A palette of your own

Teaching Pre K-8, Aug/Sep 2001 by DaSilva, Karen Ernst

Free your creativity by experimenting with media.

As an artist, I want to make choices in my topic and material. But like anyone, I may be cautious about paint or even crayon because I am not familiar with it or its possibilities. This activity can help us to make knowledgeable choices in the future.

First things first

Start by taking a blank piece of white paper or opening to a clean page in your sketch journal, which is where you (hopefully!) keep a collection of your thinking in words and pictures. Divide the page into four quadrants or equal sections. Let's start thinking about the crayon, a material that most of us are familiar with.

Talk to a partner about what you know about the crayon, what things can you do with that crayon. What kind of lines will it make, what happens when you press hard or barely touch the page?

As a class, discuss what you talked about with your partner. What do you already know about a crayon? As you talk, your teacher can write these ideas on a flip chart. Everyone's ideas will give you more possibilities.

Explore the possibilities

Now, take a crayon and experiment in those four quadrants. Make each quadrant different so that you can identify the characteristics of what the crayon can do. Draw lines in one quadrant; in the others, press hard and color it in entirely, peel the crayon, turn it on its side and do a rubbing with the crayon. You'll find many possibilities for just one material.

Label each quadrant with the term you would use to describe the quality of the crayon in that particular quadrant. Share these as a whole class so that your ideas will add to their palette.

You have the entire school year ahead of you for experimenting with colored pencil, watercolor, oil pastel or tom paper collage and making palettes for each of these materials.

Karen Ernst daSilva is a writer and consultant, a former Resource Teacher in Westport, CT and a Teaching Editor of Teaching K-8. E-mail: artked@aol.com