Spring Term Artwork 2015

We just finished our art curriculum for this term, Artistic Pursuits. It was really fun to read about the various artists and apply some of their techniques, whether it was color or style, subject matter or methods. This particular term, we read about artists like Jean Francois Millet, Jan Vermeer, Jean-Honore Fragonard and Joseph Turner.

I think the funniest aspect of the whole thing was how the kids tended to draw the same thing, often without discussing it. The favorite subject had to be birthday parties, but trees and outdoor scenes were prominent, too.

One project they did was to put the paper on a textured surface and then use oil pastels to draw a picture. The texture underneath came right through to make a very interesting look.

 This on was Gabe's on crumpled and then smoothed foil.

 Olivia did this simple tree on bubble wrap.

Ezra did his tree on a bunch of pennies.

Another project was using tissue paper as the coloring rather than something like paint or crayons. Not surprisingly, they all did the same thing: boats. :)

In another project, the kids had to draw first with a black oil pastel and then paint it with watercolors. The effect was that the color would stick to the paper, but not the lines they drew with the oil pastel. Here you see one of the many appearances of the birthday party theme.

And finally, they did one last project as a group. It was a 3D drawing done on a platform of construction paper. Olivia did the drawing, Gabe and Ezra colored it and then Olivia and Gabe cut out the pieces and Olivia attached them to the paper.

Here you can see both the outdoor scene and the birthday party together. 

The kids had so much fun doing this art and I'm really glad I got to do it with them. 

Artwork - April & May

For Art this term we've done more work with printing along with stamps, interior scenes and bodies in motion. 

So first, we learned a bit about Rembrandt who, along with painting, also did pieces for stamp printing illustrations into books. The kids cut out various shapes and letters and made their own stamps.

 Then they did some relief printing by drawing onto a foam block, putting ink on it and pressing the paper onto the block.

Then the kids learned about Johannes Vermeer, who excelled at interior scenes. The third kind of printing they tried is called collagraph printing. They cut out foam shapes and glued them onto cardboard to create a scene. Then they rolled a lightly-inked roller over a piece of paper laid over the scene. This was the result:

 Birthday party

Playing ball in the yard and a chicken catching a worm.

 Still studying Vermeer, they made their own interior scenes using oil pastels. 

Ezra's depiction of a birthday party.

 Olivia's drawing of someone reading a book in our dining room.

 ...I can't quite remember what Gabe's was...

 When they studied Fragonard (whom I have never heard of...) they drew bodies in motion.

 Mom playing with a ball by Ezra

 A person jumping rope by Gabe

Someone going for a swim by Olivia. 

Artwork - January-March 2015

So for art over the last couple of months, we've been trying new media and techniques. We talked about Albrecht Durer, who we looked at when we studied the Medici family in history. One of his big things was woodcuttings for printing. The kids got to try using foam sheets to scratch a picture and then roll over it with ink and press a sheet of paper to make a print.

 Olivia tried making two prints from one rolling. :)

Then we talked about Pieter Bruegel, who used bright colors to paint scenes of everyday life. We'd seen his work before as well. The kids used veggies to make various shapes on the page. The used slices of green peppers for the clouds, broccoli for bushes and the tops of the trees, corn cobs for tree trunks and logs and carrots for things like rocks and the sun. 

After Bruegel, we learned about someone new: Giorlamo Francesco Maria Mazzola who became known as Parmigianino. He did a lot of work with distortion, like painting the view in a curved mirror or a spoon. The kids' projects were doing watercolor "lifts" which involved painting the background and then using more water and a paper towel to soak back up some of the blue paint to make clouds. Then they painted angels on them. :)

Finally, we tried our hand at blocking, which is painting over something on the page and then removing it. They did candles in darkness and it was pretty cool how they came out.

Kids' Art

The last few art lessons in Artistic Pursuits have recalled one of the artists we've studied as part of the Renaissance, Michelangelo and touched on Rafael, who was one we hadn't studied.

For Michelangelo, the kids did more frescoes 

and then tried their hand at apple carving.

They carved the apples about 8 weeks ago and we left them on the windowsill to dry. 

After 8 weeks, they're quite wrinkly and kinda cute. 

Next we looked a Rafael and his use of colors. They did one project where they layered the paints to create a scene. Each layer had to dry before the next was put on to prevent blending.

Then they did one where they had to blend primary colors to make the colors they wanted to use. we combined this with a project for our FIAR book, Clown of God, so go there to see the results! :)

Art in Our Home and our Homeschool

In this house, we seem to go through spurts of letting the kids do art (the kind with paints and messier mediums) and then we have times that we don’t do much art for a while. Of course the kids adore making art and it is oh so good for their creativity, but it requires that we, as parents, step back and allow them space to make their art. And inevitably that means making messes too.

We took the kids to ArtQuest’s Family night and they got to paint, make clay creations, and spend lots of time building with blocks. It is a wonderfully free event that happens once a month for 2 hours. 

 Ezra and Gabe

 Emma and Olivia

 Ezra's Star

 Gabe's colorful piece

Olivia's stars and hearts

Then for the last few weeks at home we have started back using our most favorite art curriculum to date. Artistic Pursuits! Olivia is the only one that has done any of their lessons before. She has completed The Way They See It (here) and Elementary Book 1, which happened to go well with some of our more ancient history studies. This is the first time that the boys will sit in on the lessons and be allowed to explore with the art materials and mediums. The curriculum’s focus is to develop skills of observation and to fully and freely involve the student in the creative process. We have done the first 3 lessons in the Elementary Book 2 so far. The two artists we have covered are Cimabue and Giotto and the lessons individually focused on using watercolor, gold leaf, and oil pastels. It fit quite nicely with our history studies which led up to and included the beginning of the Renaissance. 

Watercolors

Here we used similar paints to those that Cimabue and other artists used to create frescoes in wet plaster. While we weren't doing them in plaster, the water-based paints were the main focus of the lesson.

Emma 

 Gabe's Garden and Olivia's beehives

 Ezra

Gold Leaf

Here we were emulating how Giotto used real gold leaf to accent his pictures.

Ezra 

 Olivia

Gabe

Oil Pastels 

The idea here was to emulate Giotto's scratching pictures on stone by layering oil pastels on chipboard. First we colored the board with a light color and then overlaid it in black. Once that was done, we used a sharp tool (in this case, a wooden meat skewer) to scratch off the black to reveal the lighter color beneath.

“We cannot measure the influence that one or another artist has upon the child’s sense of beauty, upon his power of seeing, as in a picture, the common sights of life: he is enriched more than we know in having really looked at even a single picture.” --Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 309 

We have been doing a picture study of Giotto using the Simply Charlotte Mason picture study portfolios and a book that Rebecca found from the library called “The Glorious Impossible” by Madeleine L’Engle. We don’t necessarily agree with her writings that went along with each painting, so we skipped most of them, but the procession of frescoes was a wonderful study of his work. While studying his work, we also read the story of his life. He was a shepherd boy who scratched amazingly realistic pictures of his sheep on rocks and was taken as an apprentice by one of Florence’s most prominent artists of the time. As he grew in his art, he developed a new style of painting and became greater than his master.

As a comparison, we looked at paintings by both Giotto and Cimabue that had a nearly identical themes. While both were great artists, it's clear that Giotto's (on the right) shows more life-like figures and has a more three-dimensional perspective to it. This was a rather large step forward in style and became an example for the artists of the Renaissance to come. We chose to do 2-3 picture studies a week for the last several weeks. That just seems to work better for our kids than just doing one a week.