in your assignment.

Give your student a large sheet of drawing paper and various colored markers or crayons.

Have the student draw a large triangle in the center of the page. Then have them draw another, same sized, triangle only upside down on top of the other triangle. This should form a 6-pointed star.

Label your stars points clockwise as follows -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.

Next, extend a line out from the angle formed between the points of your star. These will be your intermediate colors. Label them as a hyphenated combination of the colors on either side, i.e. red-orange, yellow-green, etc.

Now, give your student several old magazines. Instruct the student to search through the magazine for examples of each color on the wheel. Cut out and paste down each example, creating a color wheel collage.

To delve deeper into color theory with this project, after the wheel is complete, instruct the student to label another sheet of paper complementary pairs. Then have the student find and cut out exmples of complementary color pairs and glue them down. Some examples may be a tomato vine (red and green), a Lakers jersey (yellow and violet). Then, do the same with analogous colors, warm colors, and cool colors.

VALUE

Definition -- an element of art, value refers to the lightness or darkness of a hue.

Tint -- a light value achieved by adding white. i.e. pink, baby blue, mint green, etc.

Shade -- a dark value achieved by adding black. i.e. burgundy, navy blue, midnight green, etc.

Value scale -- a range of light to dark values. See example.

Bell Ringer (a quick question/pre-assessment at the beginning of the lesson to get your student thinking) - Look at the color wheel you created. What are some colors that you notice are missing from the wheel. Hopefully, your student will mention some tints and shades giving an excellent segue into your lesson.

Art Analysis - Explain the terms above to you student. As you cover each term, have your student identify an tint and shade of each color on the color wheel.

Studio Project - Value Collage and Value Scales

As value is so closely related to color begin by having your student find, cut out, and paste five items from magazines onto their color wheel collages. Each item should be the same hue, but different lightness or darknesses of the that hue.

Secondly, give your student a sheet of paper and a rule.

Have them trace the ruler three times to create three long bars.

Divide the bars into 5 blocks each.

Label the top bar shading, the second hatching, and the third stippling.

In each bar create a value scale, going from light to dark values, using the techniques above.

Shading -- press hard with your pencil in the dark box and get progressively softer as you create your value scale.

Hatching -- draw close lines, overlapping each other in a grid patter in the dark box. Draw fewer lines, further apart in each subsequent box as you create your value scale.

Stippling -- dot your dark box with your pencil making very close together dots. The more paper you cover with your dots, the darker the square. Continue down your scale placing less and less dots in each box.

Now, your students should be fluent with the elements of line, shape, form, color and value. Next up will be the elements of texture and space.