The Feather Featured Art series is chosen by art teacher Vickey Belmont from her classes and/or independent art students. Belmont picks the best work during current units and encourages students to participate in these occasional posts. Other students are encouraged to submit art pieces as well. Please contact the editors directly or via adviser Greg Stobbe for submissions.

Description by art teacher Vickey Belmont:

Monochromatic (or mono) is a color scheme based on only one, single color tint. It uses only variations (shades) of a single hue, made by altering the saturation and brightness of the base color. Black and white colors are always added, as they in fact are the brightest and the darkest shade of the color.

The color unit in Art I consists of making a color wheel where students learn how to mix primary colors into secondary and tertiary colors.

The next project in this unit is a monochromatic landscape, they are using the element of value, which is the range of light to dark. A landscape helps the students see the gradual change of their chosen color as they add white and black to the original color.

The students make a color strip of their color from light to dark, the strip is used as a reference for their landscape. The skills learned doing this project will help the students with the final project of this unit, a monochromatic self portrait. 

Junior Morgan Parker a first-year art student understood the concept of value and the monochromatic color scheme. Her project shows the range of dark to light. The landscape she drew also allows the viewer a perspective of standing on a mountain looking out over the forest. She did an excellent job.

Monochromatic Landscape by Morgan Parker

From sketching the trees and mountains to mixing the different paint colors, this monochromatic landscape is my favorite project so far. Painting the different layers was relaxing and creating the light to dark contrast was pleasing to the eye.

Before this project I had no idea about the contrast of colors it takes to show a whole landscape. I chose to do mountains because I wanted to capture the trees and different movements and hills. The most challenging part of this project was how to make each color exact and slightly tinted as well as using the paintbrush to make each fine lines.

To accomplish this project, we were challenged to find a landscape whether it was from a city, mountains, or the beach. After outlining my mountain-scape, I chose to start with the color blue. Mixing in white and black, I gradually created each layer.

Art teacher Vickey Belmont had us begin testing out the tinted paint shades on a strip. She encouraged us to be creative and taught painting tricks. I enjoy taking her class and being able to express myself through the art. Each project is a way to forget about the stress and work in other classes.

For a previous art post, read Feature art No. 7, 2019-20 — Color Wheel. For more articles, check out Roger Tatarian Symposium features discussion of paperless news.