Katlin Jeffcoat’s Foundations Curriculum Arc

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This is a texture study drawing by Katlin Jeffcoat

A set of preliminary sketches for the final "In Line with Nature" project by Katlin Jeffcoat

This is Katlin Jeffcoat's final "In Line with Nature" project.

This is Katlin Jeffcoat's Merch Menu project.

FOUNDATIONS CURRICULUM ARC
from ARTS 103 to ARTS 266

with Katlin Jeffcoat, by Dawn Hunter

“What counts is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing." by Josef Albers

Katlin Jeffcoat began her exploration of leaf motif imagery in ARTS 103: Fundamentals of Art during the fall of 2022. In this course, students are asked to start from nothing—to go out into the world and find organic or cast-off objects of interest, a kind of visual scavenger hunt. From these discoveries—often rocks, spindly branches, broken glass covered in sand, bricks, or leaves—they select three to five objects and study them closely, creating two data sets: one of shapes derived from their forms and another of textures.

This is an example of Katlin Jeffcoat's creative work. It is a collage of images: leaves on the ground, a drawing of a big green leaf and merchandise of notebooks and bag with the designed leaves.

How It Started | ARTS 103, Fundamentals of Art, Fall 2022

ARTS 103 classes are comprised of students at many levels: some have never drawn before, while others bring extensive experience. Regardless of skill level, all are encouraged to cultivate curiosity and use drawing as a tool for inquiry. These inventory exercises function as a sensory and perceptual awakening, prompting students to translate observation into visual language through direct studies from life. Simultaneously, they begin developing intuition about composition—how shape, proportion, and format affect what is drawn within the edges of the page.

Gathering natural objects from her environment, Katlin developed detailed shape and texture inventories that trained her to transform organic form into interpreted and structured design systems. These inventories became the basis for her In Line with Nature project, in which students draw one or more of their objects observationally and juxtapose them within the shapes and textures discovered, or invented, during the drawing process. The resulting compositions reveal moments where the micro and macro collide in unexpected ways—where visceral sensory perception and abstraction coexist within a dynamic, balanced design.

This is a collage image of Katlin Jeffcoat's entire Foundations drawing project. There is a grid image with singular leaf studies, a set of four thumbnail sketches of differ compositions of leaves in patterns, and a final drawing of a big green leaf on a dark red background.

Image 1: Shape and texture inventory drawing, Image 3: Final In Line with Nature composition, Image 4: Iterative composition development (juxtaposition studies). Images courtesy of Katlin Jeffcoat. Visit my Mixed Media Drawing Adventure blog post to learn more about the project.

How It Continues | ARTS 107: Color and Composition

The visual fluency that Katlin developed in ARTS 103 carried forward into ARTS 107: Color and Composition, where students explore the emotional and structural power of color through Johannes Itten’s Color Harmony theory. Building on their earlier studies of form, texture, and design systems, students now investigate how color relationships influence perception, meaning, and visual balance.

Johannes Itten of the Bauhaus organized a 12-hue color wheel—composed of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors—and defined harmony as the joint effect of hues arranged in precise relational structures. His seven color contrasts, central to his teaching, link aesthetics to human perceptual and emotional responses shaped by light and nature. These contrasts include:

Hue – high-noon color clarity
Light–dark – moonlight and nighttime transitions
Warm–cool – the shifts of sunrise and sunset
Complementary – the neutralizing balance of opposites
Simultaneous contrast – the mechanism by which we distinguish the lion from the grass
Saturation – the tension between purity and grayness
Extension – proportion and dominance, the primal dynamic of firelight and shadow

This is an image of three color pencil drawings of a mountains featured in a landscape.

Above: Color pencil studies exploring triadic and complementary harmonies by Thomas Kirsten. Images courtesy of the artist

From these contrasts, Itten derived geometric harmony schemes within the color sphere. Alongside analogous and complementary pairs, artists and companies such as Disney and Duffy & Partners commonly employ triads (three evenly spaced hues), tetrads (four hues forming two complementary pairs) or hexads (comprised of three pairs of complements or three pairs of split complements). A classic tetrad such as yellow-orange / blue-violet and red / green demonstrates the balanced energy of dual complements.

In the Color Harmony sequence, students create digital or physical studies of triads, tetrads, and hexads, learning to organize hues according to Itten’s principles. These structured exercises culminate in expressive compositions that merge harmony with personal interpretation, challenging students to connect color harmonies to universal emotions, conceptual ideas, or personal symbolism—bridging analytical rigor with intuitive response.

Katlin’s later Merch Project draws directly from this foundation. Her use of a hexadic scheme, orange, red-orange, violet, blue-violet, green, and yellow-green followed Itten’s principles through variations in pure tones, tints, and shades, demonstrating a mature understanding of color harmony. In doing so, she transformed her earlier leaf motif into a cohesive color system that balances contrast, unity, and emotional resonance.

This is a brightly painted landscape of mountains in a harmonious tetrad of yellow-green, red-violet, yellow-orange and blue-violet.

Above: Acrylic final composition applying Itten’s Color Harmony triad comprised of orange, green, and violet by a peer of Katlin Jeffcoat's Thomas Kirsten. Image courtesy of the Thomas Kirsten.

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Above: Itten's Color Star set to a harmonious triad as seen in the interactive rare book Johannes Itten The Color Star published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986.

How It’s Going | ARTS 266 GD+I Merch Project, Spring 2024

By spring 2024, Katlin had transformed her Foundations visual research into a cohesive visual language. Drawing from the imagery she developed in ARTS 103 and applying Johannes Itten’s theory of harmonious hexad, featuring orange, red-orange, violet, blue-violet, green and yellow-green, she created a merchandise concept for her ARTS 266 GD+I class that unites design and meaning. Her work demonstrates how the foundational study of line, shape, and texture can evolve into refined visual branding grounded in both craftsmanship and conceptual clarity. Through this synthesis, her work visually traces the curricular arc of Foundations as it manifests in upper-division coursework. Visit kjn_art on Instagram to learn more!

This is a collage image of various merchandise that features designs of leaves on skateboards, notebooks, t-shirts, stickers and re-usable bags.

Above: Katlin Jeffcoat’s “Merch Menu” from ARTS 266. Images courtesy of Katlin Jeffcoat.

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Above: Itten's Color Star set to a harmonious hexad as seen in the interactive rare book Johannes Itten The Color Star published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986.