A Lesson in Color Mixing

Our school doesn't have a dedicated art teacher. In my 2.5 years here so far, I have incorporated a fair amount of art into my lessons, but I often use it as an add on to the lesson rather than the focus. This year, we are in the second year of the two-year cycle (or is it the first year? It's the second for me.) and we have a unit that is specifically about the elements of art.

Today my class learned about paint mixing.

I was imagining students would have these little pieces of work that showed mixing. Ideally, I wanted to see some sort of a color swatch.

Usually, I create a model for students the day before, but I didn't have a chance this time. So I thought I could do it the day of the lesson - again, I was foiled.

What I assumed some student work would look like.

When I was presenting to the students, I showed them a color swatch. I can't show it here because it is a copyrighted image, but it was one that had the colors lined up in columns.

Photo by Copper and Wild on Unsplash

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Showing ratios when mixing paint #mrhammerlund

A post shared by Thomas Hammerlund (@thomashammerlund) on Jan 23, 2020 at 11:12pm PST

The student work wasn't terrible, but it could have been better. Next time I would do a few things differently.

Student work

Warn About Mixing Dark Colors First

This is something I had been warned about before starting, so I was about to warn my students about it before we started. If I were to do this again, I would emphasize it more.


Mixing with Sticks

The popsicle sticks should stay with the colors!

I only gave the students a very little paint at first and they each got a popsicle stick. That was good. But, I forgot to remind them to just keep a stick in color.

I did tell them that they would need to mix their paints in the paint cups and most did that. You can tell when they don't by the amount of pain on the paper.

The class layout and the colors at each table

Focus More on Ratios

The ratio portion of this lesson was quick. If I were to do this again, I would go more in-depth into ratios.

One way to do this might be to have them use the site Try Colors. This site could show students the effect of adding more of one color.

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Just in case the Instagram post is ever deleted. (That's happened to me before.)