Circular Nature Prints
These large circular designs started with students using oil pastels to create a colored background in either a warm or cool color scheme. We chose from four different pastel-marking techniques when making this circle: Rays, Ripples, Criss-Cross and Free-Form Swirls.
Next, we completed a series of observational drawings and turned our favorite drawing into a Styrofoam printing plate. We printed our image multiple times on our circle, again choosing from a variety of pattern techniques: Alignment, Radial Symmetry, Scattered, and Around-and-Around.
In addition to all these choices each student had to also thoughtfully select ink colors for printing: like-color schemes between the background and the printed shapes resulted in low contrast results, whereas opposite color schemes, (such as warm colored inks against a cool colored background,) resulted in a high contrast effect.
During this project, students learned about contrast, warm and cool colors, balance, symmetry, design and also gained experiences with a variety of art materials and techniques such as pastels, printmaking, and observational drawing!
