Symbolism in Painting

Learning to Mix Tints and Shades:

For this lesson, start the students with two colours and have them slowly (little by little) add white to each colour to achieve a full range of value in tints. Then add a little bit of black bit by bit to achieve shades. PLEASE see demo video.

Hot and Cool Watercolour Weavings: Students begin with a study in to organic and geometric shapes in cool or hot palettes. When their paintings are dry, they weave the two sections to make dynamic pieces to show contrast.

Monet and Seurat: A Study of Impressionism and Pointillism using dry tempra palettes and students' personal photos of nature.

Visual Haiku: Creating an Illustration of a Basho poem.

Exquisite Corpse Paintings: Begin with a Group Exquisite Corpse Poem (Dada style). Then create a painting incorporating all of the words from your poem.

Earth Air Water Fire: Choose one of the elements and photograph something in nature or in your own life. Create a painting based off of this photograph.

Blurry to Clear: Start the class off with a very blurry image projecting from the LCD. Begin the painting from observation. Each day make the photo a little less blurry until a clear image or landscape is recognizable. Great for teaching background and building layers!