Colour Schemes and Emotion in Art

For the first part of the session we talked about different colour schemes (warm, cold, complementary and analogous). We looked at some paintings by famous painters such as Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet. The children then had a go at colouring in some pattern paper with a specific colour scheme in mind

For the second part of the session we talked about how certain colours can make you think of a particular emotion such as Picasso’s ‘The Tragedy’ using lots of blue to give a feeling of sadness. The children felt that colours emotional meaning could be very different depending on the person and some emotions felt more like a mix of different colours. Red for angry and blue for sad were the only colour associations they agreed with. They made each made a diagram of emotions and used the colours they thought matched particular emotions in each labelled segment. After they noted that the type of marks you make on paper could affect the emotion portrayed, so they each tried representing a different emotion on the opposite page.

Next week we are going to have a go at drawing some portraits using pencils.