Artist Study: Wassily Kandinksy

More color theory. This time....Kandinsky! In this lesson we first looked at Kandinsky's famous concentric circles painting Farbstudie Quadrate circa 1913.

I started the lesson by projecting the image on the board. I asked the students who they thought made this painting. They responded "Gina's class," "my mom," and "you!" They were excited to learn that this was a famous painting that -- like the work Josef Albers that we had just looked at the week before -- studied how color looks different when placed next to other colors. Learners then started their own creations.

We started with a small circle in the center and then adding circles around that in pastel.

Learners painted in the circles with any color they chose, making sure to think about warm and cool colors.

Materials: watercolor paper cut in squares, watercolor paints, crayon or pastel

Artist Study: Josef Albers

As we continued our study of color we looked at the art work of Josef Albers. There is a wonderful children's book called An Eye for Color about Albers. It not only gives a short bio of Albers life but also nicely explains color theory in a clear and concise fashion.

After reading the book we looked at how colors can appear different when juxtaposed against different colors. A good example of this is putting a red square on top of a white piece of paper and on top of an purple piece of paper.

After reading the book and playing around with layering different squares on top of each other, we made our own Josef Albers artwork by gluing squares together.

Materials: pre-cut construction paper squares of various colors, glue sticks, An Eye for Color book