Jasper Johns and the Gray Scale

Ms. J's Foundations class has moved beyond the line! And they have moved onto something even more exciting--the gray scale!

If you don't know already, this is a gray scale:


And making one is significantly more difficult than you might imagine. The students mixed black and white acrylic paint over and over and over again until they created a great enough variety of pigments to make a successful gray scale.

But where does an art class go from here? Once we have a mastery of monochromatic gradation, how do we apply it to personal creation?


For inspiration, we need to look no further than the works of this man--Jasper Johns. Jasper Johns is a American artist, born in 1930, who works primarily in painting and printmaking. His art most notably incorporates images from popular culture, especially Americana iconography like the American flag and maps of the United States.

The Foundations art class, however, is using his monochromatic paintings of numbers, letters, and other stenciled signs for their primary inspiration.




Some of these pieces feature one large subject:





















Other works like this are more complex:

Jasper Johns
Jubilee, 1959

Jasper Johns
Map, 1962

With these images in mind, the students have begun to design their own Jasper Johns-inspired pieces and prepare to utilize the gray scale to make those designs come to life!