Now that background information has been provided for students to better understand and have a deeper appreciation for modern art, it’s time to practice the art techniques that are necessary to communicate the message. The project is looking for students to creatively explore and apply specific colors that may create high impact, convey mood and is also challenging students to present a dynamic layout for all the content that will go into the composition. The element of color and the principles of emphasis and balance will be explored through technique exercises. Students will have already had previous lessons that explored primary and secondary colors and will now explore other colors like tertiaries and values manipulating color schemes for best visual impact. Teaching students how to blend colors is integral to enhancing creativity. Incorporate George Bellows painting to demonstrate the variety of colors he uses to indicate the strong mood conveyed in his painting. Have students create a painting exercises that has them looking at the different values that Bellows uses to describe subject and background and then create an assignment to have students mix primaries with the help of white and black together to create a swatch of multiple tints, tones and shades that derive from a tertiary color. Next, have students look at Douglas’s use of complementary colors and have them create another swatch of mixed colors that focus on a set of complements that are placed in the center of the work space and then radiate multiple tertiary color combinations off of them that become a gradient of values that branch off the tertiaries. The purpose for spending time creating these two exercises is to familiarize students with the control they have for making their own colors, broadening their choices and enhancing creativity.
To help students get more creative with compositional arrangement, have students select one of the works of art to practice how to create emphasis and balance within a composition. Jackson Pollock was quoted as saying, “My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.” Have students find the center of a painting and then find the emphasis of the painting and how far away from the center it is. This will help students appreciate that asymmetrical balance is not only an option but can create a more stimulating layout. Students should choose one of the paintings they’ve been learning about as reference and using a thumbnail sketch format, have students loosely gesture the bold shapes of mass and content they can see, paying attention to the placement of each and there relationships and proportion to the mass around it and the grounds that each mass is placed. An extension activity is to have students change the layout to show an opposite arrangement so if the balance is originally asymmetrical, create a symmetrical composition using the same amount of parts. These three technique exercises, two painting and one drawing, should be developed over three class periods.