Art Adventure Kindergarten - Lesson 1

Artists and Color

Objective: To introduce the idea that artists create original art and show how an artist mixes colors.

A) Introduction:

Today we are going to talk art and the artist that creates those works of art. With your imagination you create

forts, you take snow and create figures and tunnels, you imagine things in your world a certain way and with

your hand and tools you create what you see in your mind. Artists also look at the work around them and

create an original way to make art by drawing, painting, cutting, digging, shaping and so many other ways.

Does anyone know what “original” means? Something that has not been done before and is not copied is

original.

Artists will also use colors to add to their art. They will always start with three colors red, yellow and blue and

then mix those colors to create more colors like orange, purple and green. They will also use colors like white to

lighten their colors and black to darken their colors. Let talk about a few art terms:

B) Vocabulary: (if the vocabulary words have been provided on poster boards, refer to them here. Otherwise,

write the words on the board before you start the discussion on vocabulary)

• Art: Something created using the imagination, such as a painting, a musical composition or poem

• Artist: A person who creates a work of art

• Original: Something that is fresh and unusual, not a copied

• Copy: An imitation of something original

• Primary color: A color that cannot be made by mixing other colors (red, blue and yellow)

• Secondary color: A color made by mixing primary colors

C) Artwork

Title: A Sunday on the Grande Jatte (jaht)

Artist: George Seurat (su-rah)

Details: Painting

• What do you see happening in this painting?

• If you were to go visit a beach today, would it look like this picture? What is different from what you would

see today?

• Instead of mixing paint colors and brushing them onto the canvas, George would take his colors and place

dots of colors next to one another. Do you see dots or are you too far away? What happens if you take a

closer look, do you see dots? For afar you see one color, but up close you see hundreds of color dots.

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Art Adventure Kindergarten - Lesson 1

Artists and Color

Reinforcement Activity

Materials provided:

paper plates

red, blue, and yellow paint

q-tips

wet wipes

Students Supply: pencil and ruler

Each child is given a paper plate. They will need to use their pencils and rules to divide their plates into 6 evenly

sized sections. Each child will receive red paint, blue paint, and yellow paint. Ask each child to paint one section

red with their q-tip. Next, have them skip a section and paint the next one yellow. Then, have them skip

another section and then paint the next section blue, Those are all the primary colors. To create the secondary

colors we will start to blend colors. Let’s first blend the yellow paint and the blue together in one of the empty

sections. What color did everyone get? You will notice that some of you got a lighter green and some of you

got a darker green. That is because some of you used more blue and some of you used more yellow which

changes how the green color turns out. Next, let’s mix the blue paint and the red paint together in another

empty section. Does anyone know what color we will get? If you guessed purple, then you are correct. Again,

some of you got a lighter purple and some of you got a darker purple. It’s just because you all mixed the paint a

little differently. That leaves us with two colors. We need to mix the yellow paint and the red paint in the last

section. Some of you might already know what happens when we mix these two colors together. We should

get a pretty orange color. Next year we will talk more about how to make the colors lighter or darker, but for

now we will enjoy learning about how we make secondary colors from the primary colors. Just as a reminder:

red, blue and yellow are primary colors and we blend red/blue to make purple, red/yellow to make orange, and

blue/yellow to make green.

If you have a few extra minutes you can have the kids look around the room and find different primary and

secondary colors.

NOTE: Make sure the kids put the project somewhere to dry before they take them home.

Wet wipes will be provided for easy clean-up!

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Art Adventure Kindergarten - Lesson 1

Artists and Color

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Art Adventure Kindergarten - Lesson 1

Artists and Color

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