The Resource Queen Knowledge Organisers	Year 4 Art – Dots & Spots, and the joy of colour!

Overview: What can you do with simple dots of colour? Can you make an impression? Can you make fun of something? Can you convey an important message?

Gradually changing the size of a series of carefully-arranged dots creates an illusion of a gradient in tone, from light to dark. This optical technique is often used in printing.

Patterns of coloured dots are used in the Ishihara tests for colour blindness. Different colours of dots help doctors to diagnose various optic deficiencies.

American artist Mary Ellen Croteau assembles realistic images using only the caps of used plastic bottles. She uses the caps’ original colors to create realistic shading and hues in her images.

• A close arrangement of dots clearly does something in our minds – we can blend colours and see shades of light and dark. How have artists used dots to create and communicate? • The method of painting called Pointillism developed in 1886, and grew out of the Impressionism movement. The term ‘Pointillism’ was originally an insult by art critics to ridicule the work of artists painting in this style. • The Pop Art movement (Pop’ is short for popular) began in the 1960s, in response to mass production of goods, including comics, and advertising culture. • Damien Hirst’s paintings of rows of randomly-coloured dots challenge our ideas about what art is, especially as nearly all of them are not painted by Hirst himself, but his assistants.

Aboriginal dot patterns

The Papunya Art movement began in 1971 near Alice Springs in Australia, when a teacher at a school for children of Aboriginal people noticed how adults would draw in the sand when telling stories. He encouraged them to paint on canvas and board. At first they used colours restricted to natural shades of charcoal, ochre and clay. The images they drew were intensely spiritual reflections of their beliefs and their homeland, and eventually the painters changed to use dots to disguise the messages in their sacred tribal stories.

Pointillism & Seurat
Georges Pierre Seurat devised a system of painting known as Pointillism by using tiny coloured dots of paint positioned so closely together that when viewed they seemed to blend together. Serurat felt this was preferable to blending paints together on a palette or on the canvas, as the colours remained bright and clean. Other artists used the method too, including Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross and Vincent Van Gogh. The technique has largely fallen out of fashion today, however.

Ben Day Dots & Pop Art
The Ben Day process is named after a printer and illustrator named Benjamin Henry Day who devised a system to print in colour using closely spaced or overlapping coloured dots. Magenta dots, for example, widely spaced, would appear to create pink. Comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used this inexpensive technique with just four colours – magenta, cyan, yellow and black – to create shading and flesh tones on cheap paper. These cheap cartoon images inspired American artist Roy Lichtenstein who enlarged and exaggerated them in his paintings, turning them into works of art.

Damien Hirst
The carefully-placed dots of colour in the “Pharmaceutical” series of paintings are amongst British artist Damien Hirst’s most widely recognised works. There are over 1000 in existence, dating from 1986 to 2011. Their titles are taken arbitrarily from the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue ‘Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents’, a book Hirst stumbled across in the early 1990’s. He says, ““To create that structure, to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.”