Making Paints from Minerals

This material was originally created for On the Cutting Edge: Professional Development for Geoscience Faculty
and is replicated here as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service.

This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Teaching Activities collection (view details)

This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Teaching Collection

Resources in this top level collection a) must have scored Exemplary or Very Good in all five review categories, and must also rate as "Exemplary" in at least three of the five categories. The five categories included in the peer review process are

Scientific Accuracy
Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
Pedagogic Effectiveness
Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page

For more information about the peer review process itself, please see https://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/activity_review.html.

Initial Publication Date: May 4, 2009 | Reviewed: December 29, 2014 (see revision history: 2 events)

Summary

This activity runs over two classroom sessions with a take-home assignment in between. During the initial classroom meeting students investigate the properties of minerals that would be make them suitable for use as a pigment in a water-based paint (streak, hardness, solubility). Students then work with natural materials, including powdered minerals, to make a palette of gouache paints (opaque watercolors) which students can keep.

Over the next week, students conduct online research to find a culture (past or present) that incorporates the class's limited color palette into their painted artifacts, and emulates their art form to create an art object using their paint. Students conduct research on the region and culture through a geological lens: where are they located? What is the climate? What is the general physiography (mountainous, volcanic, plains, etc)? Where do they get their pigments? Do the colors/paints have symbolic/spiritual meaning? What use/meaning would your homemade artifact have in this culture? This information is compiled into an abstract-like form, to be written up as a curatorial display tag in a museum gallery. In addition they must mark the location in which their culture exists on a blank world map.

In week two, students display their works around the classroom, and post their "curatorial tag" and map beside their display. Students are asked to organize themselves (and their displays) by geographic region, in order to initiate student conversation and to place the exercise in a geographic context. In a gallery walk fashion, students examine each other's work, and document similarities and differences between the environments and styles, and the consistency of the limited palette of black-white-red/brown-yellow-(green). The class ends with an instructor-led discussion of the ubiquity of these colors due to the ubiquity of certain minerals in the sedimentary environment (white clay, hematite, limonite, along with charcoal), and leads into a discussion of mineral formation by weathering.

Mineralogy, Geoscience

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