3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

We learned about primary colors in our last art class a few weeks ago. Today I wanted to introduce my students to secondary colors.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

Secondary colors are orange, green and violet  They are created by combining the primary colors, red, yellow and blue.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

I started the lesson by telling the kids about the American kinetic artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976).

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Alexander Calder

He studied as an engineer before redirecting his passion to art.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Alexander Calder -

Bubbles & Spirals

After he became a painter, he played around with being a sculptor and has two pieces in our backyard around our very own Seattle Center.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Alexander Calder - Eagle

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Alexander Calder -

Olympic Iliad

When he was a child, he used to make toys for himself and his sister out of wire. While playing around with sculpture, he started incorporating the wire from his childhood into his art and became the inventor of the mobile in 1931.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Alexander Calder -Untitled, 1976

That was what we were going to be making in our two part art lesson, a kite mobile made out of primary and secondary colors.

Today we were going to paint our 6 rectangles, only using 3 primary colors and mixing our secondary colors. The next lesson we are going to cut our rectangles into kite shapes and use wire to create our own kinetic sculptures.

We started by placing three dabs of red, yellow and blue acrylic paint on a plate for each child.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

They used paintbrushes to paint a 3 x 5 inch piece of watercolor paper with each of the colors.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

Then the kids combined the red and yellow to make orange, yellow and blue to make green and blue and red to make violet on their plates..

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

They painted the remainder three pieces of paper with those colors.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

We had just enough time to lay everything out to dry for next time.

3rd Grade Art Lesson: Secondary Colors with Calder

We'll cut the paper into a kite design, then punch holes in them and add the wire.

Here is an update on our completed masterpieces.