 My name is Megan Viscio. I'm a fine artist and a teacher and I'm so happy to be here with you today teaching you how to make painted pinwheels on wooden blocks. So hopefully you are able to pick up your supplies at the library. We're going to be making four wood blocks today and you might have seen a funny word in the description called a polyptick if you want to try saying it at home, polyptick. Polyptick just means a grouping of paintings, different paintings that are put together to form one painting. You can have a diptych, which is two paintings put together, or triptych, which is three paintings put together. I'd just like to give you a little bit of an art history lesson on modern art because I want you to be thinking of that when you're working. Modern art was a time period. It started around the 1860s and goes to about the 1950s to 70s and it was started around the industrial revolution and during the industrial revolution there was a lot of change and new ideas, a lot of new inventions coming about and travel. And so this directly affected the way artists started thinking about art. Before this many paintings were made, they depicted family scenes, there were people, there were landscapes, still lifes or biblical scenes, maybe mythical scenes. And a lot of times a wealthy family or a church would go to an artist and say, please paint me a picture of this, like a church would go to Carvagio and say, please paint me the calling of St. Matthew and Carvagio would paint it and it would be given to the church, the church would pay him. That's called commissioned. So then comes the industrial revolution, all this change happening, all these new ideas. Well art is definitely right in there in the center of it. Artists started thinking a lot more about how they interpret art. When they look at a scene, do they just see that scene or do they see something else? When they look at a person, how can they paint that to make it reflect how they see it? Thinking about their process more than just the outcome, thinking about the process of painting. They were thinking about color and shapes and movement. New ways of thinking and making art and kind of stepping away from how art used to be made. This was called avant-garde and that's another great art word and I want you to try to say it at home. Avant-garde and you're going to use it in a sentence with your parents. You're going to say, oh that painting was very avant-garde for its time period. I hope you do that. So an avant-garde just means new and different from the old and a lot of times these paintings weren't accepted. People thought they were terrible. That didn't look like a person. That doesn't look like a landscape. So at the time they weren't really accepted. Obviously now we look back at them and we kind of see the whole history but at the time they were not. So avant-garde knew different, throwing away the ideas of the old, stepping forward with new ideas. So under this umbrella of modern art there are several movements and I'm just going to give you some examples of each of the movements and show you a piece from each. So there's Impressionism. This is kind of the start of modern art. Post-Impressionism, Favism, Expressionism, Cubism, followed by the Dada movement, Surrealism and then Abstract Expressionism also known as Abbex and that was definitely about the process of painting rather than making a finished product that looked like something. It was all about process and you can see a Jackson Pollock in Albany. I'll tell you about that just a minute. So after modern art is contemporary art and that started around 1970s and goes till now. So if you'd like to see some modern art in person, which I really encourage you to do when you feel comfortable, you can either go to New York City and there's the Museum of Modern Art also known as MoMA or you don't have to go that far. You can go right to Albany and there's a lovely collection of modern art put together by Governor Rockefeller and you've probably walked down that like hallway and seen art on the sides. Those are modern art pieces but you can also go up to a gallery. I think you take an escalator up and there's a Jackson Pollock up there and there's more pieces that you can check out and there's nothing like seeing art face-to-face in person. It's definitely different than looking at a picture in a book. So I just want to show you three examples of pieces you can actually see in Albany. There's Mark Rothko's Untitled, Alvin Loving New Morning One and Donald Judd's Untitled. So I'm just showing you these three examples because I want you to think about them when you start making art. Okay so we had our little mini art history lesson about modern art and now like I said I just wanted to dip our paintbrushes into a smidge of color theory and color theory is colors. Mixing colors, making colors, what that means and it's a very vast topic. I spent a lot of time in college learning color theory. These are just some value charts that I did when I was in college just learning about what what makes different colors, what happens when you mix colors. The one little aspect we're going to talk about today is chromatic gray scales. Now a lot of times you think okay I want to make a color darker. I want to make my red darker. So the first thing you think is might be I'm going to add black. Well today let's think about a different way of making colors dark and this is really important. So black isn't a color so when you mix black with a color it's just going to muddy it and it's not going to be a really good true color. So this scale right here these are this down here represents colors from the tube okay so you have your greens your blue and violets and then your blue and yellow and then up here different colors these are from the tube. So you have your color wheel right so what you want to do on your color wheel is look at two opposites so we're going to take this for example red and green their opposites on the color wheel okay they're complementary colors. You can mix its complement with it to make it darker and it's going to give you a truer color. I have my red and what happens here is I just added a tiny smidge of this green a little bit more green a little bit more green look at that in the middle. This I started with my green from the tube and added a little bit of red and a little bit more. This line right here in the middle they're called the chromatic grays so that's just means when you mix the two complements together you get a chromatic red equal parts of the both of them okay so the COI started with this red and I just added a touch of the green how much darker it got and that's a much better quality dark red than if you were to add black and again here you have a purple and a green when you add just a touch of purple to the screen see how it becomes darker instead of adding black to a color add its complement to make it darker. Okay now on with the tutorial you're just going to need a few things from home a ruler or straight edge a pencil and a scrap piece of paper or newspaper to work on and here's a look at the supplies you picked up from the library your four blocks of wood your roll of tape some sandpaper your paint pots of course yours will be filled with paints and then a paintbrush and I just want to say a quick thing about this wood this was sawn locally by my father-in-law he has a sawmill and it's beautiful wood and some of them have you might have one with a knot in it or a crack I think that's really cool because it shows what it is it's wood it's natural if we wanted perfection we would have painted on you know something plastic but it has no no character I really enjoy