Polar Bear Value Painting
"Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet."
- Paul Klee
Today is winter solstice. Officially the first day of winter. The shortest, darkest day of the year. The yogis believe it is a perfect time for reflection. A time to meditate, to be in nature, and to create. I started my day with morning pages and meditation and then spent the early afternoon creating this value painting with the girls. It's a cold, rainy day in Los Angeles and I have a bad cold so I am bringing nature indoors through the sound of "Sketches in Maine"...hello loons. Will you spend some time today in quiet reflection? Will you create something? Will you spend some time in nature? I hope so.
Today's project is going to introduce a little color theory and a little art vocabulary into the holiday mix. First off, what is value? Value is the lightness or darkness of tones or colors. White is the lightest value; black is the darkest. In color theory, a tint is the mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, and a shade is the mixture of a color with black.
I have done many value painting projects over the years with penguins, igloos, and bare branched trees but never with polar bears. This is a first and I think it turned out pretty great.
Materials:
white acrylic or white tempera paint
thick drawing paper (we used white bristol and bright blue card stock)
black and silver markers
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1. Make your tint. We chose a pretty vibrant blue to start with, then we added our bright blue to white, creating a mid tone. Then we added that mid tone to white, creating a very light blue tint.
2. Paint your tints on your thick white paper in horizontal stripes. Let your paint dry for 20-30 minutes.
3. Once your paint is dry you can start to tear your sections. Darkest tint in the foreground, middle tint in the middle ground, and lightest tint behind the middle ground. We used our bright blue card stock as our background but you could paint yours.
4. Draw your polar bear(s).
Ri decided to add some grey dots to my bear and then she made some polar bear faces of her own. The bottom right is the one that H drew.. I love him, he has so much 'tude.
We added a little beige collage muzzle to this one:
5. Play around with your layout before you glue your bears behind your foreground piece.
6. Add some snow balls with white hole-punched paper confetti, a white chalk marker, or little dabs of paint on the back of your brush.
xx
a.
