In response to the question about paints from the other day (on Lilting House), my pal Joann writes:

C’s favorite media are Prismacolors and
acrylic paints.

Acrylics are water clean-up, mix nicely. She likes
them.

She uses Daler-Rowney acrylics from Dick Blick or and they are made in ENGLAND! Not China! Not sure about the lead content. I
would think that oils would probably be prone to have heavy metals in them as
some of the pigments are from earth minerals. (I don’t remember why I know
that.) BUT I did see in a Dick Blick catalog some "H2Oils" that are water
cleanable.
I LOVE oils for myself. The richness, the
thickness, the globs. LOL

We love Prismacolors too—the soft creamy feel when you’re coloring with them, the gorgeous hues. I bought a huge set almost ten years ago (!) from Timberdoodle, and we are still using those pencils! (I do think I replenished with a smaller set several years later, because the kids had used up their favorite colors. But those pencils really do last a long time.)

Martha asked:

I
have a question…
Why use watercolors? Do you also use other art mediums for painting?
Oils? Pastels?
Also what about lead in the pigments? After all the issues with
products from China, I’m being more vigilant about this and it’s nearly
impossible to find non-china art supplies in my price range!
thoughts?

Wow, good point about the question of where our art supplies are coming from. I’ve been on the toy watch for a long time, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me to look at where our paints were made. I know you can get German-made watercolors from Stockmar, but as you say, those are pricey, and I have an uneasy feeling about Stockmar anyway. (Edited to add: There’s a long story here! This is a shift for me. I have enthusiastically recommended Stockmar many times in the past.)

Hmm, this bears looking into.

As for "why watercolors"—for me, there are lots of reasons. I’ve never used oils, but my sense is that they’re expensive and messy and harder to clean up…don’t you have to clean your brushes with turpentine or something? You see how ignorant I am on that subject.

We do use tempera paint sometimes, and my kids love the little jars of acrylics for painting those unfinished wooden things you can pick up cheap at Michael’s. (More made-in-China stuff? Probably. Sigh. Hadn’t occurred to me.)

But we like watercolors best for painting pictures, because of the luminous, swirling colors, the easy blending, the pleasure of watching the heavy paper absorb the translucent paint.

Oil pastels are a rare treat: again, their mess factor is too high for regular use.

My three oldest girls are taking an art class right now, and the medium for many weeks has been chalk pastels. They are really enjoying using them, and they’ve learned an awful lot about tone and shading and texture. I think chalk pastels are an easy medium to use for experimenting with shading techniques. And the cleanup is a snap.

(You can see where my priorities are.)

On the same post, Amy asked another excellent question.

Where and how do you store/display the finished artwork? I find this
even more daunting than the creative process. How do you (any of you)
respectfully manage the output of your oh-so-productive junior artists?
I’d love to hear any thoughts.

Ha! On this topic, my thoughts amount to a dull buzzing in the head. Our current storage method is: pictures hung on the fridge, and a large and ever-growing pile of beautiful finished work on the laundry-room counter, waiting to be hung or stored or something.

When we moved last year, I had to sort through boxes and boxes of such treasures. I tried to pare down to the best or most adorable work, but it was sooo hard to part with any single painting or drawing, you know? The masterpieces that made the cut are now languishing in a box in the closet, most of them.

So I’d love to hear other people’s answer to this question.

Related post: Watercolor Painting: How It Happens Here.

Remember how much fun my kids had at Mark Kistler‘s drawing class this summer? Mark has begun to put free 8-minute drawing tutorials up at YouTube. Very cool!

I have often remarked to close friends that for me, logistics make or break everything. I can have the best idea in the world, but if I can’t figure out how to pull it off on a practical level, it is no more useful to us than a cloud: something pretty to look at, but impossible to take hold of.

Painting is one of those "nice ideas" that floated airily overhead until I worked out a system to make it feasible on a regular basis. My pal Sarah asked me for the details, and I thought I’d share them here. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but you should know that I am the easily frazzled type who really must think things through on the most basic level or else my plans go all kablooey.

I use high-quality watercolor paints, the kind that come in little tubes. These are very rich pigments and a little goes a long way. We used to use paint jars but they took up so much storage space, and the lids fell under the table and rolled away, and there was always mess involved.

Then I found these cute little plastic paint palettes at Michael’s for 99 cents each. They have six wells, perfect for mixing colors. I put a dab of the three primary colors in one well each, and a smaller dab of each in two more of the wells, so the kids can mix their green, orange, and purple. Each child gets her own paint palette.

I have written before about investing in good watercolor paper and brushes. (Here’s my long art supplies post from Bonny Glen, and its sequel.) These tubes have lasted us for over a year.