the the little knots and the and the lines of the wood so you can either cover that up or you can work with it I think it's really beautiful and I think it makes your piece more interesting so we're all set up and ready to go the first thing we want to do is just pick a spot on our block and draw a very light dot it can be here there wherever okay you pick it when you're working with a pencil on this wood I want you to think about mice tracks you can either do elephant tracks where you're really grinding in your pencil really hard like that or you can do mice tracks which is like that I want you to work in mice tracks for this okay we don't want to see your pencil when you're done we want it to just be paint and wood I'm going to draw mine right there okay from that dot I'm going to decide how many colors I'd like on here so for this one I've got one two three four these these parts are left natural wood I really like how that looks over here on this one I've got one two three four five colors okay you can kind of plan out how many colors you want all you're going to do is go from that dot very lightly and we're going to start making our sections of our pinwheel okay so there's one maybe I want this next one and I'm pushing really light even lighter than that the next one I want to be like that this third I'm going to go way make it way over here and I'm going to do one more right here okay so I've got one two three four five six colors let's say one two three four five six okay I have six colors that I'm going to use in this one so I'm going to put in a few more spaces so I can have that natural wood poking through I'm going to make a really skinny one right here okay so I've kind of thought about what colors I want to use and now I've got it all set okay that's your first step next thing you want to do is take a little bit of your tape you only have a certain amount of this so use sparingly so let's see I'm going to paint this section first okay so all I do is take my tape take off a little bit very carefully line the tape up right on the line now you'll see you see a little bit of the pencil there I do that because then when you paint it's going to paint over that pencil mark and we won't see it okay so I've got that I'm painting this section I'm going to take another little piece and just put it right over there line it up as best as you can and really press it down with your finger this is just a masking tape it's going to make our lines really nice and neat now that my section is taped off I'm going to pick my color that I want to use I chose this orange your paint is going to be in this little these little paint pots you can just leave it in there and dip your paintbrush right into it I just suggest you use sparingly so that you have enough paint to do all four squares but I'm just going to do it for my demonstration I'm going to just use this here get a little bit of paint and paint your square you're going to paint till it's all filled up this is a tip for when you're painting near the edge if you come this way with your paintbrush you're going to get paint all over here so go if you paint in this direction to the edge you'll have a nice clean edge and just let that coat dry completely between coats you want to make sure you wash your paintbrush to make it last a long time and all you do is gently run it under warm water and rub it around in your hand while running it under water and make sure you can go like this to make sure all the paint is out of your bristles give it a little dry on a towel and lay it flat to dry while you're waiting for that one to dry you can go ahead and do your lines on this one and then start working on a section of this one while you're waiting for that to dry you can come back to this one or start on a new one so it's kind of nice to be working on all four pieces at the same time that way you're not just waiting around for paint to dry so once that first layer has dried you're going to apply your second coat of paint and cover it completely so you get a nice bright color you're going to wash your brush before it dries you're going to take off that tape and you'll see how nice and crisp that is okay so now my orange is dry and I'm going to fill in another piece of the pie I think I'd like to leave this one wood and maybe this one wood and I'll fill in the rest of the color so I'm going to work away from that orange while that's drying I'm going to do this color right here and I am going to choose this kind of copper copper gold that I have so again I'm just going to pick my section and I want to paint take a little piece of tape you're going to wait till that's completely dry okay line it up press it down another piece that might be too small let's see I think it's just right okay so now I've got another section I'm going to take my next color fill it in let it dry and give it a second coat before that second coat is dry you're going to peel that tape off just a few things as you're working when you have a color and you want to put a color next to it it's okay to put this tape right over that other color this is this is paint friendly tape so it's not going to it's not going to hurt that color underneath if you want you can always reuse the other edge of this tape you just have a small amount of paint to work with very small amount so when you dip into your little paint pot if you have extra paint on your on your brush after you've given it a coat just take your brush and and wipe it along the ridge of the little paint pot and you can put that extra paint right back in so you're not wasting any okay so I just finished up the colors on this one and I added a few more I added a blue next to the orange because I think they look really cool together they're compliments so I want you to think about your paintings and I want you to think about your your negative space your positive space how you're going to fill this in my challenge to you is use colors that you don't wouldn't normally think kind of think outside the box so you know maybe you would never use this kind of olivey green next to a pink but try it try different colors try it on you know a little piece of paper you can also just dab a little color samples on piece of paper see how it looks together before you paint on the wood okay so then you're going to have your four painted blocks your polyp tick all done if you wanted to just take your piece when your paint is fully dry and you're just going to sand those corners what that's going to do is just if you got any paint over on the side it's just going to clean it up and then you can wipe that you can wipe that paint dust off if you would like to hang these you could these these will stand on their own if you if you'd like to kind of lean them up you know like that you can do that or um sometimes I use this this command they're like velcro strips from command and then they don't damage your wall you just separate the two and you'd stick one on the back of your piece one on the wall if you wanted to hang it more like that okay guys well that was a lot to learn I hope you enjoyed it I really enjoyed working with you making these little modern art inspired pinwheel cookies I do love teaching in person but since we can't do that now I I'm still glad I can do this the one thing I do miss is seeing your finished work so if you'd like to share with me what you've done you can have your parent take a photo of your final work and email it to me I'll leave my email at the end and I also usually post photos on my art blog which I'll also leave at the end so please feel free to send that along it makes me so happy to see what you guys have made so until next time bye