Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Complementary Colors Art Project

I have given up waiting for Blogger to restore my post about complementary colors.  I rewrote it. 

Mouse Magic by Ellen Stoll Walsh is a fun book about what happens when complementary colors get together.  Colors opposite one another on the color wheel are called complementary colors, and if you place any two complementary colors together, they will jump around for you (well, at least it looks like they jump around).  Not all colors are pure enough to work, but it's fun to try.

We also read Hello Red Fox by Eric Carle.   In this book, Little Frog's friends come for his birthday party and Mama Frog thinks all of the animals are the wrong color.  She can't see the complementary colors until Little Frog tells her to look at them longer.  This is a really neat book.  The reader is supposed to stare at the animal on each page and then look at a white page with a black dot in the center to hopefully see the complementary color.  Unfortunately, we can't seem to make this work.  We have tried many times, but our eyes just won't be tricked. 


We began our art project by looking at a color wheel and finding complementary colors.  The complementary colors are directly across from each other on the color wheel (red and green, yellow and purple, orange and blue).  C and R chose the two complementary colors they wanted to work with; C chose red and green and R chose yellow and purple.


I made masking tape designs on white card stock (only because I was out of plain white paper) and told C and R to paint over the entire paper (including over the tape) with their first color.



Once the paint dried, I carefully peeled off the masking tape.  C and R used thin paint brushes to fill in the white spots with the complementary colors. 

Here is their finished art:


 

1 comment:

Susana said...

Glad you rewrote this one :-). This is a great post full of super info. I love this project and the books that go along with it. I want to do this here with Joe for sure, maybe Jack as well, we'll see.