Art at Hosmer: Color Wheel Snowflakes

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Color Wheel Snowflakes

Recently artists in 2nd and 3rd grade have been exploring color and color mixing. In 2nd grade we painted color wheels, using the primary colors and mixing our secondary colors. Third graders also painted similar color wheels but they also mixed an additional set of colors called tertiary colors, combining the primary and secondary colors to create these intermediate colors.

We noticed that the color wheel is organized in a way that helps you remember which 2 primary colors make a secondary color, because it is located in between the 2 primary colors that you need to mix:

3rd graders used a color wheel that included tertiary, or intermediate, colors:

For the tertiary colors, students had to consider how much of one color they should use to get red-orange vs. yellow-orange. We noticed that the names of the tertiary colors give you a clue about what colors you need more of. We tested some of our color mixes to make sure we had the color we wanted.

After the color wheels dried, we learned about the concept of radial symmetry, which can be seen in nature. Radial symmetry is symmetry around a central point. We looked at images of snowflakes under a microscope to see how each snowflake had radial symmetry in its design, and are all unique and different.

We learned how to fold our cut out color wheels, starting with folding it in half like a taco and eventually folding it into an ice cream cone shape. We then cut out a variety of shapes, making sure to leave a little space in between our shapes so our finished snowflake would not fall apart. Then it was time for the big reveal as we opened our snowflakes to see our intricate, unique and radially symmetrical designs!