Art Books

My Vacation Drawing Book

May 9, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

My Vacation Drawing Book is a great book to take along with you on your vacation. Geared for 5-8 year olds, this is a creative book that introduces art elements around the theme of going on vacation.

Imagine being able to design your own menu, or draw some of the scenery before you as you go down the road. What about learning to draw some of the interesting animals you will see? Do you know how to draw a bird, or how to turn a box into something new and fun? Staying in a tent? A trailer or a Resort? Wouldn’t it be fun to draw it and see what you can add? How about making a sign post of all the interesting places you will go? Ideas like these and more fill the 72 pages of this hardcover book.

Coming with an elastic band as a placeholder, this book is built to stand the rigors of an early elementary student hauling it with them on their travels.

I loved the space given on each page as well as the variety of activities provided. Lessons are taught using simple lines that children can easily copy, and yet I found the children are pushed a bit to become better at what they are doing (like practicing where to put the horizons, and working with vanishing points).

All in all I found this book to be a well designed one that many children would delight in working through, giving them a keep sake to remember their vacation with. The only page I wish could have been made different was one where they were asked to add captions to images. The space for captions was too small for children of this age bracket to write in. Asking Mom or Dad for help would solved this problem. This is a nice book that I would have no problem giving any child.

My Vacation Drawing Book: How to draw, sketch or scribble your adventures.
Gillian Johnson
Lonely Planet Kids
72 pages, 5-8 years,
Drawing, art, sketch, vacation, activity book
Hardcover with elastic band
Reviewed for: Raincoast books.
Where to find: Amazon link.

642 Awesome Things to Draw

May 2, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Do you have the thought that you would like to draw something and when you sit down to draw all your ideas float out the window? Or do you ever have a child come and say “I want to draw something Mom/Dad but I don’t know what to draw!!!!” 642 Awesome Things to Draw, Young Artist’s Edition is the answer to all those wonderings. It has been my pleasure to review this book.

You might be asking… what can I draw?

a jungle, a beach and a desert coexisting together
a tarantula taking over Japan
sheep organizing a strike
a red, white and blue rollercoaster
A car covered in bumper stickers
a circus run by mice
a jumbo paper clip

So many ideas… it almost makes a body want to try them all.

Can you imagine the stories you could tell as you each drew your own version of the picture prompt? Consider the laughter and conversations that could erupt around you.

For we all know what might come out of “a huge pile of trash”… books filled with tails, forgotten drinks bubbling up, making toy fish float as alligators come bumbling out with leftover turkeys riding their backs, as stuff dragons breathe fire while dancing with hula hoops… what stories could emerge as your budding artists fill the pages, waiting for the next adventure to come their way.

Each space comes in a variety of formats, whole pages, 1/2 and quarters, sometimes on a diagonal. Rectangles and squares, with a few triangles thrown into the mix. No circles to be found in this book.

642 different things to draw on car rides, or while on vacation driving to the beach or the campground, be inspired as you sit inside on a rainy afternoon when no-one can come over to play. Imagine…what could you do? What could your children come up with? Ah the fun to be had!

642 Awesome Things to Draw: Young Artist’s Edition
by Root Division
Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Ages 8-12
Art, Drawing, Creativity, Imagination, Activity Books

Reviewed for Raincoast Books.
Where to find: Amazon Link.

Part of a series of 642 Things to draw. I have reviewed the 642 places to draw, 642 Big Things to draw,and 642 Things about Me. This is a great series of books to spur on your children to creativity (as well as yourself). Relax with your children, be inspired to draw!

What do I think?

642 Things to do does what it sets out to do. Provide 642 different things for children 8-12 (or those who wish they could be again) to draw, things to inspire the imagination, the intellectual curiousity to wonder, and the willingness to try.

Paint by Sticker with free printable

April 11, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Saturday night I came home later than I had planned from a homeschool conference, completed the chores I needed to and than sat down tired. My mind was racing and I felt unsettled. Watching TV with the boys as they played their computer game was relaxing me so I thought I would pull out my Paint by Sticker book and do a page. I don’t think I’ve shared this book with you before so let me walk you through it. Do stay tuned to my ArtWork Notebooking Page at the close of this post.

