Teaching: for next week’s lesson plan, I need examples of 3D paper art to show my students. Most of the stuff I’ve found is on YouTube, which I don’t have access to at work. Specifically, I’m looking for any cut, folded, glued, squashed, reasonably simple technique that produces something 3D, to spark the kids’ imaginations.
The basic lesson plan is that the kids will create a 3D paper version of a well known painting, sculpture, or building. Most of the kids will squeal about how difficult that is, which is fine. A few will squeal that they want to do their own thing, and if they can show me in thumbnail sketches that they have a workable concept, I will let them do it.
I’m down to construction paper, tissue paper, and glue at this point, so the simpler the better. Please give me links I can use in the classroom.
Non-teaching: I cannot, for the life of me, manage to successfully use local color in paint. I can barely approximate it with colored pencils or chalk pastels. I have a firm grasp of basic color theory - hue, saturation, tone, shade, and tint, et cetera - but I find that when I try to put my brush to matching the color I see, I always end up with some funky pooh colored paint.
Please suggest books, exercises, tutorials, hints, or other helpful approaches.
2.u “Color Theory” is good to know, but it doesn’t really tell you what paint to mix with what other paint to get to a desired color. Each color out of a tube (or whatever) has a vector, its base color, such as red, and a direction thatt color “leans,” for red it would either orangy or purply. To mix a bright orange, you’d want to mix a orangy yellow with an orangy red. If you want a dull orange, like for a shadow or some cliffs in Arizona, mix a lemony yellow with a crimson or magentaish red.
To simply darken a color, don’t use black. Instead, add tiny amounts of the opposite color. To darken red, drop in some green.
Other notes: two transparent colors mixed together will tend to darken. Matte/opaque colors will tend to lighten.
If you have to, you can make cards with the reult of mixing two particular pigment you have. A well organized set can help you narrow your need to experiment.
Can’t help you with 1) but I’ve got just the thing for 2)! Check out this book by Betty Edwards. I was a colour dolt, but this book went a long way toward re-mediating the situation. It’s every bit as effective as her classic on drawing.
You should check out children’s picture books. There are several whose style is to contruct pictures from construction paper rather than to draw or paint pictures. Unless you don’t consider that 3D enough?
Unfortunately, I’m mostly drawing blanks as to titles and authors at the moment, but I know there’s one about mice coming out at night (probably the book Mouse Paint too, actually), one about Golems by David Wisniewski, a version of the old woman who swallowed a fly (pretty sure the same author did something about Joseph’s coat of many colors.)
Searching on google for “papercraft” would be a good place to start. Of course, the more detailed the model, the longer it’s going to take to construct, so keep that in mind.