A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Art

Art Series: Art Lab for Kids

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Welcome Wren to my blog today!!!   Yes, she is a total sweetheart to help me out with my art series.  She’s going to be talking about a wonderful book called Art Lab of Kids by Susan Schwake.   You will normally find Wren (and her sister) blogging at FinchnWren.
How do you approach art in your home or homeschool? Are you a
naturally talented artist yourself, for whom art creation just flows
out? Or, are you someone who would love to teach art but have no
ideas of where or how to start? Let me encourage you, if you fit
into this last category: it’s much easier than you imagine! Even
if you are not a trained artist, you really can teach the subject of
art to your own children. There are so many books and resources
available today to help you along in this. I’d like to share a
very well-rounded book to help you in this journey: Susan Schwake’s
ART LAB FOR KIDS. I refer to this book all the time for both
our own homeschool art, and for the art class I teach in our local
homeschool coop. What a resource!
 
ART LAB FOR KIDS is subtitled “52 Creative Adventures in
Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media.”
Practically, that means you could take one adventure per week and
have a year’s worth of art to do in your homeschool! Ms. Schwake’s
book contains practical, step-by-step instructions, lots of photos,
and pictures of completed artworks so that the artist (or mom)
understands exactly how to teach and create each project. The author
also provides a great resource list of recommended media in the first
section, explaining how different ones work and can be used. She is
an artist and art teacher with 20 years’ experience, so she brings
both the ability to clearly teach and a huge depth of art idea
resources to the reader.
ART LAB FOR KIDS has sections which cover the following:
  • How to use the book and how to create art with others
  • Drawing (ink, scribble, pastels, crayon, and more)
  • Painting (miniature, Fauvist, charcoal, watercolor, tempera, etc.)
  • Printmaking (silkscreen, stencil, cardboard relief, gelatin, and
    more)
  • Paper (stamps, tissue, torn-paper, Pop Art, vellum…)
  • Mixed Media (charcoal/watercolor, photos, watercolor and pencil,
    portraits, batik…)

While I think that ART LAB FOR KIDS would be ideal used as a
curriculum, I have personally just read through it many times and
selected specific art projects to teach, based on what my students
were learning or what we found most interesting. Some projects we
thoroughly enjoyed completing were painting an enlarged tiny section
of a painting on a small square; “Painting in the Style of…,”
and “Text as Texture.” And that’s only a fraction of the
projects offered in this book. We’re looking forward to painting
on tiny pieces of wood; reverse landscapes; gelatin monoprinting; and
many more!
 
I recommend this book for anyone who’d like to go deeper into the
world of artmaking, or art teaching, in a variety of art styles.
These vivid, fascinating projects will keep you busy for hours and
hours, happily creating!
Enjoy!
Wren from FinchnWren.
You can find this book through my affiliate links (helping to support this blog).
Amazon.ca
Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media-For Budding Artists of All Ages
Amazon.com
Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media-For Budding Artists of All Ages (Lab Series)

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Art Series: Designing with Pixar

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YES! It’s time for another Art Books from My House to Yours. I really need to take the time to provide you with links to all of them, but not today. 🙂 Today’s book is Designing With Pixar: 45 Activities to create your own characters, worlds and stories.

 Anyways, when I first saw this 80 page I wondered at its usefulness, and then I really started looking at it.

The author Ms. Emily Haynes takes the beloved pixar characters and uses them to help children design better characters, worlds and stories. I’m going to be using this book with my lad to help him once he finishes his story, to turn it into a book. 🙂 Won’t that be cool?

Using pixar characters we are drawn into determining colours for characters skin, hair, clothing etc.   How do those colours make you feel, what do they draw out of you.

We are then led to think about shapes, how does the shape of the character change your thoughts about them.   Often the words “Imagine if….”

What makes your character(s) interesting?   How would you draw them to show those interests?

I won’t say this book is huge and very in-depth, but it does excite the curiousity.   What if Nemo wasn’t orange and white, would it have affected how we thought of him?   What if he’d been a moray eel instead?   Or if Brave’s Merida had long blond tresses rather than a wild mass of long red-haired curls?

Colour and shape influence what we think and feel about characters (and perhaps about the people around us… like the book we are listening to right now where the main character likes to dress in greys and browns so she won’t be noticed).   Could such a character be drawn and how would you draw such a person?