The page I did took me about 30-45 to complete and I have to admit I was TIRED, I wasn’t focused on perfection, I was focused on getting my mind to settle so that I’d be able to get to bed and sleep. 🙂 So the page I did isn’t perfect, but it completed that task I had…the fiddling with stickers, looking for numbers, settled my brain down wonderfully. I think it’s one of the reasons I like colouring, it gives my brain something fiddly to work with that helps it to shut off all the extraneous, and at the end of it I can see I’ve accomplished something. This Paint by Stickers book does the same thing, but leaves me not having to worry about getting colours right.

Paint by Sticker gives me 12 different pieces of artwork to complete. What the artwork is, is listed in the table of contents. This book contains such as the Creation of Adam, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Dance as well as others. The one I am showing you today is called “House of Parliament, Sunlight Effect” by Claude Monet.

I admittedly didn’t take a picture of the uncompleted work, so I’m showing you a different page. 🙂 You’ll bear with me right? The spaces have an alpha-numeric combination.

The instructions in the beginning of the book tell you to be careful about putting the stickers on, and advise using a tweezer. I learned that if you don’t stick the pieces on firmly you can do some replacing, but once it is stuck, it’s stuck. AND if you apply too much pressure it’s too bad, so sad. Ergo, if you want it to come out just so… take your time, have good lighting, be finicky about your placement.

It’s easy to know which page of stickers you need to use. Each sticker page has a picture of the completed art work in the top right corner.

AND each sticker page is perforated so they rip out easily making it super easy to complete each page. And they do… sometimes perforated pages don’t rip out smoothly or easily, these do. So much better than flipping back and forth in a book trying to reach small stickers.

You may have noticed on the page above the stickers are divided into colour coded sections. This makes it easier to find the sticker that you need to use. I found the colour coded divisions added a bright spot, so helpful and so much nicer than a plain white background eh! 🙂

My thought when I started out was that I would start on one side and work my way across but as I worked I changed my mind. I then started picking out the biggest pieces and fitting them in, I saved the smallest pieces for the end. You can make your creation in whatever way you want to!

MOST of the stickers I managed to get well. I was able to reposition three or four of them, one I bungled badly. But my son said “It looks good mom!”

You can probably see the darker purple one in the middle that I messed up with. I’m thinking if I wanted to I could take a purple pencil crayon and fill in those white lines, but from a distance the lad tells me it looks great and I should just leave things be. 🙂

I did learn that the stickers are definitely not oriented to the page. I frequently had to turn the sticker around to find the right orientation. Make sure that you don’t just slap the stickers down. Take your time and turn them around so you get the sticker on the correct way.

All in all this was an excellent way to relax without having to fuss about with crayons, paper or markers. No big colour decisions to make, just a look, sort, place and be finished with a decent looking piece of art. I urge you, if you like colouring books, to give the paint by sticker books a look. I know I’ll be looking for more of them (hopefully on sale like this one was). 🙂

Just so you know, some of the art work is more involved and requires two pages of stickers to complete. All carefully labelled so you know what goes where. Go on… create a masterpiece… One sticker at a time. 🙂

I was thinking about how this book would be so handy to do with a homeschooling unit. Can’t you just see working with your students/children as you talk about this work that the artist did, and then take small breaks to see other works by the same artist. You could easily pull in history, geography, science and more. Reading to your children fascinating tidbits as they keep their hands and eyes busy recreating works of art!

Click on the image below to download my ArtWork Notebooking Page.

Art Book: Fallout, a colouring book

March 21, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Welcome Kristen to the blog today. She’s introducing us to a adult colouring book for a game called Fallout. Kristen is from the blog Mom’s Quest to Teach. You really should go visit her. 🙂

Fallout Coloring Book
It’s All Over But the Coloring

The Fallout Adult Coloring Book, a ThinkGeek and Bethesda Store exclusive, contains over 100 line drawings from the game Fallout 4. For fans for of the Fallout series, this might be a must have for their vaults.

The majority of the book contains images of the Vault Boy to color of the various perks one can choose from the actual Fallout 4 game. Other pages depict the companions of the game: Dogmeat, Piper, Strong, Cait, Hancock, X6-88, and Gage as well as some of the enemies of the game like Deathclaws and Ghouls. Noticeably missing from the coloring book are many of the more popular companions including Nick Valentine, MacCready, Deacon, the two Robots (Codsworth and Curie), Preston, and possibly Danse (one could argue he is one of the two Brotherhood of Steel soldiers). Upon further thought, Preston is probably helping a settlement.

