Positively Orange

Orange has never been a favourite colour of mine, but I am starting to fall in love with the colour.  I even bought two pairs of earrings with orange this fall!  Who knew?

To celebrate my positively new love of orange, for Halloween I found and purchased some gloriously creepily green and orange warted pumpkins. I have also until recently have never been a fan of drawing or painting fruit and vegetables, so this art became a challenge both for me and my students.

My grade one students and I took the plunge, first we did contour drawings and then acrylic paintings of the enticing pumpkins.  We enjoyed feeling the warts and spent hours painting them.  The paintings turned out surprisingly well.  We were to only use primary colours and white.  We discussed the artist's thirds for the background, different painting techniques like splattering, highlighting and using different tools to add texture.We also talked about how the sky meets the ground, and most indeed have a horizon line that met the sky!

I then videoed my students talking about their creations.  It is amazing how insightful they are.  One little girl said that she made the grass yellow because in the fall grass turns yellow.  I never even thought of that, and went back to my painting and painted in some yellow grass.  Others made their skies very colourful because they have started to notice the sunsets through our discussions about my photography of fall sunsets!  What little sponges they are!

Their paintings have been receiving a lot of compliments in the hallway at school, and I finally made time to finish mine today!  I haven't received permission to post them yet, but I hope to soon.  For now, I am sharing my positively orange warted pumpkin with you!