“Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap,” are the sounds of wooden tools ticking away in tiny, colorful dots in the New Buffalo High School art room. The students are studying Pointillism and designed their paintings from source images that they took during the Photography unit. Some paint landscapes, portraits, and others, still life compositions; but each work of art develops from the accumulation of dots painted closely together to compose an overall image.
Post-Impressionist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, pioneered the Pointillist technique as a non-traditional way to represent “impressions” of landscapes and day-to-day life. Inspired by color theory and optics, the Pointillists painted in patches of tiny adjacent dabs with primary colors to trick our eyes into blending them together to become more than the sum of its parts. This is achieved through optical mixing when colors placed next to each other are perceived by the human eye as a third color.
Seurat’s most famous painting, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -1884,” is made up of millions of dots that took him more than two years of labor-intensive study to complete the final product.
While the purists of Pointillism painted only in primary colors, many contemporary artists have continued the Impressionist tradition with the application of dots in a range of colors and media including crayons, found objects, and digital pixelation.
Students learned how to mix custom hues, values, and intermingle color combinations to create the illusion of optical mixing and depth perception. They practiced stippling patterns of dots in large areas with foundational colors before adding layers of highlights and shadows with contradictory colors. A still life study of a Macintosh apple was used as a guided exercise to practice their observation skills of representing the range of colors in an otherwise mostly red object with layers of dots.
When the class began their final paintings, individual personalities and artistic styles came to life. Students took inspiration from their original photographs in their compositions while employing a range of stippling techniques with blobs, marks, dashes, and the tiniest, most minuscule dots from the end of a paper clip.
While the process was tedious at times, my students showed perseverance and dedication by following through with their best work. Oftentimes, I would encourage them to take breaks and prop up their paintings on the ledge to view from a distance so they could have a better understanding of their progress and conceptualize the overall, unified image coming together.
As the students built up layers of dots and dashes, the paintings reflected the spirit of the Impressionist painters who sought to record daily life through moments of light and color with their brushstrokes. Using color theory, tonal gradation, and optical mixing, students used Pointillist techniques to create their impressions of the world.
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