Studying Color: Two Projects

My second and third graders learned about monochromatic color schemes, and then made these hanging things (I don't know, could they be called garlands?).  They spent some time chopping up magazines, keeping the random pieces sorted by base color.  Then students decoupaged the pieces in a monochromatic collage on each circle, and then the middle school students helped out by stringing the discs together.

And after all that pasting, the students moved on to studying complementary colors, and created these simple city skylines.  Students had to choose a color for their background, and then figure out what the complementary color would be, and use that for the buildings.  We discussed how to tint and shade a color, and then used tints and shades of each color to make layers of color in the background, and buildings in the foreground.  This lesson is loaded with art terms and concepts (color, fore/background, tinting and shading, shape, layering, use of space, etc) and really fun for the kids since they have so much control and also, who doesn't love mixing paint?  Inspiration for this project came from MN Art Gal's blog.