Personally, I like the chance to color some of the characters from the video game and Vault boy but I would have also liked to see more images from the game itself. Perhaps towns or locates of the Commonwealth like Diamond City or the Atom Cats Garage? Or even Vault 111.

(suggested Fallout hashtags: #Fallout #Fallout4 #Fallout3 #Bethesda #ThinkGeek #VaultBoy #Vault111 #Vault101)

“A Mom’s Quest to Teach is a regular column covering elements of teaching and learning (with an eye towards homeschooling), parenting, crafting, and all of the discoveries, joys, and daily roller coaster rides that occur while being a mom.”

Art Book: Draw Like an Artist – Pop Art

March 14, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Does PopArt interest you? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Draw Like an Artist PopArt will help you along your way.

Don’t know what Pop Art is? Me too! I had to learn and this video helped. Simple colourful work.

Draw like an Artist: pop art is a book that takes you through 18 different artists, introducing you the work they did and then gives you an opportunity to copy their style. This book does tell you how to do it, it gives you the opportunity and the paper, and then says This is what this artist did.. now.. make their style your own. I love this style of teaching. Being able to look at works of art until you understand the style and then being encouraged to make it your own….It’s wonderful!

Anyways, artists include people such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, Joe Tilson and more. 18 artists, 18 activities. Included at the close of the book are elements you can use in your creativity.

Each artist has a brief biography given plus a sample of their work. A brief synopsis of the type of work they did, and then encouragement to make your own piece of art.

My thoughts.

I thought this was a wonderful book. I love how each artist was introduced along with some of their art work. Then a simple encouragement to just try your hand at it. A page to work on with the artists work visible for inspiration makes it a useful book for students of Pop Art. I can see this book being SO easy to use for a co-op class. It would be a matter of finding samples of the artists work, adding a bit more to the biography, providing papers, magazines and a variety of art materials and then simply encouraging each student to make a work of art that is all their own. I think it would be fantastic to see more books like this one.

cover of the book draw like an artist Pop Art

Draw Like an Artist - Pop Art
Patricia Geis
Princeton Architectural Press
64 pages, softcover, age 10+
art, art book, pop art, draw like an artist
Series: Draw Like An Artist
Reviewed for Raincoast books.

Where to find: Amazon Link.

Other Art Books:

How to Draw Comics. 
How to Draw . 
Stick Stekch School.

Art Book: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

March 7, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Guess what! Ritsumei was ever so kind and thought she would join me in my art series. Please welcome her with me.

I was introduced to Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by a friend of mine, a Real Artist. I asked him one day, “How’d you do that??” –and after he told me, he loaned me this book. Which I quickly decided I needed to buy. That was in 1994, and this book has been my friend ever since then.

It’s a little worn… the poor thing split into two “volumes” when I had my oldest son working in it not long ago, and not because he was rough on it; he wasn’t.

It’s just the kind of how-to book that’s easy to refer to and easy to use… and we gradually used it up.

The book was first published in 1979, and a lot of the brain research that it rests on has been updated: I understand that the idea of the strict right-brain/left-brain categorization of tasks (logical work to the left; artistic on the right) has been refined and even outgrown. And when I sat my son down to read the book and do the exercises, I told him that: the science is dated.

Well, the science may be dated, but the exercises work.
So we continue to use the book.

Drawing is not really very difficult. Seeing is the problem, or to be more specific, shifting to a particular way of seeing. You may not believe me at this moment. You may feel that you are seeing things just fine and that it’s the drawing that is hard. But the opposite is true, and the exercises in this book are designed to help you make the mental shift…”
-From Chapter 1: Drawing and the Art of Bicycle riding, page 4

And it’s true: the things that Jay taught me in the five minute conversation that literally took me from drawing bad stick figures to doing a recognizable portrait that afternoon were all about how to look at things. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain continued the lessons in how to see, and just as important, to trust what I see.

I still have the first sketch book that I bought, where I did the exercises in the book, and thumbing back through it, I still remember the thrill of putting the things I see on paper — and having other people look at them and say, “Yep, that’s what it looks like.”

I thought that my sister got all that talent; really, she learned to see before I did.

So. The book.

It’s got a nice collection of before-and-after student work. These two are my favorites.

Throughout the book, there are readings, as the author teaches in the main body of the text, and puts a great collection of quotes and exercises and artwork from both students and masters in the sidebars on each page.

