Students in Art 1 and Art 1 Advanced classes are starting a new monochromatic scenery project using tempera paint to help students learn how to render three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional piece of paper.

“Monochromatic is the color scheme where they’re just choosing one color,” teacher Elise Reed said. “Then they use different layers and change the value of the color to show depth in their landscape painting.”

The project requires students to paint a landscape and break it down into five to seven simple layers with a varying range of different values of their chosen color, where the foreground, middle ground, and background are obvious.

“It’s a really good project to do if you want to expand your artistic abilities on landscapes and stuff because it takes a lot of thinking of what you’re going to draw at first to paint,” freshman Stella McCord said. “I’m doing green, but more, like, sage green, and like different shades of it, and then I’m doing a mountain landscape with a very large sun.” 

Art is relaxing for freshman Jahnavi Muppala and allows her to experiment with her artistic abilities, and this project gave her that opportunity.

“I think the project is really fun because you get to use different shades of color and you get to draw out the scenery and paint it,” Muppala said. “The color scheme that I’m using is blue, and since it’s monochromatic I’m using different shades of blue. The scenery that I chose to do is a bunch of mountains in the background and like a bridge.”