Lesson 2

·         Remind the children what you left off with and ask them what they remember. Refresh their memory.

·         Ask them what the six main colors are and show them the color wheel. Tell them they can use these six main colors to make a painting and they can mix more colors with these.

·         Ever color comes from three colors called primary colors: blue, red, and yellow. Show them how the color wheel shows what colors they make (e.g. blue and red make purple, so purple is between them)

·         Tell them they can use all the colors, or only a few, even one. Tell them that a painting made in one color is called a monochromatic painting. Write monochromatic on the board.

·         Tell them they can also pick either warm or cool colors, and point out these sections on the wheel. Ask them what warm colors make them feel and what cool colors make them feel.

·         Tell them can also choose between bright and dull. Bright colors would be like neon colors: pinks, yellows, bright oranges, and so on. Ask them how bright colors make them feel. Dull colors usually have a lot of gray in them. They are closer to black and white. Ask them how dull colors make them feel.

·         “You can mix and match these elements—warm and cool, bright and dull—to create contrast. Contrast is when two things stand out against each other because they are opposites.”

·         Show them the paper with your name on it. Tell them it has a lot of contrast because black and white are opposites.

·         Tell them there are three kinds of contrast: warm and cool, bright and dull, and opposite colors. Show them the opposite colors on the color wheel and how you can tell (they’re across from each other).

·         Show them the paper with the superhero symbols on it. Ask them what kind of contrast they see in each one.

·         You use opposites to make contrast. What is the opposite of red/orange/yellow? You can also make contrast with bright and dull. To make something stand out, make it bright; to make something blend in, make it dull. If you put purple and yellow next to each other, that would make contrast. If you wanted to do a painting in one color, you could have a really light green next to a dark green.

·         “Contrast makes things stand out. The part of your drawing you want people to notice most is the part that should have the most contrast.”

·         Ask them what should have more contrast in a portrait, the face or the background? In a painting of a cat in a chair?

·         Give the children time to make a drawing with markers using contrast. When they’re finished, ask if anyone wants to share and ask them what kinds of contrast they used.

·         “Now let’s talk about shapes. Shapes are important in drawing because you can use them to make a map of what you are going to draw. You can draw the basic shapes to show the general shape of what you are drawing. What are the basic shapes?”

·         Tell them you’re going to show them how to make a face and they can follow along in their sketchbooks if they like

·         You don’t have to use this narration, but here’s basically what to do:  start by drawing a circle. This is the skull. Now we’ll draw the jaw, making an upside-down egg shape for the face. Next, we draw lines through the middle of the face. This line marks where the eyes will go, and this line marks the middle of the face where the nose and lips will go. Now we can draw the eyes. Start with circles, then draw the lids, an oval shape that’s pointy at the ends. The eyebrows go above. The nose is one of the hardest parts of the face to draw. I’ll explain this more in a second, but for now let’s draw a triangle for the shape of the nose. You can draw circles at the bottom for the nostrils. Now for the lips: start by drawing a pointy oval, just like we did with the eyelids. Now we draw a line through the middle that goes straight, then dips down in the middle, and goes straight again. The top lip goes up, curves twice, then goes down again. Now we can erase the unnecessary lines and fill in the rest of the drawing.

·         Tell them the lines through the middle of the face are called line of symmetry. Symmetry means that if you folded the paper along the line, the image on each side of the line would match up perfectly.

·         Ask them what other shapes they see on the face.

·         “Now I’m coming back to the nose. The nose is one of the hardest parts of the face to draw because it is made of shadow. Shadow makes contrast on the face between light and dark. When you draw shadow, it’s called shading.” Show them the second part of the diagram of the face.

·         Tell them that a light source is where the light is coming from and in each painting, they will need to pick a light source. Show them how the light source affects the shading on the second diagram.

·         Ask the children to find partners and begin passing out canvases and paints. Tell them to look at the person they’re drawing and that they can ask them to look up if they need to. Briefly remind them what they just learned (contrast and shading) and remind them of the color wheel.