Category Archives: Art

Art

I Stand Corrected!

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Turns out dryer lint really IS valuable! Check out this comment from Jennifer (author of the wonderful homeschooling-on-a-boat blog, S/V Mari Hal-O-Jen):

You don’t save Lint for Clay???
2 Cups Dryer Lint (firmly packed) 1/3 Cup Warm Water
6 Tbsp. White Glue
1 Tbsp. Clear Liquid Dishsoap
Tear the lint up into little bits. Mix everything in a bowl and knead
until workable. Sculpt to heart’s content. Airdries in a few days.

Who knew? (Not my daughters—but perhaps they felt in their bones that it had potential.)

Art

Um, Kid, You DO Know You Could Just Do It for Fun, Don’t You?

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Shortly after one of her older sisters earned herself a chunk of copywork as a consequence for something-or-other, Beanie, aged almost six, appeared at my side with one of our Draw-Write-Now books.

"Mommy," she said, all bright-eyed eagerness, "if I do something naughty and have to have copywork, you could give me THIS book. See?"

Draw-Write-Now is primarily a drawing tutorial, but there are a few lines of simple text beneath the pictures, suitable for handwriting practice if you are so inclined. I never have been, not wishing to suck the fun out of my kids’ favorite, favorite how-to-draw manuals.

But Beanie was all kinds of excited about her new idea. "I wonder how naughty I would have to be," she mused, "to make you give me some copywork."

Hey, don’t look at ME, child—I’m certainly not giving you any suggestions!

Art, Best Gifts for Homeschoolers

More Gift Ideas: Books on Drawing

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Artist_1
In the comments yesterday, Faith of Dumb Ox Academy wrote:

Thanks Lissa! This is perfect timing. We have been doing ten minutes of
drawing at our Family school (or what the kids call Breakfast school).
My kids are very intimidated by drawing and all claim they can’t, so we
decided from now until Christmas we’d draw every morning for ten
minutes. These little exercises will fit perfectly into our new routine.

My kids have all enjoyed and been quite inspired by the I Can Draw series published by Usborne Books. Here’s an excerpt from a long piece about drawing books I wrote for Bonny Glen last year—

These are some drawing books my kids are nuts about. The Usborne
ones NEVER stay on the shelf; someone is always using one, it seems.
They’re also fond of the Draw Write Now series, but we’ve always
ignored the Write part. They just like the step-by-step instructions
for drawing things like the Statue of Liberty and buffalo. (We only
have a couple of them, but I’m assuming the others are just as good.)

I Can Draw Animals

I Can Draw People

I Can Crayon

On The Farm, Kids & Critters, Storybook Characters (Draw Write Now, Book 1)

Christopher Columbus, Autumn Harvest, The Weather (Draw Write Now, Book 2)

Native Americans, North America, The Pilgrims (Draw Write Now, Book 3)

The Polar Regions, The Arctic, The Antarctic (Draw Write Now, Book 4)

The United States, From Sea to Sea, Moving Forward (Draw Write Now, Book 5)

Animals & Habitats — On Land, Ponds & Rivers, Oceans (Draw Write Now, Book 6)

Animals of the World, Part 1: Tropical Forests, Northern Forests, Forests Down Under (Draw Write Now, Book 7)

Animals of the World, Part 2: Savannas, Grasslands, Mountains and Deserts (Draw Write Now, Book 8)

Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad

And these are two books that I’ve been using to improve my own
skills a little…I especially love the snippets of advice Claire
Walker Leslie gives for drawing trees, plants, birds, etc. She has a
knack for pointing out just the right way to approach the tricky bits
that don’t come naturally to me, like how to make a tree branch look
like it’s really curving out of a trunk.

Keeping a Nature Journal: Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You

The Usborne Complete Book of Drawing

There’s also a highly rated video program called Draw Today which I’ve got on my own Christmas wish list! Have any of you tried it out?

As for stuff with which to draw, I tackled that topic too on Bonny Glen a while back.

Art

How to Draw Practically Anything (As Long as It Barks, Quacks, or Roars)

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Here’s a fun site for the kids! And mom too, for that matter. How to Draw It is the gift of Santa Fe artist Pam Neely to sketchers-in-training everywhere. Her site features step by step instructions for drawing simple, charming animals—everthing from mice to unicorns, from hippos to seahorses. You can even subscribe for free weekly drawing lessons via email. Each lesson includes a delightful snippet of poetry about the animal in question.

These are great pages to print out and give to the kids. I know my little gang will have fun with these lessons!

Art, Best Gifts for Homeschoolers, Fun Educational Stuff

Another Gift Idea: Art Prints

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Back to that art print post I mentioned yesterday. Like many homeschoolers, my family chooses an artist for picture study every couple of months. I usually pick out five or six paintings to use as wallpaper on our computer, which is located in a central area of the house. We talk about the artist, read a little about his or her life, look at where he falls in time. If I can get hold of a cheap calendar with prints of his work, we cut out the pictures and hang them up.