The exercises start in chapter four, and they are excellent. Sitting in school, I passed time by doodling vase faces on my notebooks and folders long after I had completed the exercise. I still enjoy doing them; to make a convincing face requires a relatively high degree of concentration and care, which makes it a good exercise long after the basics of drawing become familiar.

…if you do use words to think, ask yourself only such things as:
“Where does that curve start?”
“How deep is that curve?”
What is the angle relative to the edge of the paper?”
“How long is that line relative to the one I’ve just drawn?”
These are R-mode questions: spatial, relational and comparative. Notice that no parts are named. No statements are made, no conclusions drawn, such as, “The chin must come out as far as the nose,” or, “Noses are curved.”
-From Chapter 4: Experiencing the Shift From Left to Right, p 49

There are a number of other great exercises as well. One of the most memorable is copying a Picasso line drawing — but the drawing is upside down while you do it. It really messes with the preconceived notions of what things ought to look like when you draw them upside down — and that is exactly what the book is all about: helping the student get past their preconceived notions of what things look like, so they can get to putting what things really look like on the paper. More than once I’ve suggested that moms who want to learn to draw ought to grab one of the coloring sheets they print for their kids, turn it upside down, and draw it themselves. It’s a great exercise for confusing the part of the mind that likes to slap a quick label on things and be done — which allows the slower, calmer, more patient part of the mind to emerge and to really see. Because seeing well is what drawing is all about.My poor, worn-out copy is from the second edition, and looking at Amazon, I see that it’s now in the fourth edition, and the chapters have been reworked enough that a few of them have slightly different titles. But looking through the preview, I see that much of the material is probably going to be familiar, when I finally get around to replacing my poor old book. Which I probably will do: after my oldest, there are two more children that I’ll want to work through the book, so that they, too, can learn to see well enough to draw well.

Ritsumei is a wife and a mother of
three. She has been using a Classical/Charlotte Mason approach to
homeschooling for ~8 years, since her oldest started doing preschool.
You can find her blogging at Baby Steps, where she primarily posts about homeschooling life, educational philosophy, and the Bible.

Ritsumei is a wife and a mother of three. She has been using a Classical/Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling for ~8 years, since her oldest started doing preschool. You can find her blogging at Baby Steps, where she primarily posts about homeschooling life, educational philosophy, and the Bible.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Betty Edwards

Where to find: Amazon Link.

Art Book: Doodle Theory Anywhere!

February 28, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Guess what I have for you today? It’s a neat little book filled with colourful shapes to jump-start your doodling. It’s a creative adventure just waiting for you! The book? Doodle Theory Anywhere!

I made up a small video so that you could see this book better than I can describe it in words.

Isn’t it a cool little book? So many shapes, colours, and figures to set your imagination loose on. Can’t you just see yourself plucking it down in your purse or a car bag for your youngsters and heading out the door. Wouldn’t it be great to have something easy at hand to take the place of the electronics? It’s just the right size to fit in a purse, oversized coat pocket or toss into a car bag for the youngsters.

My Thoughts:

I think it’s a neat little book, it’s apparently a smaller version of the Doodle Theory drawing pad. This version is a petite version meant to travel with you, making it a very handy little resource. Doodling helps to spur on creative thinking. It also is great at letting your imagination soar and your brain rest, helping to connect pieces that normally you might not. I know that when I doodle I will often have a “eureka” moment as suddenly I get the answer I sought. It also gives you something to do to keep you busy for car rides, plane rides, waits in offices and such like. Since it’s NOT an electronic device, it is more welcoming of conversation, as people wonder about this amazing book that you are so busy with. 🙂 Human connection is SO important you know?

Doodle Theory Anywhere, a doodle note pad with many creative shapes

Doodle Theory Anywhere!
        Create Amazing doodles with starter shapes and squiggles    
Nate Padavick
Chronicle Books
Doodle pad, art book, Doodling
200 pages

Reviewed for: Raincoast Books. 

Where to find it: Amazon Link.

Other doodling/creative books that I have reviewed:

CatDoodles.
Kawaii Doodle Class. 
Dangles.
Zentangles.  
Pocket Doodles for Christmas.

Art Books

My Vacation Drawing Book

642 Awesome Things to Draw

What do I think?

Paint by Sticker with free printable

Art Book: Fallout, a colouring book

Art Book: Draw Like an Artist – Pop Art

My thoughts.

Art Book: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Art Book: Doodle Theory Anywhere!

My Thoughts:

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What do I think?

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