Our Fall Art Class

You may remember me mentioning something about teaching an art appreciation class for our homeschool group's fall co-op. Well, I just had to share what my kiddos created in that class. They had a lot of fun!

The first week we talked about George Seurat and Pointillism.

I had the students use heavy art paper, acrylic paints, and cotton swabs

for this technique. They were to simply dab the cotton swab in the

paint and use dots of paint to create their paintings. The Princess

went for the landscape, while Mr. B chose fruit as his muse.

I think I'd like to try this again soon with my kids and practice mixing

dots of different colors to create another color. For not being an

artist, I do find this stuff totally fascinating!

(For instance, did you know that Seurat is basically the father of our

modern day printing technique? He thought that any color could be

created by using red, blue, and yellow. Have you looked at what

colors your printing cartridges use lately?).

The second week we talked about Jean Dubuffet and textured sculpture.

For this project my husband cut a whole bunch of wood blocks for us to

use for the base of our plaster of Paris. Then we pressed various

objects into the wet plaster to make impressions. We used shells,

buttons, Legos, screen, chain links, coins, you-name-it...

The class was finished at that point but I encouraged the students to

paint their "sculpture" after it had dried well. My kiddos chose to

paint theirs: The Princess went for a turquoise and Mr. B for red.

The Third week we discussed Jackson Pollock and splatter painting.

Each student had an 8x10 canvas to paint. Some really got into the

splatter action (see The Princess' above), but others had a more

difficult time doing that and went for a different approach--and

that's okay, too. It's all about self-expression, right? Mr. B went

more monochromatic (see below).

Our final week we learned about Alexander Calder

(my personal fave from this study) and wire art.

I finally narrowed down a project in Calder's style for our class to wire

fish. This was a fun project! I never knew wire could be so expressive.

Each student received about 18" of wire and was asked to form it into

a fish. They could embellish it with beads--or not. The Princess added

beads, but Mr. B opted for a purest approach. I love both fish!

And after four weeks of art appreciation we are now enjoying some lovely

new original art in our home!

I am looking forward to more fun art projects this year!

Comments

The Reading Game: A Review

I was excited to receive this review product recently, thinking my 1st-grade-son could really benefit and enjoy it a lot. And I was right! He is having so much fun with this game. The Reading Game is a fast-paced memory card game using words. The game comes with 6 sets of memory cards with 6 corresponding readers. The idea is for you and your student to play memory with each set of cards (playing 6 rounds with each set), after every 2 rounds your student then reads 2 test sentences to see how he is retaining the new words he is learning. After the whole set has been played, he is then ready to read the corresponding reader...and has learned 30 new words! By the time your student has played every set of cards and read every reader, he will have learned 180 words. Of the 25 most common English words, 23 are on that list; of the 50 most common words, 42 are on that list. So this little game of reading really does prepare your student well. The readers are illustrated with cute ...

The Making of an Egyptian Death Mask

We are learning all about the ancient world this year with Story of the World I and loving it! We've been learning a lot about Egypt, of course, which is completely fascinating. Most recently we have studied the New Kingdom of Egypt, which includes the story of King Tut. So we decided making an Egyptian death mask in the style of King Tut's would be a fun project. First since it was too cold at the time to paper mache in the garage (it probably would have frozen instead of dried-ha) and it was too messy to do it in the house, we decided to pick up a couple of cheap craft masks at Hobby Lobby. Next we cut out cardboard shapes to complete the shape of the death mask, attaching them with hot glue. Vince even put a little detail on the *beard* with the hot glue per The Princess' request. Then the kiddos started to paint them with this metallic gold tempera paint. It worked okay for the cardboard, but would not coat the plastic of the mask. We thought maybe a second coat ...

Door Hanger Chore Charts

My kids have had a chore chart for a while. It's one of those magnetic boards and they share it. However, it's not by their rooms and often they (and I) forget to update it. Plus it's a little bulky. When I saw the concept of a door hanger chore chart on Pinterest, I loved it! It was compact, right there were the kiddos could see it coming out and going into their rooms, and it costs almost nothing to make. I headed over to one of my favorite stores: Hobby Lobby, of course. They have these little wooden door hangers for .79. I also grabbed a couple of packets of decorative buttons for $1.99 each. I already had the clothes pins and the paint so those cost me nothing. I began by painting the door hangers (I used tempera paints because that's what I had). Then I grabbed a fine point Sharpie and the clothes pins and started writing chores on them, making sure to write them correctly so they will ...

my blessed life

Search This Blog