1 | FEATURE | Color Scheme Conundrum

Here’s a great color scheme to share with your students.

2 | ARTICLE | Brain Connections

Teaching with 3D – live sculpting & drawing.

3 | CLASSROOM | Teach Proportions

Proportion seems like it would be easy to explain…

4 | MATERIALS | Clay

Modeling clay is such a great teaching tool.

5 | GRAPHIC | Working In Clay

How to manipulate clay for the best results.

6 | LESSONS | What’s Coming Up

This month’s lessons – overviews for each week.

Feature

Teaching kids about triads, double-complements, and quadrads, in addition to complementary and split-complementary, might be more than we need to do.

Especially since these neat geometries don’t always fit what’s going on.

Color scheme models attempt to make something incredibly complex fit into a set of fairly simple rules. That is a laudable goal, and the models we have do a pretty good job of it, using a 12-color wheel as a foundation. The basic wheel has 3 simplified primaries, 3 simplified secondaries, and 6 tertiaries. Even though real color can’t be reduced to such a simple set of hues, this wheel and the resulting scheme geometries are very important for us. Without them, we would flounder in the myriad colors and combinations of them. It’s equally important though, to understand that this system is very simplified, and that color schemes can move far beyond both the wheel, and the standard schemes.

Let’s explore some color schemes that don’t fit.

Color Scheme Variation 1

This color block has a lot going on with 5 distinct points on the color wheel. It’s pretty loud, somewhat complex, and yet pleasing. What would you call this color scheme?

Scheme 1 Diagram

Drawing a line from the center of the wheel to the 5 colors in our graphic, we see a star pattern that doesn’t seem to fit very well at first glance.

Scheme 1 Examined

Looking closer, you see that this isn’t as complex as we thought. It’s a basic quadrad (4 main end-points make a rectangle, or you can call it a double-complement). But there’s also an extra accent in an adjacent (or analagous) color to one of the quadrads. A student will generally have a difficult time analyzing this. The extra accent color throws the whole thing into unknown territory.

Variation 2

Here’s a variation where we’ve toned down the loudness by changing the yellow-green to orange. This scheme is much more calm by making only one color change. You would think that this will fit better into one of our simple color scheme geometries. But can you define this color scheme?

Scheme 2

What the heck is going on here? This is even farther from a known color scheme. How can you explain this to a student after you’ve taught them split complements, triads and quadrads?

I can see a pair of complements, and also sort of a set of analogous colors. But this is pretty wild considering the nice and simple look of the graphic.

Scheme 2 Examined

This is basically an analagous scheme, even though the red-purple is a wide point to the oranges and yellow. There is only a bit of the blue-green accent, and it’s a nice direct complement to a color at almost the center of the set of analogous colors. This is a great color scheme. It just doesn’t fit our models. We could call this a tree color scheme if we needed a name for it, but that would make the small accent the trunk – implying a weight that it doesn’t have. So this doesn’t really fit easily into a existing scheme model, or even a new idea we could attach to it. 

Variation 3

Again, this variation turns down the loudness by changing the red-orange circle to purple. We have a bright and pleasant scheme, but with 5 colors it’s still complex.

Scheme 3

We have another crazy star pattern here, and it’s completely different than anything we’ve seen.

Scheme 3 Examined

Here again we can see that there is a hidden quadrad in the star, and a single accent color off to one side. This really does not fit well, and can be hard to figure out.

So how do we teach color schemes without limiting students to a few simplistic triads and quadrads?

An easier way.

Good looking color schemes are almost always limited to 5 colors or less.

The basic idea of color schemes is to either have low contrast, or high contrast, with variations of colors that subjectively look like they fit together – harmony.

A low contrast color scheme uses analogous groups of colors, but can also have an accent for a small bit of high contrast. Conversely, a high contrast scheme such as a triad can use a few analogous variations to calm the group down a bit.

The trick is to realize that you don’t have to stay inside the boxes of evenly spaced analogous colors or triadics. This doesn’t mean there are no rules, it just means that color schemes are myriad, and you just have to test it and see if you like it. Finding other color schemes you like and borrowing them is a great way for students to learn to select good colors.

Conclusions

• The most basic rule for colors (hues) is simply not to use more than 4 or 5 of them for your scheme. You really don’t need to know all the names and geometric shapes. That’s always going to yield a color scheme.

• Add to this rule, the concepts of experimentation and evaluation – to see if you like how it looks. This is the easiest and most effective method for students to know how to arrive at good color schemes.

• Finally, using colors that are similar in intensity can be helpful, as well as grouping alike colors together, and letting accent colors break the rules.

You can always teach the tried and true quadradics and triadics because it’s fun to know things, and that gives a feeling of control over the complexities of color. But it’s also good to let students know that simply limiting their palette and evaluating how they like it, is really all you need.

This whole article is summed up in that sub title above. The brain is making connections between neurons whenever it is learning. So, it stands to reason that if you use more neurons when you’re learning, it makes a lot more connections. You can find articles about this easily, and there are two of them linked at the end of this article.

