A color wheel a Delaunay, keeps the boredom away...

12 years of teaching the color wheel to sixth graders can get, well, boring. Even a paint passionate abstract painter like myself, will cringe at the thought of having children fill in another wheel based coloring page. I thought I was destined for the monotony, until a tiny print in my classroom caught my eye. There she was. How could I have forgotten? Sonia Delaunay in all her concentric circular glory was calling my name! What a fantastic way to teach the wheel!

I began by briefly describing Sonia and showing a power point of both her and her husband, Robert's Orphism (coined by Guillaume Apollinaire) paintings. We discussed Orphism, the culture of Paris at the time, and the electric street lamps that inspired these abstractions. We held a debate about abstract vs. abstractED while pretending to be art critics. I watched in awe as my kids got excited about the thought of abstracting something they observed, much like Sonia must have, when seeing the aura produced by the streetlamps which inspired these paintings. Long before Sonia Delaunay committed to working on textile design, these paintings acted as shining lights in the art world. After the gloomy neutrals of Cubism, these colorful, playful paintings carried a humor and warmth that caught the attention of even my most unruly students. In Sonia, they found an artist they could both emulate to perfection, and understand.

Each student created hand drawn (the quirky shapes they make by hand, have the most life), concentric circles that radiated outward on the 18x 18" square paper until they reached the table surface. They then divided their work into 12 sections using a yard stick. Each section would serve as a color on the color wheel.We discussed color mixing (using magenta, yellow, and cyan) and had a demo. The children then began to bring their own concentric circle wheels to life!

We began with the primary colors, and filled in each alternating stripe in the appropriate section in the pure hue. In the other stripes, we mixed the primary's opposite to create a tone. Tones were used only in the primary slots.

We moved onto the secondary colors, and again left alternating (checkerboard type) patterns of blank space between the painted sections. We followed with the intermediates (and a brief lesson on ratios), mixing most of one color, and a bit of another. The kids stood in amazement as they added a drop of cyan to their yellow and watched it turn into juicy, limey, yellow-green. All of that color needed grounding , so our next step was to add a neutral. We mixed black and white and created all different values of gray. The kids were encouraged to be free, and creative during this step, since we had so many rules for creating our wheel.

The end products were nothing short of spectacular bursts of color with sophisticated neutral points which allow our eyes to rest. These mini-Delaunays made me proud! We learned all about mixing paint, we created a visual chart, learned about ratios, AND produced some fantastic, finished work (unlike a coloring page). I hope you find time to try this one with your kids! It was truly a breath of fresh paint...er, I mean air! Happy teaching!