I Heart Art

7th Grade Perspective / Value Winter Paintings

My 7th graders have been learning about value. We made these snowy landscapes by mixing tints and shades of the same color. We also discussed overlap and perspective, how far away things look smaller than close-up things (the trees).

My students did a really nice job painting the trees! I broke trees down to three kinds of line to simplify them; the tree trunk is a thick line, the branches are medium lines, and the little twigs are skinny lines. We looked at reference pictures on our Chromebooks and developed practice sketches. This helped the students create beautiful trees with confidence.

This project took 4 days. The first day, we talked about value, and divided our paper into 5 sections and penciled in some basic trees.  The top section was the black of the paper background. We painted the next section a shade of the color they chose (blue, green or violet). A shade is made by adding black to the color. The second day students used the pure color. We painted the middle section and tree with this color. The 3rd day, students mixed a tint. The tint was made by adding white to the color. We painted the second from the bottom section with the tint. The last day, students used white to paint the bottom section and the closest, largest tree.