Andy Warhol's Pop Color Mixing

How did I teach color mixing last week? With a little help from artist mentor, Andy Warhol!

The intention for this project was to practice setting up/using/cleaning the laminated color wheel palette, filling in positive AND negative space of an image, and experimenting with different color palette combinations, including tertiary colors.

I chose the same Marilyn photo that Andy Warhol used in his prints. 

I love introducing tertiary colors. Some older classes even understood that tertiary colors could be seen like a math equation: If yellow + red = orange, then 1 yellow + 1 red = 1 orange, which means...

1 yellow + 2 red = red orange 

Only materials needed: 

-laminated color wheel

-primary tempera paint

-tiny/small paint brush 

-celebrity photocopies  

-paper towel for brush

No water cup needed! Just clean your brush on the paper towel, 

and wash the re-usable palette in the sink when finished.     

To make the celebrity prints, I used my macbook to copy an image from the internet, and paste it 4x in Pages. I printed in out, then made tons of photocopies. I chose Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Montessori, Justin Bieber, Tom Brady, and a few other requests by students. When some students finished, they even made their own portrait in Photobooth and I helped them paste the image three more times in Pages.

(Hmm, I'm just really noticing this student's pallet above.)

 Soup cans and Justin Bieber!

This student is using the secondary color wheel very neatly. 

I cover who, what, when, where, why, and how 

in lessons that feature an artist mentor so I set the scene. 

Using photocopies made this lesson cheap (for me!) an emphasized that element of mass production. I knew that the final product would have looked nicer if we just used markers to color the black and white, but the real purpose for me was to practice mixing paint. Overall, it worked really well!