Art

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.

Illustration Workshop

April 25, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Raincoast Books sent me a great book to review called Illustration Workshop. This is a practical book filled with inspiration and exercises to delight those looking for some creative fun as well as educate those looking to broaden their skills as they look towards a career as an illustrator. If you want to create attention-grabbing work, this workshop will help you.

My Thoughts:

I’m going to tell you right up front… I really like this book. There is a firm appreciation for good teaching up front. I love the loads of exercises that the reader is walked through. The graphics and the step by step teaching, and the checklist at the end of lesson is simply marvellous. Great for the student who really wants to learn, and yet loose enough to attract those who just want to get better at something they love without the pressure to do it as a professional … learning but keeping it fun.

Now on to the nitty gritty.

What do you get?

The section illustrating like an illustrator walks you through the ideas of illustrating… from what illustrating is to how to combine concept with style, targeting your audience and more. Well written text that explains each thought simply yet thoroughly. Could lots more the said about each topic? Sure, but there is enough to get you started on your own journey of discovery.

Materials, bright and colourful section with some basic information given to help you determine what your needs are. Each type of implement with it’s pros and cons.

The next section walks us through the steps taken through each of the 36 assignments given. Given examples of how to complete each section so you end up with illustrations that you are happy with.

It is rather nice I think, that the author includes a section on how to do some of your drawings using computer software. She urges the illustrator to complete work by hand as it takes longer but gives you more control, helps you improve your ability to draw and helps you to be more thoughtful about your work. Digitizing your work means it is easier to play around with your colour palette and to make incremental changes more easily.

The Warm up section was just plain fun. Different ideas to get you thinking creatively from using scribbles to make a drawing, using hatch marks to create an image, using shapes to make a picture and more.

36 Assignments

The 36 assignments were created to take away the “what on earth do I draw” dilemma. This gives people an actual project to work on. Call them, if you will, 36 mini projects to give the budding professional illustrator confidence in approaching a paid project of their own. These assignments cover such topics as greeting cards, book covers, bottle packaging, and hankerchiefs. Interesting assignments to delight you the illustrator.

Each assignment follows a similar format:

The assignment page. This page includes with the requirements of the assignment clearly given.

The next steps include thoughts the illustrator might have on the assignment. All these steps help the illustrator come up with ideas to help them create the product needed.

Each of the following steps walks the illustrator through the necessary steps to complete their final product. Brainstorming through text and drawings, developing your concept, creating thumbnails, making rough sketches, and then revising your sketch til it’s about where you want it.

A lovely checklist is provided for each of the assignments, giving you a way to double check that you have completed each of the steps before you finalize your project.

The final step gives you a chance to have fun with your project, choosing your best writing/drawing medium, surface to use, colours needed and so forth. It’s where all your research and activity comes to a conclusion.

In conclusion

At the close of the book are a number of practice sheets where an illustrator can improve their skills drawing some specific targets like hands, bikes, people wearing a gorilla suit, and animals. A chance to practice lettering to demonstrate emotions like fear, energy, and playfulness. These pages allow people to play around with drawing trees, people, buildings and more. Improve skills and just keep drawing.

This well-laid out book gives the illustrator a chance to build for themselves a small portfolio that they can use to showcase their work. It allows the novice art student to experience what an illustrator needs to do in order to be successful and to improve their skills.

This well-laid out book gives the illustrator a chance to build for themselves a small portfolio that they can use to showcase their work. It allows the just for fun learner to experience what an illustrator needs to do in order to be… Share on X

An excellent book for novice and seasoned illustrator alike.

Illustration Workshop

Find your style, practice drawing skills, and build a stellar portfolio.
Mary Kate McDevitt
Chronicle Books
Art, Illustration, Workshop, Drawing
Softcover, 192 pages
Reviewed for Raincoast Books.
Where to find: Amazon Link.

My Favourite Art Books

April 18, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

It’s that time again eh? To share some of my favourite art books with you. It’s hard to pick I have to admit, but I think I’ve winnowed it down to my top few.

Get Into Art Places: Discover Great Art And Create Your Own!. This is a fantastic book that I wrote about here. It’s not very big at 32 pages but it’s chockful for art and ideas about how to try out the type of art on your own. I’ve used it with art classes and my students had a lot of fun with it.

At the back of the book a Project Checklist was provided, easily letting
me know what supplies I would need to complete each project.