In this way we make the acquaintance of, oh, four or five artists a year. (At one point I was aiming for one artist a month, but then we had another baby and moved across country, yada yada yada.) And I was thinking how lovely it would be to commemorate each one by choosing our favorite work and having it framed, so that over the years we would grow a collection of paintings that mean something to our family.

Mantel
We do have a couple of Carl Larsson prints framed (calendar pages, so the color quality isn’t perfect) and recently we picked up some Van Gogh prints when frames were on sale at Michael’s. It struck me that a wonderful way for other family members to be part of the fun of picture study would be to include the names of favorite art prints on holiday wish lists. A favorite Renoir on the wall is a delight in its own right, but a favorite Renoir from Grandma is even more special.

LOL—this is a very hard post to write—I keep worrying that it sounds like I’m dropping hints for my mother and mother-in-law. I’m speaking in a general sense, honestly! But of course both grandmas do ask me for gift ideas for the kids every year, and I think from now on I will start including some paintings on those lists.

The Artchive Poster Store is one good source of framed prints. Of course it’s much cheaper to just buy the print and watch for frame sales at Michael’s or Target.

Art, Books, Picture Book Spotlight

Monday in the Park with George

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081094811701_aa240_sclzzzzzzz_Seurat and La Grande Jatte: Connecting the Dots by Robert Burleigh. Scott picked this up at the library and Beanie has been glued to it ever since. (When not standing nose-to-the-plastic in front of our butterfly house of horrors.) It’s a picture book about the famous Georges Seurat painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 (best known to people of my generation as the painting that so affected Cameron in the best high school movie ever).

“What do we notice first?” Burleigh asks, serving as our tour guide as we get up close and personal with the painting. He shares with us the history of La Grande Jatte and, in an engaging I-Spy-inspired manner, helps us notice every tiny detail. “How many of the following people, animals, and objects can you find?” Monkey on leash, check. Woman knitting, check. Beanie will pore over the pages for half an hour at a stretch. She knows this painting intimately now, and she will never forget it. Burleigh takes us beyond the painting into discussions of pointillism and Impressionism, of Seurat’s work process, of the use of color and light in art: discussions my older girls and I found fascinating. But for my five-year-old, the attraction of this book is in finding the treasures in the dots.

Art

Painting Boards

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Didn’t want you to miss this comment from Leslie in Springfield:

Painting boards can be had at Home Depot or Lowe’s (or similar) for very little $$. Go to the section where they sell pegboards, etc. Get a sheet of “tile board”– it’s got a white laminate on one side and the fibreboard stuff (like what pegboard is made of) on the other. Have the store cut the sheet into pieces that are at least a few inches larger on each side than the paper you use. You can also use the plain fibreboard (without the laminate), but then you need to wax the board heavily to keep it from absorbing water. Our Waldorf-inspired HS co-op uses these boards all the time and they’re fantastic! I bought a scrap piece of the tile board for about $3 once and from it got two large paint boards (big enough for 15×22″ paper and 3 small boards (big enough for 9×12″ paper). They are sturdier than the ones from Mercurius, which are all plastic and bow in the middle when you try to carry them.

Very good to know—thanks, Leslie.

Art

Art Supplies

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CityMom asked:

Here’s another nitty gritty question: what is in your arts and crafts cabinet? I think that this is an area in which we are lacking, and it would be good to have some things on hand for rainy summer days. Any website suggestions for craft supplies?

A while back I wrote about Waldorf art supplies and whether they were worth the money. A commenter recommended Discount School Supply as a good source for non-Waldorf materials—and I just realized that’s the same company running an ad in my lefthand sidebar at the moment. Scroll down and check them out!

My supply cupboard is pretty basic:

• Paper (White copy-machine paper for drawing, as it’s cheaper to buy in large quantities than real drawing paper; notebook paper; construction paper; and I stock up on card stock [ba dum bum] when Michael’s has a good sale, because it is so great for mini-book covers, bookmarks, paper dolls, etc etc etc. Jane has a million uses for card stock.)

• Crayons

• Prismacolor pencils (can’t live without ’em)

• Watercolors

• Markers

• Scissors

• Glue (sticks and Elmer’s)

• Stickers (I bought a big grab-bag of Mrs. Grossman’s stickers cheap at Timberdoodle seven years ago and we are still using them!)

• Sculpey

• Foam shapes (Found a tub on sale at Michael’s.)

• Holy cards

• Yarn

• Usborne drawing books—check my archives under “Art” for a list of our favorites.

For awesome liturgical-year-themed craft ideas, check out my pal Alice’s website. She is a crafting genius.

CityMom, I’ll have to save part two of your question for another post—baby just woke up!

(And I haven’t forgotten about the promised language arts post, either. Still to come.)