The sixth grade Arts Alive group have just explored oil pastels and the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. Georgia O'Keefe takes realistic items and abstracts them by making them very large and simplifing their shapes. Students looked at how oil pastels can be manipulated by coloring one pastel over another to make rich dark colors, as well as blending them so that subtle colors saturate a white area, giving it a richness far greater than white alone would do. They experimented with using oil to melt the pastels, giving their work a painterly effect and drawing over the oil to bring color back to an area that became too transparent. They did an excellent job of looking closely at values, and using three values in each flower petal. Each petal consists of the color of the flower, the color of light shining on the flower and the color of the shadowy areas.
Students then choose a new subject and used their new skills to draw that object.
Working from a real object requires concentration and obserservation. Abstracting from life, requires even more focus on the lines and shapes of what they are drawing. These students took the time to look, and their work really shows their results.
1 comment:
testing
Post a Comment