Week 4: Stretcher Bars and Color Saturation

This week, Jennifer had students begin the stretcher building process and had them make color saturation charts to better understand their oil colors. 

The assigned reading along with the assignment for the week is all about color.  For many of the students, this is their first time painting with oils, so it is important that they know how the pigments react to one another.  For the color saturation charts, she is having the students create a hue gradient using the complimentary colors, this is a good way for students to learn which pigments are stronger than others and what types of hues they can achieve with the mixture of complimenting colors.  She also had them do a second row where they mixed their 5 hues with white to decrease saturation.

While the students are working on their saturation charts, she has two at a time go to a building station to begin the first step of their stretcher building process.  they are glueing a quarter round to a 1x2 beam and then nailing it in place using a nail gun.  the edge of the quarter round creates a thin contact point between stretcher bar and canvas.  This allows the canvas to be exposed to air from behind helping colors to dry and preventing the stretcher from poking through the painting at the sides.

I appreciate the approach Jennifer takes to teaching the class.  By having students begin building their stretchers now, it gives them time to work on their experimentation with color while slowly putting together their first stretchers for later projects.  having 2-3 projects going at once makes it easier for students who work at different paces to always have something to do during class time.  It's apparent Jennifer has a pretty good sense of time management, especially when it comes to teaching art classes.  Her time spent in elementary education definitely informs her teaching style and gives her a lot of insight into classroom structure in general that I never would have thought of on my own.