Shopping for tempera paint can make you feel like a kid in a candy store! How can you resist filling your basket with all those juicy colors?? When you're in the market for paint for your elementary classroom or homeschool, you really only need 3 colors of tempera to provide a great learning experience for your students, and you'll simplify your life at the same … [Read more...]
The Color Wheel Challenge
If you've been following any art teacher accounts on social media lately, you've probably seen it... the Color Wheel Challenge! The idea is simple... gather items in bright, solid colors from around your home, assemble them into color wheel order, and snap a pic! Then share your creation on social media using the hashtag #colorwheelchallenge . Here are a few tips I … [Read more...]
The Great Tertiary Color Debate
The internet…. that great supplier of information at your fingertips, making it fast and easy to find answers and share them with the world! But what if those answers being shared are incorrect?? Vladimir Lenin once said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” (Hmmmm….. did Lenin really say that, or has it just been credited to him so often it’s assumed to be true??) … [Read more...]
Valentine Color Mixing – Paint 100 Hearts!
With Valentines Day (and the '100th Day of School') just around the corner, I thought I’d post this heart-themed version of my 'Mixing 100 Colors’ lesson! Mixing the colors and then painting hearts requires a little longer attention span, so I’ve found that 4th grade and up does best with this version. But younger students can also do this if they just work a little larger and … [Read more...]
Create Your Own Color Wheel
Why purchase pre-mixed paint colors when students can learn to mix their own colors for more variety and more interesting results? Making a color wheel teaches students how to mix the colors they want while learning the basics of color theory! For a printable 7 page pdf of this project (including my color wheel template), please visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store! You will … [Read more...]
How to Mix More Interesting Greens
Green is a color that students often take for granted. When painting greens, many kids will default to just using the green in their paint set. This results in paintings that lack depth and interest. With some basic color mixing instruction, kids can paint a variety of greens and greatly improve their paintings at the same time! Follow these steps to mix more interesting … [Read more...]
Kandinsky for Kinders
I love this color mixing lesson inspired by Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky! Kandinsky was an accomplished musician as well as an artist, so it's fun to play music while the students are working. You can do variations of this lesson for just about any grade level. Here is what I do for Kindergarten and 1st grade.... perfect for allowing students to experiment and just have … [Read more...]
Cityscapes with Tints and Shades
Our Kinders are becoming experts at color mixing! This time we added white to make tints and black to make shades as we created these sweet "candy-colored" cities!Materials:9x12 white heavyweight construction paperpencilTempera paint - red, yellow, turquoise, white and blackPaper plates for palettesbrushes and waterVocabulary:Tint - any color plus whiteShade - any color plus … [Read more...]
Valentine Color Mixing
You can mix a "tint" of any color just by adding white to it. Painting with tints lends itself well to Valentine projects, like this colorful card made from a 12"x18" painting folded in half.1. First, place a "quarter-size" amount of red, yellow and turquoise tempera paint on a paper plate. (I like to use "turquoise" rather than "blue", because it's closer to "cyan", or "true … [Read more...]
Color Mixing with Kindergarten
I love how K's will intuitively paint a line of blue across the top of the paper for the sky because the sky is above them! (They usually need to be taught to make the sky touch the ground. I save that lesson for later!) ~ Flowers by Gabriel I like to start off our first color mixing lesson in Kindergarten by reading the story, "Mouse Paint" by Ellen Stoll Walsh. Then, … [Read more...]