It’s a simple and yet intriguing concept don’t you think?

This book comes with a ton of pages to write and colour on.  To Design your set and to think through changes you would make to movies they have put together.     You see this book is the result of work done by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Pixar Animation Studios when they worked to put together an exhibit.    The exhibit was all about Pixar’s design process.   Research, Iteration and collaboration.   A Story need to have appeal and believability. 

Research – when you look to the world to help inspire your own work.
Iteration – playing with colours and shapes to create your own worlds and characters
Collaboration – working with other people to help tell a story.

The goal of the book: to help people tell their own stories.

To that end, they use their own characters, such as Eve from Wall-E

We are asked to imagine that she has met an alien intruder, what does he look like, his shape and colour?   Does the mean friend or foe?

Emotions can be different colours, like red for anger, green for digust.

What colours could other emotions be?   Like Joy  or Sadness or excitement?

So grab up this book, this inventive activity book that draws you into the world of Pixar and discovery, talk and think about what colours and shapes evoke in your and others.  Work together, create your own stories and worlds.

Designing with Pixar: 45 Activities to create your own characters, worlds and stories.

Michael Bierut
by (artist) ‘Cooper Hewitt
foreword by John Lasseter 
Text by Emily Haynes
Size is 8 x 10 inches.
 80 pages.
Geared for ages 6-9 (but I see the age spread as higher)
Affiliate links provided for ease in finding this book for yourself.   Thanks for your support.
Amazon.ca: Designing with Pixar: 45 Activities to Create Your Own Characters, Worlds, and Stories
Amazon.com: Designing with Pixar: 45 Activities to Create Your Own Characters, Worlds, and Stories

Review: The Art of Beatrix Potter

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Does the thought of Beatrix Potter and her books bring back good memories?   Do you love the art work that she did?   Wouldn’t it be neat to watch a talent develop and see the progression in a famous series of books, as well as to see what else Miss Potter was interested in as an artist?

Well then… Have I got the book for you!!!  

I originally was going to put this book in my art series, (would post mid January), but as I started going through it I thought no…. I cannot wait that long.  This book is WAY to beautiful and nice to let it wait that long.   Beatrix Potter did such lovely work.   I will be referring to it later on in the Art Book Series, but for now, let me tell you about this lovely hardcover book that tells us all about The Art of Beatrix Potter.

So what do you get in this marvellous book?

Five main sections covering
1. Becoming Beatrix Potter
2. London and the South Coast
3. Scotland
4. The Lake District
5. Wales and Beyond

 As I went through this book I discovered reams upon reams of gorgeous drawings.  I met all the characters from her book, discovering that:

I discovered that Beatrix secretly bought Peter Rabbit, and eventually trained him to walk on a leash.  Can you imagine seeing that?   Made me grin when I thought about it.

There is SO much I could tell you about this book, just so very much, but I wanted to tell you about the fungi pictures.  YES.. I like fungi, I love taking pictures of them, and as I was browsing through this book look at what I discovered!!!!

Did you that Miss Potter did up a whole bunch of drawings on fungus..and she did them really well?   I was thoroughly impressed and learned so much!   🙂

That was only one part of the book though, scattered throughout were all her characters that we know and love, Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin and all the rest.

This image made me smile as well, three guinea pigs in a basket.  I used to raise guinea pigs and still miss their wheeking at me first thing in the morning.  Seeing this picture brought back good memories for me.  In fact this whole book did that, seeing the pictures of the Peter Rabbit books and the guinea pigs…just gave me the warm fuzzies.

 This is a very thorough book that is not a dry treatise.   Tons of art work with the words to fill in the details to delight and educate the reader.  Beauty in art, and strength and knowledge in words.  

For anyone who treasures the work of Beatrix Potter and wants to know the woman behind the books and how she developed her talent, this book is a perfect fit.

Author:  Emily Zach
foreword by Steven Heller
introduction by Linda Lear

Publisher:Chronicle Books
Size: 9.96 x 11.28
256 pages

Reviewed for: Raincoast Books

Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

Art Series: Draw, Paint, Print like the Great Artists

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Don’t you love when you find a book that works great for a class you want to teach?   When I first saw this book “Draw  Paint Print like the Great Artists” by Marion Denchars I thought THIS book will be awesome to use in an art classes with a group of children.