For painting boards, we use some markerboards (dry erase boards) I bought on clearance a long while back. I had actually ordered an official painting board from Paper Scissors Stone, and when I arrived I smacked my forehead because it was—a markerboard. But way more expensive. Doh.

Here’s a tip from a Bonny Glen reader for another inexpensive kind of painting board. Whatever you use, they sure do make painting a lot easier to clean up. The boards wipe right off, and we stack ours near the closet when they’re not in use. Voila—nice clean table.

We use pickle jars for water and a cloth diaper for drying brushes. Oh! And here’s a great tip from—I think—Donna Simmons of Christopherus Homeschool Resources (whose First Grade Syllabus I’ll be reviewing here later this week, by the way, and whose work I praised in my Waldorf series in the spring). If this wasn’t Donna’s suggestion, it was a speaker from a Waldorf homeschooling conference on a DVD I watched a while back. I should tell you more about that, too, sometime. But I digress. The great tip I was getting to: it’s a sweet way to teach children to properly care for their brushes. You take the brush and tell a little story about a gnome who doesn’t like his beard to stay wet. We never leave the brush sitting in the jar of water because that beard will be soaked and oh, what a sad little gnome. And we mustn’t push too hard and bend his beard every which way. He doesn’t like that at all.

Ever since I told this tale to Rose and Bean, they have treated their brushes with special care. No more leaving them soaking in the pickle jar. They carefully dry the "beard" on the cloth and smooth it into a point. It’s nice.

I explained to the kids about the expensive paper, and how in order to use it for our paintings, we have to take great care not to squander it. They understood. They’ve painted on plain white copy paper, and they can feel the difference.

Rose says she "needs to paint at least two pictures a day" or she just doesn’t feel right. She finds it a calming, peaceful activity. Here’s a painting she says was inspired by a poem called "The Little Rose Tree" by Rachel Field:

(As you can see, we don’t bother to tape our paper down flat, as most watercolor technique books recommend.)

When they were younger, I usually wet the paper with a sponge first, per the wet-on-wet watercolor technique you’ll hear about in every Waldorf resource. My very little children, like Wonderboy now at age three, loved touching a brushful of paint to the wet paper and watching the paint swirl around the page. But past the age of five or so, I find that they much prefer to have more control over where their colors go. They know how to use water (either before or after applying paint to paper) to help the paint go where they want it to go, and to blend colors. They love to keep wetting the brush and "pulling" paint from one darker section across a wider area, making a rich blue sky or a lush green meadow.

Sarah had some great art-supply advice of her own to share:

Here is the address for the discount art supplies I was telling you about:

www.millerpadsandpaper.com

The company reminds me of Rainbow Resource only it is (nearly) exclusively
art supplies.  I have bought things in person at conventions and ordered by
phone and online.  I highly recommend them.  The prices are hard to beat.  I
purchased my class supplies for VBS this summer from them.  Even with
shipping they were the least expensive alternative (and I always love
supporting a small business anyway).

One of my favorite items is their sketchbook journals.  They have all sizes
in both 60 and 80# paper.  They are $3 for a 6×9 size which are perfect for
little laps in the car.

Always good to know where to stock up on more supplies. We get very excited about painting around here, as you can see. (Kindly ignore the girls squabbling in the background.)

(This clip doesn’t keep replaying every time you load the page, does it? It isn’t supposed to.)

I’ve written before about how much Jane has enjoyed working through the drawing lessons in Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad. When I saw that Mark Kistler himself was offering a summer art camp right here in San Diego, I jumped at the opportunity.

"Hey, Jane," I said, ever so casually, "would you be interested in taking an art class with Mark Kistler?"

"WHAT??????!!!!!!!!!!!" she shrieked, puncturing my left eardrum. (I think I counted the number of exclamation points correctly, but there may have been more.) "REALLY????!!!!" :::pop:::: There went my other eardrum.

"I take it that’s a yes?"

I couldn’t hear her response, but fortunately I have learned a lot of sign language. I interpreted the jumping-up-and-down and maniacal grinning as a yes, and signed her up.

On Day Two of the camp, Rose demanded to know why she wasn’t part of this experience. She fit the age range, so I’m not really sure why I didn’t think to sign her up as well. Perhaps my powers of thought were thrown off by the shrieking and the ruptured eardrums and whatnot.

Happily, Day Two was "Bring a Friend Day," so I was able to sign Rose up for the rest of the week-long camp.

We could have signed up for two sessions—"Draw! Draw! Draw!" and "Beyond Pencil Power"—but I had some scheduling conflicts with the larger chunk of time, so we (to the children’s disappointment) limited our participation to Draw! Draw! Draw!, a one-hour session five days in a row.

