If you haven’t hear of Rex Ray, do a quick Google search.  You will see a ton of beautiful paintings and collages.  For the past two weeks, we have been working on a project based on his amazing work.  The first week, we focused on creating painted papers to use in our collages.  The big challenge for students was to create low contrast pattern.  This subtlety is really difficult for kids to get; they generally are drawn to high contrast.  We talked about how colors next to each other on the color wheel (analogous colors) can “whisper” to each other, while colors across from each other (complimentary colors) have to yell at each other.  This seemed to make sense to them, and they ended up making some gorgeous papers.  I overheard a couple of students saying, “Wow, those colors are really yelling at each other!” or “Now I have whispering colors!” : )

The next week, we started our collages. We used both our painted papers and some scrapbook paper with subtle texture.  Rex Ray’s work is a wonderful example of positive and negative shapes.  I encouraged students to use both, to vary the size of their shapes, and to consider contrast (this time we wanted the colors to yell at each other).  🙂  The concepts we covered in this project are really advanced, and I wasn’t expecting amazing results.  I was more interested in them getting the concepts and enjoying the process.  Most got the concepts and all had fun, so I would say it was a successful project.

I’m showing a few kids in action pics first, since this was a more processed based project.

A few of these really surprised me.  I could see their thinking in terms of composition and design.  Yay!  I didn’t get pictures of them all.  As you can imagine, kids + scissors + glue = creative chaos! : )  I didn’t have much time for taking pictures.