And you know what… IT WAS!   🙂

I have to tell you how much fun we had with this 224 page book.   18
different artists that we could discuss it was hard to break it down to
just 6 classes.

One of the artists we learned about was Sonia Delaunay, was a Ukrainian-French artist who work explodes with colourful shapes in unexpected rhythms and patterns.   She loves to do abstract art.    Her work was always infused with abstract, geometric, and brightly coloured patterns.

Check out some of the work the children did.

I just love how the children took the ideas they learned and let them play out in their own ways.  Circles, layers, rectangles, and more.  I was particularly impressed with this one.

The young person who made this is a very shy quiet lad.   He needed a certain amount of prompting and quiet encouragement to attempt his hand.   Circles didn’t appeal to this lad, and he seemed rather uncertain so I read out the description of Ms. Delaunay s work about how it showed geometric shapes.  That peeked his interest so I said.. you know geometic shapes like circles and triangles, and rectangles and squares…and he was off to the races.  🙂   It was SO delightful to see this young fellow grab hold and figure out how to make it all work.     He was bravely different and I love it.  THIS is what I love about teaching art classes, and books like this that inspire and give ideas… I love them.

This is such a great book to use.

If you just want to use it within your family that would be very doable, or if you want to gift a child, this book is meant to used and worked with.

Pages where you can make a self portrait, do aboriginal drawing, learn to use space and so much more.

 
 

 

 

The set up is fairly simple.
Learn about the artist.  See examples of their style.   Learn how to copy that style.  Pages are given if using with an individual student to use, or you can just take the information and talk to a class of children and teach it.  This is a marvellous resource that I plan to use again with another class. 

I will continue to use it with my son in his schooling as well.. but art with a class is SO MUCH FUN.   Ideas that are spawned off each other… it’s amazing to see the encouragement given, the delight in a child’s eyes when they learn something new and accomplish it and the variety AND sense of pride that doing your own thing, while meeting the challenge of an artists gives.

It’s why I like teaching art to children… in my own way.  🙂 

Now I would be remiss if I failed to tell you where I got this great book, it comes my way courtesy of Raincoast Books.  224 pages, 18 artists, great for children 8-12 (or older), published by Laurence King and is about 8 x 11 inches.  Printed on heavier paper to withstand the rigors of being used by an artist.

Five books, five reasons, all about adult colouring.

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Have you joined in on the colouring craze?   You know.. colouring for adults?
I have to admit that when I heard about adults colouring, and not just with their children I thought, huh?   What’s up with that?

So I went out and bought a book, wanted to see what the fuss was about and discovered something.
I enjoy it.  Not so much that I want to do it every day, but sitting down and colouring when you don’t want to read and you don’t want to go out for a hike.. it’s an enjoyable way to kill some time without watching the tube.

I thought I would take the time today to introduce you to some books that I use and some reasons why it’s good to colour.

First book and reason

Peterson Field Guide Coloring Books: Reptiles and Amphibians is a neat book that has colouring images of various reptiles and amphibians and is right up my son’s ally for things to draw and/or colour.   It comes with small stickers that you can use as a reference as well.

 This book is actually my son’s.  He just grinned when I picked it up.  “Look mom!   It’s HalfWay!” (a toad of his).

Reason to Colour: No childish drawing that inspire research into a favourite topic or that simply enhances one’s learning about them.  My lad likes the realistic drawings and the colours that match colours in nature.

Second Book and Reason

Coloring Book Be Still

A chance to think on some words of God as you delight in coming up with just the right colours.  A perfect book for rainy Sunday afternoons when everyone is tired and just wanting to chill out.

This book is filled will flowers and birds and words from the Lord.   Not every page contains a verse, or birds, or flowers.   But much of it does.

Reason to Colour: This is my “let’s be pretty book” which is not my normal frame of mind, so it’s great for Sundays when I NEED to relax and prepare for the coming week.   It’s a girlie type book and out of my normal paradigm of thinking and it’s good to cultivate that part of me sometimes.  🙂

Third book and Reason

Animal Kingdom: Color Me, Draw Me

This book is the one that draws people in when they colour with me.  There is SO MUCH variety contained with the pages.     I’ve started and stopped with so many pictures as my mood will change with what I want to do.  Eventually I’ll get around back to those started.