They have had the most fabulous time.

They love Mark Kistler. He’s a great guy, every bit as engaging and funny as his books. My girls love his sense of humor and his energy. They come out of class full of laughter and stories—and the drawings, my word, the drawings.

Mark teaches the basics of 3-D drawing. His style is cartoonish, which appeals to the kids. His technique is rock solid, and the concepts they have learned will serve them well for a lifetime of drawing: foreshortening, shading, finding where light would hit the object you are drawing. The kids walked out of the very first class with impressive and delightful drawings. They are thrilled. They are bubbling over with excitement. They are distraught because today is the last day of class.

Never fear!, I told them. We can take Mark Kistler home with us. Of course we already have the cherished copy of Draw Squad, and now (thanks to a little bartering action, heh heh—Mark has a young daughter who is just the right age for Little House) we have his Imagination Station book as well, along with a couple of his drawing-lesson DVDs, which contain episodes of Mark’s popular PBS show of the same name.

And then there’s his website, which is loaded with good stuff.  You can download art lessons and even sign up for Mark’s online drawing school. There are some free lessons to give you a taste of how it works. It’s a nifty format, with animations to walk you through each step.

My girls couldn’t wait to try out the new DVDs, and I have to tell you, I was blown away by the drawings Beanie—six years old, you know, and the only one who did NOT attend Mark’s workshop (next year, I promised her, if he offers the camp here again)—produced after watching the show: a whole page of 3-D cartoon ghosts chasing each other around.

My point being: Mark’s methods are highly effective, probably because they are so much fun. I only wish I could sign up for the class myself next year. (Actually, parents can sit in on the classes for free, and there’s a kids-and-adults mixed session in the evenings. I couldn’t swing it, what with the baby and the toddler, but the opportunity was there.)

I’ll just have to content myself with watching the DVDs. These kids are having too much fun. I’ve got to get in on the action.

This YouTube clip of an artist at work is amazing.

Hat tip: my old friend Pam T. of the Always Learning list.

I was catching up with my friend Silvia’s blog, Po Moyemu, and saw this post about her brother’s Google Sketchup tutorial.

Google SketchUp? This was new to me. I liked the sound of it (probably because it rhymes with ketchup) and went to check it out. Ooh, fun. It’s a 3D drafting program. You can draft buildings, furniture, all sorts of stuff. You can even plunk your buildings down in Google Earth.

This, I thought, might be useful for Alicia’s Architecture for Kids blog. Have you visited that yet? Gorgeous photos, interesting links.

Every time I visit it I mean to ask Alicia (aka Love2Learn Mom) if  she has read our favorite kids’ architecture book, Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle like a Fish, which I wrote about on Bonny Glen a while back.

Back to SketchUp. I wanted to read Silvia’s brother’s tutorial, and that clicky-click introduced me to Make Magazine. Wow. Who knew? It’s a quarterly magazine full of techie projects. You can subscribe to the paper edition or a digital version (or both). You can also purchase single issues, if there is a particular article that catches your eye on the website. (I was able to watch Silvia’s brother’s SketchUp video tutorial for free, but I couldn’t read the article.)

There is even a Make blog, the top post of which right now is a link to a video podcast of How to Make a Balloon Flinging Siege Weapon—guaranteed to make any teenage boy’s heart go pitty-pat.

And! And! Are you ready for this? Make has a sister publication: Craft! (Did I just hear a collective Oooh… from the homeschooling mom crowd?)

What is CRAFT?

CRAFT is the first project-based magazine dedicated to the renaissance
that is occurring within the world of crafts. Celebrating the DIY
spirit, CRAFT’s goal is to unite, inspire, inform and entertain a
growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who are
transforming traditional art and crafts with unconventional, unexpected
and even renegade techniques, materials and tools; people who undertake
amazing crafting projects in their homes and communities.

There’s a Craft blog, of course, as well as a Projects page which includes links to project instructions elsewhere on the net, such as these gorgeous felted beads at Maryjane’s Attic.

All this from one post at Silvia’s blog. Oh, internet, you are a marvelous, terrible thing.

Was mesmerized by this at my hubby’s blog. He got it from Charlottesville Words. I imagine it’ll be making the rounds, because it’s fascinating.

One thing that struck me was how you get to the twentieth century and the dehumanizing begins. It was strange to feel so repelled by that, because I have always found cubism and abstract art to be interesting and often quite beautiful or striking. Something about seeing the fracturing happen in this progression, after so many lovely images celebrating the female face and form, is a shock to the sensibilities—perhaps a taste of what a shock those styles of painting were to the audiences who first viewed them.