Students explore prospective content for art, then select and use appropriate subjects, symbols, and ideas to make art meaningful in this lesson suited for upper-elementary and middle level classrooms.

First graders design projects based on work of Van Gogh.  In this Van Gogh arts lesson, 1st graders review and and model artwork prior to creating their own landscape project in watercolor.  

Students choose subject of composition and do sketches in computer lab of flora and fauna contained within their environment.

Students draw an animal on a white piece of paper and add a background of leaves or flowers. They color the drawings and rip up construction paper that is the same color as the colors they chose for their drawings. They turn the...

Fourth graders explore the artistic ideas of landscape, foreground, middle ground, and background through a creative painting project. While this is written for North Carolina, teacher may adapt for any state/region.

Pupils investigate oceanography by painting sea life. In this crustacean lesson plan, students identify sea urchins in our ocean environments and describe the functionality of their spherical-shaped bodies. Pupils design their own sea...

Students draw a chair from five different perspectives. After using the shapes from their drawings to create a cubist collage, students paint their collage monochromatically.

Young scholars discover the effects of color.

Young scholars research ancient cave art in France via the internet. They apply the skills and information by creating their own cave art.

Students watch segments of a video to explore portraits. They create a self portrait using mixed-media.

Fifth graders explore the abstract form of drawing of Paul Klee. They create a drawing of an animal using contour line in the same style.

Students gain awareness of shapes in architecture by creating a painting of their school and writing a reflective summary of their study of architecture.

Students observe what happens to the pigment of the Manduca when food coloring is added to their diet. They discuss how coloration affects their lifestyle. They answer questions to complete the lesson.

An interactive site that explores the elements and principles of visual art through the artist's toolkit. This instructional activity is on tints and shades and the work studied is from Frank Stella. The animation demonstrates the...

In this activity, students solve a problem involving mixing of paint colors. They use color charts to determine the fractional parts and percentages of colors needed to create tints and shades. [Requires Adobe Reader.]

[Free Registration/Login Required] This flipchart describes color value and the differences between tints and shades. It provides examples, websites and questions for review.

This site was created by an art teacher and has several fun lesson plans that could be adapted to different grade levels. The activities are about color wheels, color theory, tints and shades, and several other subjects.

In an continuing overview of color and color theory, this site focuses on color shade and tints with examples ranging from moderately-high contrast, medium value to high contrast, light value.

American painter Charles Sheeler uses simple shapes to create his painting "Stacks in Celebration." See if you can find the shapes and then follow the lesson plan to create a similar painting of your own.

For this activity, students are asked to mix paints that match a muted color they choose, in order to create a formula for the color. Other students then try to recreate their color.

Artlex's definition of value and how it applies to black and white and color in art. There are links to other sites to further explain the term and also related terms to explore.