Pattern snake

At school we’ve made a pattern snake. First made a dot at 2,5 cm from the side at the right and left of the paper and above and from the bottom. Then you must make a line from the dot at the left top to the dot at the right top. You do the same by the two dots below. If you’ve done this you could make a lot of patterns on the snake with a pencil. Later – if you have drawn all the patterns – you can use Indian ink to trace your drawing. I found it very difficult to work with Indian ink. If whole the class was done all the pattern snakes were hung on the wall. Now there’s a very big snake on the wall in the class.

Johannes Itten

Johannes Itten was born in Südern-Linden, where he was educated at the method of Frobel. He was trained at the Art Academy in Geneva but returned to Bern because he wasn’t impressed by the Geneva trainers. In Bern he got some lessons from Eugene Gilliard, an abstract painter. Between 1919 and 1922 Itten gave les at the Bauhaus. He later published the book “Art and Colour” that describes his ideas about the particular composition and colour, based on the colour wheel of Adolf Hölzel. Itten also made a colour wheel: The Colour Wheel of Itten.

The colour wheel of Itten is based on the subtractive coloursytem. Itten has as primary colours red, yellow and blue. The secondary colours are orange, green and violet. There are also tertiary colours that occurs if you mixed the colours of primary and secondary.

If you look at the colour wheel you see in the middle the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. If you mixed the colour you get a new colour:

Red – yellow = orange

Yellow – blue = green

Blue – red = violet                               

And so you get secondary colours. If you mixed a primary colour with a secondary colour you get again a new colour:

Red – violet = pink (or light purple)

Violet – blue = dark blue

Blue – green = light blue

Green – yellow = light green

Yellow – orange = light orange

Orange – red = dark orange

Probably you think now: “he that isn’t right there are twelve tertiary  colours and here they says six.” If you very good look to the picture you see that there in the outer circle primary and secondary colours are too.

So in real the colour wheel of Itten isn’t quite true.

here you see the primary colours

here you see the secondary colours



here you see the tertiary colours but
also you see primary and secondary
colours!!!