Oil Pastels-O'Keefe Inspired

In this unit, students created oil pastel paintings of zoomed in images from nature. After exploring the color wheel, and the relationships of colors and how they interact with one another, I introduced students to American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe.  One lesson objective was to experience how to build up rich layered mixtures of color. We practiced using our oil pastels with a focus on using pastels to blend with, rather than fingers or other materials. A second lesson objective was to draw using gesture lines to capture the essence of an object so students would draw more freely. To encourage this, our drawings were done with white school glue and without any pre-drawing with pencil. We practiced our drawing and pastel techniques on both a white and a black surface which students could later choose from. Students were encouraged to look closely at their photographs and actually draw and paint what they saw, not what they assumed at first glance. For example, green things or white things are not simply one value of color. Since color is a property of light and light reflects off of surfaces in many ways, students were asked to be aware of all the variations of color in their photographs. Our photos were from the Pixabay website and were Creative Commons usage. From the eight possible photo choices, there were a wonderful variety of observation based interpretations!