This is why The Art Instructor has several tactile learning lessons, where the student first creates something themselves, using modeling clay, and then draws that same thing immediately afterwards. I believe this leads to more intuitive abilities when creating artwork.

In February and March, we’ve been learning about the face by modeling parts of it, and then drawing the model. We have an eye, a nose, and a mouth lesson using this methods. It really helps our students, and we’ve been doing these lessons for over 10 years.

I have a little story about why I think this kind of learning really works wonders. That story ends up with a tattoo of a dinosaur on my arm.

When I was a little boy…

I just always wanted to start a story that way. Anyhow, I taught myself to draw as a pre-teen and young teenager. I didn’t have an art teacher, so I used books. My mom really encouraged me, but she didn’t have any instruction either. She bought me the books.

Books are in 2-D. I didn’t realize at the time how limiting that was. What I did know, was that a friend of mine in 5th grade could draw anything, and it looked fantastically realistic. He understood things in a way I did not. I worked and worked to try and draw like him.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t even try to take an art course in high school until I was at the end of my 11th grade year. I went into the art room one day in April, and it was full of seniors. Interrupting her class, I asked the teacher if I could jump to Art 4 for the next year without taking Art 1 through 3. The seniors all laughed at me. The teacher said to bring in some work and she would see.

The next day I brought in all this work I had copied out of books. The teacher was so impressed that she called up her entire class of seniors and used my work to teach them. It was one of those rare moments in school that are quite satisfying.

But the books only showed me other drawings. Even though everyone thought I could draw really well, I had a harder time drawing from photos, much less real life. I struggled with anything I could not place in front of me in 2-D and work on for hours, copying the work exactly.

I eventually realized I had always needed to draw from life, because in art school that was required. As I worked more and more from still life and models, my abilities improved. It still took many years of struggle to feel like I understand the 3-D world when I’m drawing, even though I score highly on spacial acuity.

So what about that velociraptor on my arm?

That brings me to my great experiment. I figured understanding how something should be drawn to look like it’s 3D, would be easier if you held it, turned it around in your hands, and even made it yourself.

I have a son – he likes to draw like I do. When he was just shy of three years old I began an experiment – to try to give him what my 5th grade friend had – that superior inate understanding of the 3-D world. First, I decided I would have him draw from life at the earliest age possible, and as much as possible. Second, I would have him draw things he could hold and play with. He would draw the things he was most familiar with.

So dinosaurs!

We played with them and drew them and sculpted them and painted them. He loved dinos so much that he would pretend to be one, running back and forth in our kitchen, arms in claw position, slobbering and growling, for hours on end. He was a dinosaur.

Well it totally worked. He could draw in the 5th grade so much better than I could it was astounding. By high school he was beyond my own abilities as a professional illustrator.

Evan eventually fulfilled his dream of being a premier tattoo artist. I never in my wildest dreams expected to have a tattoo, but well, things change. Here is his Instagram post of my velociraptor tattoo right after he finished it.

Was it just a fluke?

While it can’t be proven either way, I don’t think so. To back up my story, I proudly submit another tattoo, this one on my shoulder and from a drawing by my amazing daughter.

Val was adopted from Russia at age 3 1/2.

Science Daily

ARTICLE: Neurons in Human Skin Perform Advanced Calculations.

This article talks about how neurons in the fingers send more than simple tactile information to the brain, they actually make brain-like calculations and deductions about what they touch.

Science News for Students

ARTICLE: Learning rewires the brain.

This article explores how the brain reworks connections when learning – even as adults.

This is taken from one of our Pocket Pointers; handy mini lessons you need to pull out as needed when a student is having a specific difficulty. Sometimes it’s good to stop the class and let everyone listen in when you make a quick point like this.

Here is a great way to explain proportions to young students, along with some visuals you can show to help them understand. Older students also benefit from seeing proportions and understanding that their thumbnails and other sketches need to be the same proportions as their canvas or frame.

APROACH

How Proportions Work (tap any image to open viewer)

graphic

Instructions PDF

When your students are working with modeling clay, you can either give them our instruction handout or use it to teach them the basics. This is an 8.5″ x 11″ poster or graphic handout.

Foundations

Week 28: Face Sculpture

Artists get to create a face sculpture out of air-dry clay or salt dough that will be painted next week. They’re free to have fun with ideas to make the face anything, even an animal face. Before they work on the sculptures, young artist create a fun face warmup and then make practice faces in modeling clay. Older students finish their portrait and then move to the sculpture.

Foundations

Week 29: Paint Sculptures

Last week’s face sculptures have been drying all week. The first half of the lesson this week, is painting the sculptures with acrylic paints. The second half is artists’ choice with dreams: using the acrylics in an expressive painting of a happy dream.

Foundations

Spring Break

Foundations

Week 30: Skin Tones Color Journal

Overview: Students will warm up with face sketches and create a skine tone Color Journal of 25 colors (only 16 for younger grades). Then there is a slideshow about the different color areas of the face and some exercises to practice making flesh tones work together. Young grades have some fun with alien faces too.