Lesson 4: Painting and Space

Community Connections | 9/26/2022

We created a duo lesson class that focused on color and space by interacting with the painting medium in unique ways.

It was a struggle to create a fun and interactive lesson, or two, in this case that could be differentiated enough to be broken down to a series of this-or-that choices for one student and still challenging enough to keep artistically passionate students engaged.

I decided to play with the way we use acrylic paint as a medium and stretched it's capabilities a little bit.

The first lesson was to create their own DIY scratch papers, they started by completely filling in a sheet of multi-media paper with oil pastel. The less white showing the better. My example showed a rainbow pattern but the students were encouraged to pick the colors they preferred and watch as they mixed when they pressed hard to color as instructed to make sure the pastel filled the grooves in the paper. After everyone finished, we handed out pre-poured and slightly watered down black acrylic paint and demonstrated how to paint a thin but opaque layer on top of the pastel.

This class demonstration took place after most had finished with their pastel so some students moved on to painting and others went back to coloring. This went as expected, I planned to demonstrate the next lesson in small groups or one-on-one as students finished painting.

The black acrylic was set aside to dry with the promised we would return to it; and I demonstrated the next lesson: a folded-paper string-pull. There were watered down pre-poured cups of acrylic paint set on the tables and each student was given two foot-long cuts of yarn to dip into the cup, arrange on one half of the paper, fold the paper over it, and pull revealing a type of floral Rorschach test. I planned for this to get messy and encouraged students to wear aprons, which most took me up on. The specific ways it got messy however, didn't occur to me until I taught it.

The students were instructed to press the top of the folded sheet down while pulling the string out for the desired effect, but I was unclear on how hard to press down and where on the paper to press so there were several students who struggled pulling the stings out and once they did it would fling paint at either them, a classmate, or a para. If I taught this lesson again I would be sure to demonstrate and verbalize how hard to press the paper down and how hard to pull the string.

Most students had a lot of fun making a mess with this one and made a couple string-pull pictures each. They tried different colors, laughed and talked about the things they saw in the painting, and asked us to weigh in too.

Once they were done with the string pull, the scratch papers were long dry and they were able to scratch in their drawings and designs. My original idea was to use the hard end of a paintbrush to scratch them but those didn't work so I found some wooden skewers in the pottery tools and they used those instead.

They scratched much easier and students were able to get details.

After they finished drawing on their scratch papers, it was close to the end of class. some made more string-pulls and others moved on to free draw with markers or build with blocks which were both always available at the end of class.