Instructors Lesson Plan

Lesson Number and Title:

Elements of Design Lesson 4 Color Pointillism Project
Florida State Standards:
VA.912.C.1.1, VA.912.C.1.2,
VA.912.H.1.9,
VA.912.H.1.8
VA.912.S.2.2,
VA.912.S.1.6
VA.912.F.3.10
Bell Activity:
Students will color in the color wheel handout with their choice of media colored
pencils, crayons, oil pastels, or chalk
Essential Question and Higher Order Question(s):
ES - How does color contribute to the unity of an artwork?
H.O. - Describe primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Relate how optical illusions and
Pointillism are similar. Relate Pointillism to Impressionism. Explain how the illusion of
depth in a painting can be achieved by using warm and cool colors. Determine and
explain if you can identify an object if you dont see the color.
Support Materials:

Sketchbooks
Graphite pencils
Tempera paint
Oil Pastels
Crayons
Colored Pencils
Chalk
Q-Tips
18 x 20 white paper, canvas, or other material
Tape measures
Color Wheel Handout

Vocabulary Color, color wheel, primary color, secondary color, tertiary color,
analogous color, complementary color, hue, tint, shade, tone, light spectrum,
perceive, optic optical optical illusion, and Pointillism

Art History, Resources and References:

Art history: George Seurat Pointillism and Impressionism
www.vimeo.com/28491307
http://www.ducksters.com/history/art/pointillism.php
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/opticalillusions.htm
http://www.artyfactory.com/art_quiz/color_quiz/color-theory-quiz.html
Classroom Activities:
I DO: Activate prior knowledge by asking/discussing the essential question and higher
order questions. I will present a PowerPoint on color theory. I will show the video Get
to the point: Georges Seurat and Pointillism by Nate Heck (2012) on the computer at
www.vimeo.com/28491307 as a whole group. Show images of Pointillism paintings by
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Paul Signacs
Sunday, and Maximillien Luces Morning from the website
http://www.ducksters.com/history/art/pointillism.php as a whole group activity.
Show images of different optical illusions from
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/opticalillusions.htm. Explain vocabulary, Pointillism,
and how George Seurat used dots of color to create unified objects in his paintings.
Model how to measure the distance to view Seurats work and graph the info, also model
how to make the color wheel.
WE DO: Students, in groups of four, will measure the distance it takes for each persons
eyes to blend the dots of color into a solid color object while looking at a poster of
George Seurats A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. They will create a
graph and chart their findings. They will share their graph with the whole class. As a
whole group activity, students will create a color wheel using the Pointillism technique,
Q-tips, sketchbooks, and the primary colors of tempera paint will be used. I will walk
around and discuss the technique, ask questions, answer questions, provide guidance and
feedback.
YOU DO: Students will create art using the Pointillism technique. They may choose
their subject and medium for the project. They will create a preliminary sketch that must
be approved by the teacher to allow for differentiation of the project. They will take the
color quiz afterward.
Differentiate/Grouping:

Provide access to a variety of materials that targets different learning preferences and
abilities. Use flexible grouping to group and regroup students. Allow students to take
quiz online or print out paper and pencil version.
Wrap-Up:
Critique project as a whole class activity and ask higher order questions.
Assessments:
Teacher will observe students during the class. Students will be evaluated on class
participation. Class participation is 20% of the overall grade and based on effort. A scale
of 0 (no effort) to 5 (outstanding effort) will be used to determine a letter grade.

A (100-90) Outstanding work and effort and significant progress.

B (89-80) Good work and extra effort has been demonstrated.
C (79-70) Adequate work and effort has been demonstrated.
D (69-50) Did not meet all requirements adequately, little effort shown.
F (Below 50) Failure to complete assignment, no effort shown.

Notes:
Color Vocabulary
Color is light reflected off of objects.
Color wheel - is a useful device to help us explain the relationships between Primary,
Secondary and Tertiary colors.
Primary colors - Red, Yellow and Blue are the primary colors. These are the three basic
colors that are used to mix all hues.
Secondary colors- Orange, Green and Purple are the secondary colors. They are achieved
by mixing two primary colors together.
Tertiary colors - are more subtle hues, which are achieved by mixing a primary and a
secondary color that are adjacent on the color wheel.
Analogous colors - Analogous colors sit next to one another on the color wheel. These
colors are in harmony with one another.
Complementary colors - Opposite colors are diagonally opposite one another on the color
wheel. Opposite colors create the maximum contrast with one another. You can work out
the opposite color to any primary color by taking the other two primaries and mixing
them together. The result will be its opposite or complementary color.

