The Colors

After 6 weeks of classes, seeing each group twice a week for 2 hours, a lot of progress has been made.

After the first week of classes I realized i had to completely change my curriculum because it was too advanced for their level. I am not inferring that they are not smart. They just do not have the same background in art like any other kid around the world, especially in western or first world countries. These kids are smart, but lack the materials to advance in anything related to art. I did mention before that some students had more background than others but generally, the level of skill of a 12 year old in Nablus and the Camps is equivalent to the level of a 5 year old in a first world country.

I dedicated the rest of the term for painting with colours. First i taught them how to mix colours. They were dazzled when they found out that blue + yellow = green, and that yellow + red = orange! And one of the groups spent the whole class trying to figure out why purple is made by mixing blue and red. To me and to anyone who's ever painted in their life knows that these are complete basics. I also noticed that the whole idea of *mixing* colours to create other colors is a new concept to them. I had to even show them HOW to mix. I'm sure you're wondering how could anyone not know how to mix? Well, they just simply put the colours on top of each other, dipped their paintbrush in the paint, then transferred it to the paper. Of course, without the circular motion of mixing the colours with the paintbrush to get a smooth emulsion, the resulting color will not appear. So as basic as that seems, i had to show each kid, one by one how to use their paintbrush to mix two colours to make a third colour. Even after 5 weeks of mixing colours, some students still transferred yellow and blue paint brush stripes to the paper rather than green!

The next assignment was creating the colour wheel which consists of the primary colours (blue, yellow, and red) and the secondary colours (purple, green, and orange). I only gave them paints of the primary colours to paint with. They had no problem colouring in the blue, yellow and red parts of the circle, but when it came to mixing those colours to get the secondary colours (to fill in the rest of the circle), it was chaotic! I had students pulling me from every direction. Even though I was getting a bit pessimistic about their perceptiveness in class, they were able to finish the colour wheel by the end of the class!

My hope was to get them to know how to mix colours, make dark and light colours, and experiment with mixing to make all the colours in the spectrum from the three primary colours. This way, whatever portrait they want to make in the future, they can make with as little as four paints : white, blue, green and red. Of course this is a far fetched dream for them but it is still a start better than nothing.

I explained the concept to them. I told them that these exercises are not pointless. Once they understand how colours are made, they will be unstoppable! At the end of the colour wheel class, a few students came up to me and expressed how amazing and surprising it is to create colours. They were very impressed by the simple act of mixing. At that point I knew that my classes were not pointless.

After the success of the colour wheel class, i went back to the tomato assignment (which i mention on an earlier blog: the assignment was to draw a tomato but focusing on the light and dark parts of the tomato). I brought a few different fruits with me : a tomato, a banana, a lemon, a lime, a purple eggplant, and an orange. I told them that by the end of the term, they will know how to paint each of these. First i presented them with the tomato because they worked with it before. I refreshed their memory about the light and dark spots when drawing a tomato on a paper. I asked them how they would to the same assignment but with paint. How will they paint the light areas? how will they paint the dark areas? They had absolutely no clue. Some said that they use more paint for the dark areas and less paint for the light areas. Some said by adding black or white (close guess), and others had no ideas and just kept asking "well? how?". Naturally, the next assignment was to make dark and light colours.

For those readers who have never painted in their life, this is kind of tricky. Its easy to make a colour light by adding white, but to make a colour dark, it must be mixed with its complementary (or opposite) colour. Red X Green, yellow X purple, blue X orange. I asked them all to look at their colour wheels that they successfully completed in the past lesson. I explained to them how to find the opposite colour and how mixing those colours. For example; for dark red, one must mix a lot of red with a little bit of green. The next two classes were dedicated towards making dark colours. This time, not every student did well. Some did better than others, and some did not do well at all. I admit this might be pretty advanced but just the fact that a lot of the students understood the concept and did well, was enough for me to believe that this was a successful attempt at teaching them the basics of painting.

The last day of classes I gave them an "exam"! Once they heard this word they were so nervous! I treated it like any other exam with grades and rules. No cheating or you will be kicked out. No talking during the exam. If you needed any help from me, raise your hand and I will be happy to help you. I made it clear that I will be there for them and that I will make sure every student understands the material well. In no way was this exam meant to test their artistic talent. It was just meant to be a rough indication of how much progress my students made in these 6 weeks, and if they learnt anything at all!

The exam consisted of 6 rows of 3 boxes. Each row was for a colour, its light equivalent and its dark equivalent. I presented them with four paints: white, blue, red, and yellow. They had to mix the primary colours to make the 3 other secondary colours. Each box was worth 1 point (18 points in total), and 2 points were given for how well they mixed (which comes to a total of 20 points). I'm glad to say that the lowest grade was 15 and 16, and the highest grade was 20. Our of my 20 students, 4 of them got the lowest grades, and 3 of them got the highest grades. The mean grade was 18. Overall, all my students did well and I am happy with these results.

The only issue is, they only learnt the complete basics of painting. If they were to be great artists, they will need to learn a lot more than just mixing colours. Hopefully they will get other volunteers to follow up with them so they learn more skill and maybe, just maybe, real artists will come out with them. As i mentioned before, not all of them will be successful and maybe out of the 40 students i taught, only 3 or 4 will actually pick up painting, or other artistic methods of expression. I just think that every student deserves a chance, and those who excel should be the ones that are given the opportunity to create. If they are not given the opportunity then who knows what talents are buried under the dirt.

If it was upto me for following up with these kids, I will pick out only 10 out of the 20 who did very well. That way, there will be a better concentration on each kid. Review the last term's material, then go on and teaching how to make different forms from still life. Beyond just drawing a circle for a tomato. Next, teaching darks and lights of the forms. Keeping in mind that whenever one wants to paint, one must consider the meaning behind each aspect of the painting. What it says, what it doesn't say. Of course the next term should also focus on famous artists in history as to get an idea what is out there. For the first term, I showed them a bunch of pictures of painting of still life and asked them to interpret the work. Such an activity should be done more often so they can start thinking beyond just drawing butterflies and flowers.

Unfortunately, it will be extremely hard making a longterm plan since volunteers are not always available for teaching art. One can only hope that the little we do will make a difference.