I’ve been having requests to start posting my Art lessons here from when we used to homeschool, and I thought that was a great idea! Here is the directory to all of my art lessons. I’ll be filling it in as I post them.
Today we are going to look at these impressionistic (pointillism) color wheels! The kids had a great time with these!
These are perfect for this time of year as we are celebrating St. Therese “The Little Flower” with her canonization date on May 17, PLUS, this is a really great project for the Easter season and Spring in general. Or for anytime you are studying color theory with kids, or impressionism.
At the time that I taught this Art lesson with my homeschool co-op, I was studying Vincent van Gogh with the kids, with an emphasis on learning painting skills. So on this particular week, we were learning about the color wheel, color mixing, and how the impressionists didn’t always mix their paints on their pallets but often right on their canvases! Yellow and blue beside each other can start to trick our eye into seeing green, and having a variety of colors in one place can add visual interest to the artwork.
Find all of my Vincent van Gogh Art lessons here
Supplies Needed For Flower Color Wheels:
- Paint in primary colors- red, yellow, and blue (You can use cheap acrylic paint, or if you’re worried about a mess, you could use washable kid’s tempera paints.)
- White paper (for the flowers)
- Black paper (for the background piece)
- Scissors
- Glue stick
- Q-tips
Start by giving all the kids a piece of standard white paper.
Fold it in half like so…
Turn your paper so the folded side is at the top. Fold one corner down- about in a third.
Fold the other corner down…
Make 2 marks like this- kids have a much easier time cutting on lines.
Cut on those lines…
Open your paper to reveal an awesome 6 petaled flower- ready for your color wheel!
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The kids are going to start by gluing their white flower to the black paper to create their color wheels. Because of the way the paper was folded, they have some nice lines on their paper, creating 6 spaces- 1 for each color.
Start at the top- fill in one flower petal with yellow dots using your q-tip. It doesn’t have to be completely filled in- you want to see the dots.
Skip a petal and dot the next one in red, then skip another petal and dot that one in blue. You should now have every other petal filled in. Have the kids make the petals in between each color appear to be the secondary color by dotting the 2 colors together.
Here’s a close up of one of the completed color wheels.
You can see how even though the colors are mixed on the paper, the color impressions are successful! This is a great way to get kids started with impressionism.
I like to have something for the kids to do when they complete their project and they’re waiting for the other kids to finish up. So in this case, I gave the kids some computer paper and let them create their own pointillism flowers with the leftover paint. They loved this!
The completed impressionistic flowers…
Art terms and concepts to cover during this lesson:
- impressionism
- pointillism
- primary colors
- secondary colors
- color wheel
- color mixing
- the correct way to refer to colors during art class (the biggest one here is going to be referring to purple as “violet”) Also, when you refer to a tertiary color, you always say the primary color first. So for instance, you would always say red-orange rather than orange-red, EVEN if the color seemed more orange.
- the correct way to orient a color wheel- with yellow at the top
Check out some of my other posts about kid art! 🙂
What To Do With Your Children’s Art– a really great guide with lots of practical ideas of dealing with their little masterpieces.
A Guide To Buying Arts And Crafts Supplies– another really handy guide! What do you need to splurge on? When is it ok to skimp? What should you keep stocked all the time? All these questions and more answered.
