Art Activity #11: Hunting for Colours
This week’s activity gives us an opportunity to get out of the house and hone our sense of colour on a fun scavenger hunt. Before we can get into the activity itself, let’s talk a little bit about colour…
When most of us think of colour we tend to think of the different colour names (blue, green, red, orange…) while in reality colour is a much more complicated subject. Those colour names we all know so well actually refer to a colour’s hue.
Hues are the most intense and vibrant version of each colour, and can be considered to be colour in it’s pure form. You can see the whole range of hues in the topmost bar of this visual. That bar represents the visual spectrum, which consists of all the hues of light our human eyes can distinguish. (Some animals can see more hues than we can! Some can see less.)
Saturation refers to how intense the hue in the colour appears. A high saturation means the colour is more vibrant and bright, while a lower saturation makes the colour appear darker and closer to black. At the lowest saturation, all colours appear black! To make more sense of the saturation bar above, I made my own visual of three different colours that are all the same hue with different levels of saturation. As you can see, all three colours could be referred to as blue or teal, but their appearance varies greatly based on the saturation.
Now that we know a bit more about colour, we need to gather some colour samples. A colour sample is a small bit of a colour, usually made of paper or cardboard. Each sample consists of a single colour or pattern, as you can see in the example of construction samples to the left. You should gather 5- 10 samples for your hunt. Here are a few ways you can gather your own samples:
construction samples (You may have some of these around your home, they are little cards that come in every colour you can imagine. People use these to figure out which colour home decor they want to buy, so you can find them at construction stores and paint stores as well.)
coloured paper (If you have construction paper or magazines in your home you are allowed to cut up you can cut out your own colour cards. Cut out any colour you find appealing!)
art supplies (You can use paint, markers, or coloured pencils to make your own colour samples on blank pieces of paper. Just colour and cut them out! You can also use the art supplies themselves as your samples - marker lids or crayons would work very well!)
The samples of colour we have gathered will serve as our guides on our scavenger hunt, as we seek natural and manmade items that are the same colour as our samples. Here is what you will need for your scavenger hunt:
a natural environment outside of your home for you to hunt in (like your yard, a nearby park, or a community garden)
colour samples of your choosing (try to bring a variety of 5-10 colours along)
a camera to capture the colour matches you find on your hunt
someone to hunt with you (this activity is much more fun when you do it with others!)
Bring your samples and camera to your natural space of choice and start your hunt. It helps having physical colour samples because you can hold them up to the objects you find to see how closely your colour matches. When you find a match, snap a photo as your trophy. Here are some examples from our colour hunt:
Use your new understanding of colour to find the closest matches you can, and try to find a match for every colour sample you gathered. This activity will help you get a better sense of colour theory and where colours occur naturally in our environments. We noticed that there were more manmade (mostly painted) matches for our samples than natural items. Why do you think that is? If you find any awesome matches in your colour hunt, share them with your class on teams and email them to me at smarks@sd40.bc.ca to share here in the student gallery! Happy hunting!
