Celebrating Creativity!

International Dot Day is a world-wide celebration of creativity and inspiring others. It takes place during the week of September 15th (ish). The beginning of the school year was just too hectic for a collaborative art project, so we celebrated Dot Day in our own way, as an introduction to color!

The Dot, by Peter Reynolds, is a story about a young art student named Vashti who is frustrated because she "just can't draw!". Vashti's teacher encourages her to just make a mark on her blank sheet of paper and "see where it takes you". Vashti's dots become the talk of the town and she, in turn, encourages other artists to be creative and make their own mark. 

In class, we "kicked it up a notch" and used The Dot as a vehicle for looking at how color choice evokes emotions. We began by looking at some very famous artwork;

   

(Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist; Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party; Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; Edvard Munch, The Scream)

We discussed the color choices made by the artists and how the artwork made us feel very specific emotions based on these choices. The students were given packets of color-coded words. The words were feelings or emotions commonly represented by the color. They were asked to use the lists to create a dot which represents them. We got some very interesting and personal designs! As the week went on our collaborative Dot Day Tree began to grow....

And bloom into a beautiful collaborative-art piece for an empty wall in our school!

I'm so proud of the thought that the students put into making "just one dot" that in some way represents them and their unique creativity. Not all artists are skilled and creative in the same way, but we can all make our mark on the world in a beautiful, positive way.