The Artsy Fartsy Art Room: Color Mixing Gum Ball Machines with 3rd and 4th Grade

When searching for a color mixing project to do with my older students I stumbled upon this pin, unfortunately the link is bad, UGH! COME ON PINNERS! The Pin links to an art page for Brookwood Elementary school, but doesn't go much past there...

So here is a screen shot of the pin...from what I can tell the original was with 2nd graders and oil pastels. I decided to add tints and shades to the lesson and use paint and construction paper.

Once again, another awesome color project that I didn't have enough time for at the end of the year. It wasn't totally executed how it should of been and felt really rushed... I wish I had more time on this so I could of kept them from mixing without intention and had a requirement of so many secondary/tints/shades/intermediates etc. Regardless, It was still worth it every time they shot out of their seats and called me over to show me the new colors they had made :)

I CAN statement for this project:
I CAN use my knowledge of the color wheel and color concepts to create a unique gum ball machine.

Day 1: Intro! Obviously I started with the amazing YouTube color video again...it really never got old.

Then we used the same amazing TpT Color Mixing PDF that I used with 2nd grade . After we had our discussions and I became a human color wheel we filled in the color wheel just like second grade did but I added some of this TpT download, Color Buddies! The color buddies added tints and shades and intermediates which I was hoping they would encounter in this mixing extravaganza! After I checked off their sheets I wrote their name on a 1/2 sheet of tag board on the matte side and put it in a pile to start with next time. If they didn't have one at the start of the next class I knew I had to still check their worksheets.

Day 2 (3): Started off with a super quick review. Watched the video again and shot off questions about tints, shades, and intermediates. Then I revealed what we were making and how we were going to spend two whole classes painting like maniacs. The goal was to paint the gum balls as close together as possible and when sections dried overlapping the dots with more dots. My emphasis was quality not quantity so they were not restricted to size. They had two days to paint and needed to paint the entire time. The final size of the machines had no specifics so some only filled a small part of the page while others filled it full.

My classes with less time at the end of the year only painted for 1 class period, which meant smaller machines but was still just as exciting, and effective.

Last Day: We started the class browsing images of different gum ball machines and looked at all the different possibilities, I wanted them to know it was pretty much limitless so I felt this discussion was really important. The most challenging part was explaining how to find/create the sphere of gum balls in their midst of dots. Some students had really small areas with paint while others filled the page. I set out a variety of circles objects that could be traced for the sphere and showed them how I found mine. I looked for the sections with my most vibrant colors that filled the sphere well and made it appear like it was not full. The key was to not have floating gum balls. Some students used colored sharpies to add a few more gum balls so they could use the section they really wanted.

So before they cut their pages looked something like this....

The "wasted" dots not inside the circle were used to create extra details in their machines...like falling gum balls or the one they just received from their machine!

It was pretty open as to the rest of the creating... it had to have a base and place for the gum ball to come out and those were the only requirements.

Some students went more traditional...