At the end of last year, I held another art workshop for 50 students in year 2 (age 8) at Laly’s school. This time, I focussed on colour and chatted to the kids about the power of colour in our lives. I was inspired by my faraway friend, artist & educator Lisa Solomon’s new book A Field Guide to Color - it is full of fantastic techniques on understanding colour through watercolour. And the paper throughout the book is ideal to apply watercolour paint, so you can do the exercises directly in the book which I love…
I took the book in and taught the children a little about Lisa’s art, what I personally love about her work, and some of her colour work techniques like Colour Meditation.
They were all very excited to be making colour! They knew the basic principles of making different colours (red + yellow = orange etc) but I wanted to stretch this a bit further, to get them to experiment, to not just take a colour from a tube and go with that but to adjust it according to their mood, and to use their intuition when creating a new colour.
We created a few different stations in the classroom so that the kids could go from one to the other, allowing a few children at a time a few minutes at my station - the colour making station. As I mentioned, one of the many things that Lisa does is create colour meditations with watercolour, it’s a wonderful activity so I used this idea as one of the stations for the kids. At this table, they were to repeat a marking on their paper over and over again using a different coloured marker for each one. Another station I set up with a whole bunch of colour samples from the paint section of the local hardware store. These I had gathered over the previous months for my own photoshoots, as I use them to create colour palettes in my storyboarding. For this station, the idea was to look at the names of the colours to gather inspiration, and to then come up with a name for their colour that they will be creating. They came up with so many creative names!
At my station, it was all about the mixing. It was no easy feat to manage this to accomodate 50 kids in two hours! Their excitement and gratitude though was worth every drop of sweat as I frantically prepped for each round of children. I let them choose a base colour from a group of mixing vessels I’d prepared before they arrived at the table, and then we got adding - I asked them what colour they would like to add to see what happens, and off they went. I tried my best to teach them that the more colour they added, the more it could become brown, but at the same time I also know that they need to learn this from trying themselves. Stepping back to allow their own lessons to transpire while also being available to teach them when they need it is a challenge. I have always had immense gratitude to the teachers of the world who manage this daily, in their own journey to find their own balance.
After they’d mixed their colour, they went to the painting station to paint their colour onto a piece of paper and write the name of their colour and their name onto the paper. So. much. fun.
Meanwhile at home, I’d been making my own colour palette for a backdrop and painting I was working on. I’ll be sharing the process in detail of developing a shoot from start to finish on the Wandering Hearts Collective in the coming week, as this process is transferrable to how I design intuitive websites for my mentoring clients as well as intuitive business practice.
Although I hosted this workshop for children, it’s an activity I would recommend to my clients and anyone at all who is needing to connect with their intuition, creativity, and inner child.
And if you’ve been wanting to learn how to play with watercolours and deepen your knowledge of colour, then Lisa’s book is definitely for you.
With love & colours,
Pia xx
