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Series of Grayscale Artworks Hung on Wall
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Elise Namee

Many people probably think I am crazy. I know this because every time I give my brief summary of what to expect for my 6th grade art classes at Meet the Teacher night, I get these very confused (and sometimes worried) facial expressions. Why do they do this? Look in the storage cupboards and on the shelves of any classroom used to teach art and you will find some or all of the following: paint, crayons, colored pencils, pastels, and markers. If you look in the storage cupboard for the 6th grade Fine Arts classroom, you will find none of those. The 6th grade art class does not use color for any of their assignments. This is a big change from the norm people have come to expect from a school art class, especially coming out of elementary school. And that is a good thing.

When students get to middle school, they are moving into the next stage of their educational journey. Specifically, they are moving from the Grammar stage into the Logic/Dialectic stage. This applies to visual art as well, not just Great Books or History. “So what does that have to do with my child not being allowed to use color in their art class?” you might be thinking. Well... everything. By removing color from the equation, students are better able to focus on and understand how the world around them looks and interacts with itself visually. Seeing where the shadows are, how big they are, and the gradient between their darkest sections to where it fades into light makes them much easier to recognize and capture. We learn how to correctly draw the corner of a room and ceiling tiles with the realization that what we see and what our brains are telling us do not always match. Questions arise as we learn how to capture the features of the human face without adding lines that do not exist. These experiences (and many more) are able to come about because we do not use color. This is how the artistic Masters learned, and this is how 6th graders at The Saint Constantine School are learning.

Do not misunderstand — I love color. It is great, and learning how to create colorful art done well is an important skill. However, learning how to capture the level of detail and depth that we do in full color is really difficult and overwhelming if you do not know how to do it first in grayscale. This is why we spend an entire school year creating amazing, detailed, realistic pieces of art using nothing but graphite pencils — mostly the same yellow No. 2 Dixon Ticonderoga that you yourself probably used as a student.