Introduction Lessons

Art is the use of skill and creative imagination in the production of beautiful or thought provoking objects that exhibit taste and or style.

Elements of Art

The elements are color, value, line, shape, form, texture and space.

 

Principles of Design

The principles of design are balance, contrast, proportion, pattern, rhythm, emphasis, unity, and variety.

The elements of art are like the ingredients of a cake. Let's compare the two.

When you bake a cake, you have an empty bowl, and you put the ingredients in to create your cake, like flour and sugar.

When you make a piece of art, you have an empty paper or canvas, and you put the elements on to create your artwork, like lines and color.

"Understanding the elements and principles of art helps people talk and think about art." from the Sanford art suppliers web site.

The objective of these lessons is to introduce the students to masterpieces from different periods of history and get them to start thinking about art history as well as be curious and interested in the following lessons. The students will also learn the vocabulary of the elements of art and the principles of design through exploratory games on the Internet in order to prepare them for their art history chronological sort.

Lesson 1: Elements of Art: Color This lesson needs to be taught in a computer lab.

The objectives are: to learn the colors on the color wheel, to learn what the primary, secondary, and intermediate colors are, to learn what the warm and cool colors are, to learn what the complementary color pairs are, learn to mix the primary colors to get the secondary colors.

Time: One 45 minute class period.

Advanced preparation: Make sure you can easily have the students navigate to this web page to help guide their research. You need to have a drawing program like Kid Pix or Adobe Illustrator. The students already have to know how to use the drawing software in order to do the name making.

To Assess the lesson, grade the color sheet below.

Click here to print out a worksheet to go with this lesson.

Have the children use the links below to help them answer the following questions on the worksheet:

COLOR WHEEL

For fun try Mixing the colors . COLOR MIXING

PRIMARY COLORS

SECONDARY COLORS

INTERMEDIATE COLORS

For fun use Kid Pix or some other painting program and design your name using warm colors.

WARM COLORS

 

Now design your last name using cool colors. You design needs to exhibit the Principles of design and use at least three elements of art.

Here are examples of student projects.

COOL COLORS

COMPLEMENTARY COLORS

For homework study the link above on complementary colors and complete the worksheet below.

Homework Worksheet

Lesson 2: Elements of Art: Color-Tints and Shades This lesson needs to be taught in a computer lab and an art studio.

The objective is to learn how to make tints and shades and use them in a composition.

Time: Two 45 minute class periods.

Assessment: Use the project rubric on the rubric link, which is on the table of contents.

Here are examples of student projects form both:

 

 

1st: Explain that a hue is a pure color, like red, yellow or blue. Then explain that a tint is created when white is added to that hue, and a shade is created when black is added to that hue.

2nd: Have children read about tints and shades on the URL below, and have them practice making tints and shades on the web site too.

TINTS AND SHADES

3rd: Have the children use only one hue(color) and its tints and shades to create a picture. Use five small cups. The middle cup will have the pure hue, just blue for example. The two cups on the right will be the tints and the two cups on the left will be the shades.

If you do the project in the computer lab, Kid Pix has color swatches that are petty close to a hues tints and shades. Photoshop or any other graphic program that allows you to use a more sophisticated color picked is better. The students would create the tints and shades and then save them as swatches.

4th: The students need to choose a picture and simplify it so that it is like a stained glass window. The picture must be broken into obvious shapes. In the art studio, coloring books work as good references for them to copy. I recommend having them draw in pen (permanent markers are the best) so that the line is authentic and expresses that child at that moment. (Kids hate this, but it really works better that using pencils. When they use pencils they tend to spend more time erasing than drawing.) A fun resource for this project is a coloring book called, "Start Exploring Masterpieces" by Mary Martin and published by Running Press (ISBN 0-89471-801-1). It takes sixty historic masterpieces and has them represented as line drawings. You can either photocopy the page and enlarge it to be an 11" by 17" or scan it and have the kids fill in the color in Photoshop or Kid Pix. The example above called, "PROJECT ON THE COMPUTER" is done from this book.

5th: After the line drawing is complete have them paint the entire picture with the 2 tints, 2 shades, 1 hue, and black and white.

Just for fun: ON-LINE COLOR THEORY QUIZ

More work with elements and principals: COMPOSITION

An additional idea would be to teach a lesson on, "value" and have the students pick grays that would be the same value as the tints and shades they created.

Lesson 3: Art History Sort This lesson can be taught in a regular classroom.

The timeline links below will be helpful in the creation of the multimedia final project as sources for students to find examples of art from different eras in history.

Click here for a timeline

Another timeline

One more timeline

'This lesson does take quite a bit of preparation. The teacher has to have pictures of the masterpieces for the students to use(7 pictures in total- or more). Below I have provided links to pictures to print for this purpose, although teachers may use their own resources as well.

(Please note that these time periods are approximations and not absolute.)

Use the back button to return to this page after looking at the big pictures below.

Prehistory: approximately 450,000 BC through 3,500 BC This is the period of time before humans wrote so we have no written records, only archaeological evidence to determine historical facts.

Earliest work of art known is from 35,000 BC
Ancient Civilizations: 3,500 BC through 100 AD (The fall of Tehran empire) Egypt, Sumer or Mesopotamia, Aegean, Greek, Etruscan, Roman

 

The Middle Ages 0r Dark Ages or Medieval or "Age of Faith"

5th to 15th century

The Renaissance: It literally means "rebirth". It is generally broken up into the early renaissance, the middle renaissance, and the late Renaissance.

Approximately 1400-1600

Impressionism - late 19th century

 

Postimpressionism - early 20th century

 
The 20th Century: 1900-1999 AD

Before the lesson the teacher needs to have several pictures from different times in history. I chose to break history into the big chunks above. Feel free to use the images I provided above. (The quality of these pictures isn't the greatest, but they'll do.) Another good source for pictures is the Art Institute of Chicago. Here is a link to the part of their website where one can find nice pictures to use. You just need to ask them for copyright permission. You will need to print out one colored print from each era of history, and it needs to be large enough to be seen at a distance (8.5 X 11 is fine.)

First make photocopies of your colored masters for the students to use. Each team will need one set of pictures, so the number you print will be based on your class size. Put a colored copy of each masterpiece on the board in the front of the room. These pictures will spark the students' curiosity as they enter the room.

Say, "We will be learning art skills from great art masterpieces created in the past. Then we'll create our own masterpieces based on lessons gleaned from the past. In a minute I will pass out a packet of masterpiece paintings to a your assigned group. Your task will be to put the masterpieces in the proper chronological order. You will have thirty minutes to work on your answer, and then you'll turn in your guess by handing me your stack with the oldest masterpiece on the bottom and the most recent on the top. For each painting you need to finish the following sentences:

(Write these sentence starters on the board.)

We think the subject of the painting is _______________________________________________________ .

We think this painting was made around ________________________________________ .

We think this because in the painting we see _____________________________________________ .

We think the most obvious elements of design in this masterpiece are ________________________________________ .

We see the following principles of design ___________________________________________________________ .

Here are the jobs for members of your group.

Secretary He or she writes down the sentences above with the group's responses.

Presenter He or she explains the group's reasoning for the chronological order to the class.

President He or she makes sure everyone is doing his or her job and keeps track of time so that the team gets finished in time. The president is responsible for pacing the group.

Designer He or she handles the pictures and moves them around as the team discusses choices and puts the pictures up for the final presentation.

For Assessment: Use the rubric link for team projects.