Sample #2
Watercolor Painting
Art Form: Painting.
Art Media: Watercolour paint on paper.
Design Element or Principle: Line, colour, shape and form, texture, value, space.
Expectations:
- Grade 7 - D1.3 use elements of design in art works to communicate ideas, messages, and understandings for a specific audience and purpose. D2.3 demonstrate an understanding of how to read and interpret signs, symbols, and style in art works. Emphasis on unity and harmony.
- Students will use their knowledge of signs and symbols to create a design that conveys a message.
Reflection:
3. For this work I borrowed many of the design considerations from my portfolio cover. I liked the idea of being able to expand on a design/theme, and therefore kept the same overall use of elements such as line, colour, shape, and space. This time however, I had the opportunity to explore a new medium (watercolour paints) and therefore spent some time experimenting with different techniques I could use with them. I tried various uses of lines and pointillism to create implied textures, and mix colours in different ways, however I was never fully satisfied with how each colour was blended.
4. The materials used for this work were watercolour paints and paper. This is appropriate for all age groups as watercolours as simple to use and easy to clean up, but can be technically demanding and therefore appropriate to more advanced and/or older students as well. Watercolour kits often contain primary and secondary colours, as well as black and white, and therefore do not require young students to mix colours, and watercolours also dry quickly and will be less messy in the primary grades.
5. There were several techniques that were new to me when I began this work. The first was pointillism. While we had discussed it in the elements of design, I had never employed it in a personal work before. I really liked this technique for watercolours because I have difficulty making consistent brush strokes that I am content with. Pointillism was a way of providing texture and colour to a work that can be both very crude and gentle. I used pointillism by premixing my paint colours, and then dipping a very wet brush into the paint. This made for very loose, and somewhat translucent, grains to the texture that I preferred as they used less paint. Another technique I explored during this studio session was creating secondary and tertiary colours by mixing different numbers of lines of the primary colours. I found this to be an interesting way to create new perceptions of colours and textures in a work, however I was never able to create a true sense of the intermediary colours as I had seen in the works of others.
