Rationale
The objective of this unit is to teach students about colour and how to use art materials to created desired effects with colour in their artworks. In the process of learning colour mixing with crayon, marker, tempera paint and watercolor paint students will also learn proper material use for the art classroom. Students will use felt geometric shapes to experiment with colour to create temporary artworks inspired by the colour theory artworks of the contemporary artists Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt and Kurt Schwitters that have artworks in the Yale University Art Gallery.
Color is often tied to experience of emotions within our brains.[41] Understanding of how humans see has been an endeavor of great questioning throughout time by scientists and philosophers. Plato and Aristotle for example had differing views on determines colours and whether it had material qualities or was based on experiences of the perceivers of colours.[42] Technology has made access to colour pigments for the creation of art available in a way that was not possible in the past and has led to a wide variety of shades of colours.[43] Humans attribute meaning to colours which is shaped by our physical observations and cultural frames of reference.[44]
The photograph below is a watercolor drawing I did of a friend holding a grasshopper insect. The Renaissance German artist Albrecht Dürer whose work I admire used watercolors showing nature studies such as in his artwork, The Great Piece of Turf.[45] Close observation of colour is a skill that students can develop to enhance their artwork and understanding of the world around them. Carl Linneaus a medically trained Swedish botanist was driven by a need to understand the natural world and put it into order.[46] Linneaus created a taxonomy called the System of Nature (Systema Naturae) which was based on binomial nomenclature where every organism had a Latin name with two parts: the genus and the species.[47] He attempted to classify species in 1735 and also divided humanity into types based on his perception of colour and later added personality attributes for these types of people.[48] It is possible to look back on his way of thinking and think critically about how perception can go awry in humans who are otherwise seemingly extremely logical. Biases based on any categorization presented as an absolute truth can be extremely tenacious culturally.[49] Color names are not reliably constant across cultures because their categorization is influenced by language.[50] Perhaps there is something in our evolution as humans which prioritizes categorizing our world which can be an asset or a limitation if not paired with a deeper understanding.[51] During the Enlightenment period in Europe the scientist Richard Waller tried to describe colour in a standardized way to categorize it using Latin.[52] The way that Enlightenment artists used colour inks in printing was related to how anatomists of the time thought of skin colour.[53] During the Enlightenment, anatomists dissected human bodies and created the word pigment to describe skin colour but did not know why skin deep variations existed.[54] Before the industrial period colour pigments for artworks were expensive to recreate and were not standardized the way they are today.[55]
Figure 3, Drawing of a Grasshopper, 2020, Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza
Colour can contain information about the material qualities of objects.[56] The idea of the colour white representing purity was reinforced by the misconception that Greco-Roman marbles were white.[57] Trying to understand and manage the world around us is a human trait.[58] Below are three insect specimens that I purchased at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale Univeristy. The three insects displayed are a giant leaf bug, a luna moth and a morpho butterfly. The leaf bug camouflages itself and sways with movements that make it hard for the human eye to detect high in trees. Luna moths are nocturnal and have short life cycles which make them rare for humans to see. Morpho butterfly from Central and South America is neither rare nor hard to see but the structural coloration of their wing scales makes them appear different colours.[59] While turning the morpho butterfly specimen to the right or left I observed that sometimes it appears blue or purple. Colour in this example does not seem absolute but is a result of the structure of the scales on the wings of the butterfly. A polar bear’s fur has white colour with a similar phenomenon created by how their hollow hair fibers scatter and reflect light.[60]
Figure 4, Photograph of Insect Specimens, 2026, Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza
We live in a world surrounded and outnumbered by organisms that we cannot see without the aid of technology.[61] These microorganisms vastly outnumber humans, and their species are the most numerous on the tree of life which has three branches: Bacteria, Archaea and Eurarya (which includes humans, animals, plants and fungi).[62] There are also impossible colours that exist which cannot be observed by human except after the cones of our eyes get tired creating afterimage.[63] Like experiencing a rainbow through a prism seeing afterimages is a visual activity which students can experience themselves and ask questions about. Furthermore, there are also forbidden colours which have wavelengths beyond the spectrum of what we can see.[64] Eyesight enables humans to perceive the world through the sense of sight. Some animals have evolved to have different colour vision compared to humans.[65] Light creates the conditions in which humans have evolved to see. Brown is the most common human eye colour because it is a dominant gene determined by an advantage of being less affected by UV light from the sun.[66] Like a male peacock’s brightly colored feathers evolution can cause variations in traits that are not otherwise advantageous other than for attracting mates. In another organism such as stalk-eyed flies, males evolved to have their eyes on stalks protruding from their bodies because of sexual selection even though it is not advantageous otherwise to their eyes so far outside of their bodies.[67]
Darwin described the process of evolution in his book On the Origin of Species published in 1859.[68] Darwin took a five-year journey on the HMS Beagle to South America and Australia which led to his later theory on natural selection.[69] This process of reflection led him to ask questions about the purpose of beauty in nature.[70] Charles Darwin was captivated by colour and when he struggled to draw what he saw he used words to describe colours in his journal during an expedition in 1832.[71] When paint colour is mixed wavelengths are removed and this is called subtractive mixing and when colours are combined with a prism to produce white light that is describe as additive mixing.[72] Hermann von Helmholtz experimented with colour and studied vision contributing to understanding of additive and subtractive colour mixing.[73] He found that subtractive mixing could be observed physically and additive mixing was a cognitive product of our human brain.[74]
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