Lesson plan concepts - Browns

As a part of year seven's colour theory project, they are progressing from last lesson on primary, secondary and tertiary colours, onto looking at mixing browns. As such, I have been asked to find some artists from wider cultures in order to celebrate a wider range of cultures. This has come at a time that aligned with studies at UCL into cultural appropriation, and issues of representation. In this blog post I hope to show my research and thought process throughout formulating an appropriate lesson plan.

Advice

I received some advice at University on Monday, including:

- Celebrate culture - be careful not to objectify races through their skin alone.

- Access dialogues through contemporary art

- Keep the focus on the colour theory

Megan, on my course also suggested I look at an artist that is currently showing at the Tate. This reference is incredibly useful and identifies a simple lesson idea that matches with the brief for the lesson.

Idea 1:

(Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1990–present. Oil and wax on plywood, each panel 10 x 8 in. © Byron Kim. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Richard S. Zeisler Fund, 2009.39.1.1-560. Courtesy the artist and National Gallery of Art. Photo: Rob Shelley)

Producing a lesson plan from Byron Kim

In this work, the artist asks permission from people he encountered in the street, for him to paint their skin colour. The act of asking permission, avoids appropriation, but also requires from those he asks to take ownership of their skin colour.

"So I'd sit down with the person, and I would mostly look at their arm. I would generally avoid using the face, because a person's face skin colour tends to change really drastically as they're talking. It’s a really difficult colour-mixing problem. Because the colours are really unnameable colours. And so you really have to get in there and find the colour."

Encouraging students to paint their own skin tones is useful, as it opens them up to finding the 'browns' that exist around them, however, it may still be objectifying and may cause issues in the classroom, depending on representations and minorities. Perhaps, instead, We can use pictures of celebrities and famous people that represent a wide range of skin tones.

One of the dilapidated displays at the school is a similar work to this one, where students painted their own skin tone and traced their portrait over the top. My advice from the teachers at Maiden Erlegh was that we can encourage students to paint their own skin colour. I may consider to move forward with this idea, perhaps even to find the different tones and shades of brown within their skin, with darker tones for shadows and brighter tones in the highlights. - Encourage students to bring in selfies with no filter, printed out.

Idea 2

Another idea I have, is to use henna as a way of celebrating the rich and cultural browns in the world.

'The use of henna, including as mehndi, transcends religious groups and cultures, making it difficult to trace where it originated and which culture can lay claims to it.' - Natural History Museum.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-henna-plant-transcending-time-religion-and-culture.html

Today, henna is cultivated around the world, from South America to Japan. It can also be found growing in the wild in Pakistan and India.

As it transcends across so many cultures, I thought this could be free from cultural appropriation allegations. However I am still unsure of how to adapt this into a lesson. Despite its wide-spread multicultural usage. I could not find any contemporary artists that use Henna within contemporary discourses. Perhaps this highlights a gap in the competitive world that is contemporary art, but in any case I wish I knew of an artist that utilised this medium so I could apply it more directly to art education.

Idea 3

My final idea for this lesson would be to use 'Sepia' as a vehicle to explore browns in visual arts.

Sepia is a reddish/brown ink that can be made from Cuttlefish' ink sacs.

Sepia tones would be used in classical paintings, taking the form of 'Brunaille' which were a variation of the 'Grisaille' underpainting. We can observe this style of underpainting in the Sir Anthony Van Dyck painting below. By creating monochrome compositions we remove the challenge of colour, simplifying paintings to focus on form and value.

We can define a 'Brunaille' as a painting composed entirely of brown earthy tones.

As we're encouraging in this lesson, children to make a variety of browns, we can encourage them to immediately apply it to a composition. My idea for a lesson would be to produce a simple template, such as a cube and apply to it four colours: mid value warm brown to background, Dark value warm tone to foreground, Mid value cool brown to background, light value cool brown to foreground. This contrast in value and warmth can be interchanged to have warm/cool shadows.

This approach encourages students to mix colours they can immediately apply to an artwork and encourages them to make purposeful browns. It also fosters an understanding of browns as being the underpinning and foundational colour of all things, encouraging them to see beyond the objectification of brown 'things'.

Colour Theory:

3 Ways to mix Grey:

1. Neutral Grey - Mix Black and White. This is called neutral grey as it has no tint or hue. - Equal parts makes mid-tone neutral grey, increasing in either part makes different shades.

2. Flat Grey - Mix in equal parts two complimentary colours makes flat grey. Increasing in either part makes different tints of grey. Adding Red, Yellow or Orange results in warmer greys and adding Green, Purple or Blue results in cooler greys.

3. Primary Grey - Mixing the three primary colours results in primary grey. While if they are equal in potency they would make brown, if you add more blue then the coolness will counteract the other two warmer colours. Tints can be created by adding more or less of each primary colour.

Ways to mix Brown:

We can understand Browns as 'Warm Greys'.

1. Primary Brown - Mixing the three primary colours results in primary grey, but adjusting the tint can also create browns. Brown and Grey are close cousins. Mixing them equally (considering potency) will make brown as red and yellow make the grey warmer.

2. Complimentary Brown - Mix two complimentary colours can make a brown. Increasing the amount of warmer . Adding Red, Yellow or Orange results in browns.

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