Matisse Posting #2: Color Harmony

After the Black and White collage lesson I showed my students the video Dropping in on Matisse. It is a great video- about 25 minutes, and even if you don't have time to show your students its worth watching to get an idea of how to present Matisse to students and prompts for VTS.

We moved on to the concept of HARMONY- which is actually quite difficult to translate to young students in a way that they can apply to artwork and their own compositions. I begin it by asking them where they have heard the word "harmony" (they will most likely say music) and then we take it from there by drawing connections between musical harmonies and harmony in artwork.

This was a very clear-cut directional lesson where the students had to follow along rather than it being an exploration in materials.
Each student used a 9 x 9 square of white paper as the background.
Each student got three colored pieces of tissue paper, a scissors, and a glue stick.

1. The kids were instructed to choose one color to start with. They had to cut or rip one large piece and glue it down on the white.
2. The kids chose their second color- and could cut or rip 5-8 small shapes/pieces and glue them down.
3. The kids used their final color to cut one medium shape and glue it down.
** Then the students evaluated their composition and could add on other pieces they felt necessary to "balance" out their collages.

As a class we examined the artwork and identified which compositions prompted the viewer's eye to travel around the entire page- and identified the primary and secondary focal points of the compositions.