Hue - These are the family of twelve purest and brightest colors; three primary, three
secondary, six tertiary colors.
Tint - A tint describes a color that is mixed with white.
Shade - A shade describes a color that is mixed with black.
Tone - is the lightness or darkness of a color. It is used to suggest the effect of light and
shade and to create the illusion of 3D form.
Light spectrum - The spectrum is the colors of the rainbow arranged in their natural
order: Red - Orange - Yellow - Green - Blue - Indigo - Violet. The mnemonic for this is
ROY G BIV.
Perceive - to become aware of, know, or identify by means of the senses
Optic - of or pertaining to the eye or sight.
Optical - of or pertaining to sight or vision; visual.
Optical illusion - an object causing a false visual impression
Pointillism - is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are
applied in patterns to form an image.

Color Theory
Color is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called
red, blue, yellow, green and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution
of light power versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of
the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also
associated with objects or materials based on their physical properties such as light
absorption, reflection, or emission spectra. By defining a color space, colors can be
identified numerically by their coordinates.

Because perception of color stems from the varying spectral sensitivity of different types
of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and
quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or
physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical
perception of color appearance.
The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorimetry, or simply color
science. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of
color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the
visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).
Light, no matter how complex its composition of wavelengths, is reduced to three color
components by the eye. For each location in the visual field, the three types of cones
yield three signals based on the extent to which each is stimulated. These amounts of
stimulation are sometimes called tristimulus values.

Art History: Pointillism and George Seurat and Impressionism

General Overview
Pointillism is often considered part of the Post-impressionist movement. It was primarily
invented by painters George Seurat and Paul Signac. While Impressionists used small dabs of
paint as part of their technique, Pointillism took this to the next level using only small dots of
pure color to compose an entire painting.
When was the Pointillism movement?
Pointillism reached its peak in the 1880s and 1890s after the Impressionist movement. Many of
the concepts and ideas, however, continued to be used by artists in the future.
What are the characteristics of Pointillism?

Unlike some art movements, Pointillism has nothing to do with the subject matter of the painting.
It is a specific way of applying the paint to the canvas. In Pointillism the painting is made up
entirely of small dots of pure color. See the example below.
Pointillism used the science of optics to create colors from many small dots placed so close to
each other that they would blur into an image to the eye. This is the same way computer screens
work today. The pixels in the computer screen are just like the dots in a Pointillist painting.
Georges Seurat was born into a very rich family in Paris. His father, Antoine Chrysostom Seurat,
was a legal official and a native of Champagne; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was Parisian.
Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequiene, a sculptor. Seurat attended theEcole des
Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest military academy, he returned to
Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving
to a studio of his own. For the next two years he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and
white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting - a huge canvas titled Bathers at
Asnieres.
After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat turned away from such establishments,
instead allying himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he and other artists
(including Maximilien Luce) formed the Societe des Artistes Independants. There he met and
befriended fellow artist Paul Signac. Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac,
who subsequently painted in the same idiom. In the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his
masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which took him two years to
complete.
Later he moved from the Boulevard de Clichy to a quieter studio nearby, where he lived secretly
with a young model, Madeleine Knobloch. In February 1890 she gave birth to his son. It was not
until two days before his death that he introduced his young family to his parents[citation
needed]. Shortly after his death, Madeleine gave birth to his second son, whose name is unknown,
and who died at birth or soon after.
The cause of Seurat's death is uncertain, and has been attributed to a form of meningitis,
pneumonia, infectious angina, and/or diphtheria. His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left
unfinished at the time of his death. (From Wikipedia)
'Impressionism' was a new style of painting that emerged in France at the end of the 19th
century. The Impressionist artists were interested in trying to capture the changing effects of light
on the landscape by using a more exact analysis of tone and color. Their ideas were inspired by
Eugene Chevreul's scientific research into color theory.
The Impressionist artists abandoned the old idea that the shadow of an object was made up from
the color of the object with some brown or black added. Instead, they enlivened their canvases
with the new idea that the shadow of any color could be mixed from pure hues and broken up
with its opposite color. For example, the shadow on a yellow surface could have some strokes of
lilac painted into it to increase its vitality. As the Impressionists had to work quickly to capture
the fleeting effects of light, they had to sacrifice some of the traditional qualities of outline and
detail. Nevertheless, the freshness of the Impressionist technique instinctively appeals to most
people, and most painting since has been profoundly affected by it.
Claude Monet, the greatest exponent of the Impressionist style, created several series of paintings
exploring the effects of light. The illustration above is from a series of around twenty paintings of
Rouen Cathedral (1892-94) which show the building at different times of day, at different times
of year and under different weather conditions.