Teach Art Elements Color and Value with Hearts

Valentine's Day Elementary Art Lesson Plan

Feb 5, 2009 Renee Carver

Elementary art teachers wondering how to teach art elements can use valentine hearts in an elementary Valentine's day lesson plan to teach art elements color and value.

Learning about the seven elements of art can be confusing at first for students. In a variety of elementary art lesson plans, an art teacher can focus the attention of elementary students on similarities and differences between each element by presenting each element as it is used to depict the same shape – a Valentine heart. Introduce and define each element, then have elementary children work with it to complete a quick art activity.

In this lesson, teachers teach the art element color and the art element value. Students then gain experience with using these art elements by creating an artwork in a Valentine's Day art activity.

How to Teach Art Element Color with Valentine Hearts

Have elementary students brainstorm and name as many colors as they can think of. List all the colors on the board. Then work with students to group the colors in some logical way. For example, purple, violet, and lavender could be grouped together.

Introduce the primary colors – red, blue, and yellow. Have students draw a black triangle outline on a large sheet of white paper. Provide students with red, blue, and yellow tempera paint. Have them paint a red heart at one triangle corner, a blue heart at the second, and a yellow heart at the third.

Then, introduce the secondary colors – green, purple, and orange. Have students mix the primary colors to make the secondary colors (blue and yellow to make green, red and blue to make purple, yellow and red to make orange). Have students paint a green heart between the yellow and blue hearts, a purple heart between the red and blue hearts, and an orange heart between the yellow and red hearts. Last, have students draw a circle outline from heart to heart to connect all the hearts together and complete their color wheel.

How to Teach Art Element Value with Valentine Hearts

Discuss how value describes the light and dark areas of a picture or other artwork. Then, provide children with a stack of white paper hearts, some red tempera paint, and some white tempera paint. Have them paint one white heart red. Ask them to mix a little white paint into the red paint and paint a second heart. Have them continue like this, mixing a little more white paint into the red paint and painting another heart each time until they have painted six hearts, each of an increasingly lighter tone.

Once the hearts have dried, have students arrange them in order from darkest to lightest and glue them down in a row on a piece of paper. Hold a class discussion about how the color changed each time more white was added and how the colors of the different hearts compare. Then ask students to think up and write next to each heart a name that describes its color. Suggest that they look at crayon or colored pencil names for ideas as needed.

Have Elementary Students Use Color and Value in a Valentine's Day Art Activity

Provide students with white paper valentine heart cutouts of various sizes; red, yellow, blue, and white tempera paint; and plenty of brushes and cups for mixing paint. Have students use what they have learned about primary colors, secondary colors, value, and paint mixing to paint the hearts different colors that symbolize how students feel about Valentine's Day. After the valentine hearts are dry, students can arrange and glue them down on white or colored paper to complete their artwork.

Color and value are essential ingredients when creating art. Understanding how color and value can be used to create different moods and effects will help students interpret other people's artworks better. A practical knowledge of the art elements of color and value will also assist students in creating more sophisticated effects in their own artworks.

Once art teachers have begun exploring how to teach art elements with Valentine hearts, teachers can continue students' introduction to the seven elements of art with a Valentine's Day elementary art lesson plan that uses hearts to teach art elements line and shape, a Valentine's Day elementary art lesson that uses hearts to teach art element texture, and one that uses hearts to teach art elements form and space.

The copyright of the article Teach Art Elements Color and Value with Hearts in Primary School is owned by Renee Carver. Permission to republish Teach Art Elements Color and Value with Hearts in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Hearts of Many Colors