The pages are thick enough to do pencil or marker.

Reason to colour: Whimsy can take you many different places, and sometimes following whimsy can leave you lost.  In this book, I don’t get lost and I can always come back again.  🙂

Fourth Book and Reason

Art Therapy Coloring Book Menagerie & More

This is actually one that my hubby picked out.
the pictures in it are mostly just animals, and mostly headshots with clean, clear lines.   No white on black or pictures inside of pictures.   It’s a basic interesting colouring.

I find that I start and finish pictures in this book more quickly.  I really enjoy the thick pages and clear images, and hubby is more likely to pick it up and join me in an afternoon of colouring as well.  Which is WAY COOL.  🙂

Reason to Colour:  Sharing a hobby with someone I love. The variety of images allows for different tastes in items to draw.

Fifth book and reason

 LIVE LOVED: AN ADULT COLORING BOOK

Admittedly this is my least favourite colouring book.  There are things I like about it, but I find I have to pay more attention to careful colouring with this book.  Many of the lines are quite thin.

What do I like about it?
Mmm… scripture verses that are quite varied.  Blank pages behind each picture means I can rip them out and display them if I think they are good enough for that.  🙂

Reason to Colour?
Encourages carefulness and attention to detail, which helps to focus on my mind when I have to do things like planning out a school schedule, or vacation plans.

So do you colour?
Do you have books that are different than mine?
Why do you like them?

Share with won’t you?   🙂

Picture Books to Introduce Artists

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My son and I are currently reviewing a program called ArtAchieve.   We are enjoying the program since it comes in different formats, a slide show or a video.  We are finding both formats quite useful.   If you want to give the program a look over they have sample lessons that you can try out.

Anyways, I had mentioned to my contact at Raincoast Books some of the things we were going to be doing, and she graciously sent me some art books to review.  (How cool is that eh!)

First up we looked at a book called “Mary Cassatt – extraordinary impressionist painter” by Barbara Herkert.   This book is around 30 pages long, filled with full colour illustrations throughout.

Lovely book.   We learned about her early life, her determination, her friendships, her stepping outside of what was conventional for ladies in her day.  She was an opinionated and stubborn lady who was determined to be artist, and she did what she wanted to do, no two ways about it.

BUT WOW…. have you ever looked at some of the work she did?    I found a website dedicated to the work of Mary Cassatt and all I can say is WOW.. she did excellent work.    I cannot say I love EVERYTHING that she did, but I like a lot of it.    For instance, check out this child in a straw hat.

http://www.marycassatt.org/Child-In-A-Straw-Hat.html

She drew a lot of people pictures, friends, family, people she saw at theatre and so forth.   Just an interesting lady and this book gives us a good glimpse into her early life.   The illustrator does a great job at bringing the story to life with his full colour art work.

Our next book was one on Beatrix Potter and Her Paint box, written by David McPhail. It’s a short small book, running around 40 pages.  

What a nice little book.  Seriously.  My lad enjoyed this book with me.   We even learned why the Peter Rabbit books were small “little books for little hands” was something that Beatrix insisted upon.   When we learned about the snake getting away from she could paint a picture of it, my lad was quite concerned that the snake got away to a safe place to live.

Like Mary Cassatt, Beatrix Potter did best painting things her own way.

Did you know that the Peter Rabbit books became a story because of a sick boy?   It was a “let me cheer you up when you are sick book” and at the urging of the boy’s mom, it was turned into a book which morphed into a whole series about the friends of Peter Rabbit.

I liked the images in the book as well, well crafted and made me think of Peter Rabbit and his friends.

Oh.. I have to tell you this part.   When we read about Beatrix’s pet mouse running through the paint my lad tried to get one of his house mice to run through some dye and leave mouse footy-prints on paper.  He had so much fun trying to convince the mouse to do so.. but MilkyWay would have NOTHING to do with it.    It was fun watching him try though.  🙂

 Raincoast books was the provider of these books for me.  Wanting only my honest review of them.  They were a delightful addition to our week.

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