Fantastic Planet: A Coloring Book of Amazing Places Real and Imagined

One of the reasons I chose this book is that not only do I enjoy colouring in these books, but the pictures in this book are taken from pictures of real places on our planet. So it would be really easy to add to almost any homeschool study using these colouring pages. Give your student something to do as you read about Japan, or learn about ocean life. Busy fingers mean listening brains. 🙂 You can learn more about this book here.

Draw Paint Print like the Great Artists

I can’t say this is a highly colourful book and wouldn’t grab my attention at first glance, but once you start looking through it and see the depth at which they explore the methods of different artists, I think you’ll be hooked. There are so many possibilities within this book. I think that YOU will love it to. It makes doing art with your children quite attainable.

Learn more here eh?

Zentangle: The inspiring and mindful drawing workbook with over 70 practice tiles

This is an absolutely fantastic book if you want to learn how to draw Zentangles. I used it for a co-op class and it was amazing to see the work the children did with it. They have done some AMAZING drawings, it is so very cool.

I wrote about this here.

Perhaps you’ll consider this when you are looking for art: Fine Art Adventures. Wouldn’t you just love to explore 18 different masterpieces with your children? And while you are exploring those art pieces, consider adding in Exploring Art Up Close and personal.

Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood

This is not a “let’s do art book”. This is a picture book about how art was used to change a whole neighbourhood, based on a true story.

My son, though he’s beyond the picture book stage, thought this was a very neat book. Wanting to know more led to impromptu research. 🙂 Learn more about it here. 🙂

Another that I have really like is Pop Art

It was so interesting learning more about this type of art. So much variety in it.

Visit my review here.

Oh and what others might I intrigue you with.

Do you remember Beasts from Bricks? Isn’t it fun to create with lego bricks?

Or Duct Tape Engineer?

It could just be that your art is more hands on like it is for my lad lately. Mini Terrariums are a lot of fun to build.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my walk through some of my favourite art books. Won’t you join in the fun of doing art with us?

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.

Need Something to Do?

April 6, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Every other week the Homeschool Review Crew puts together what we call a round up. A round up is a post centered around a single topic that bloggers can interpret however they choose. Sometimes I have material that I can use from the past so I can join in and other times I have NOTHING, and not enough time to come up with something worth while. Not all topics work eh? Once in a while a topic comes up like the one this week that just intrigue. The topic What Can We Do When It’s: too Hot, Cold or Raining? I thought it would be fun to share some of the hands-on things we do around here to keep ourselves busy.

How Birds Fly. Building a model incites questions and looking more.

Learning how the Da Vinci Clock works. This was just fascinating!

We do art! Sometimes it’s different than what we planned, but it’s all good you know?

We learn how to manipulate gears and wheels and make things. Like with the gears box.

We sometimes just pull out a random thought and learn things on youtube. Sometimes they are highly educational

And other times they are just fun.

My son has a big love for ants, and a lot of his free time is spent building habitats for them, feeding them, catching them and so forth. I’ve learned WAY more than I’ve wanted to about the inner workings of ants, but it’s great to see him so well engaged. These ants are in the process of making their first homes. Test tubes, cotton, water, honey and a straw ….it’s an ants life for sure! 🙂

Check out what others have to say about this topic by visiting the Homeschool Review Crew.

The history and fun of wooden spoon dolls

March 28, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Last week our six-week co-op classes started for the spring session. I have two children signed up for my class, one great helper and her wee little who joined us. We had SUCH fun.

Our first class I wanted to assess their skills so I chose a doll that could be simple or hard depending on their abilities (6-8 year olds can be all over the map you know). We would make wooden spoon dolls.

Part of my class is to give the children a VERY brief history into wooden spoons and the dolls that came from them. We talked about how wooden spoons came into being, and then how wooden spoons were a symbol of marriage. A fellow would give his gal a wooden spoon and she’d hang it on the wall. Sometimes they would be shaped like a key, or have a wooden heart on the end or just be a good wooden spoon. Something she could take into her marriage with her a vital part of her life. We talked about how a spoon could be passed down from mom to daughter and so forth. The children thought that was amazing.

Then we talked about how wooden spoons were easy to make if you had wood on hand, and how parents like to make their children happy (just like their own moms and dads do) and they would often use whatever they had on hand, and sometimes that would be an older wooden spoon they didn’t use any more. They were very popular in colonial days, being made of scraps of material mom would have left over.

Then we set out to make wooden spoon dolls. I was really clear with the children that they got to make all the decisions about what their dolls would look like. I’d help them if they needed it but they needed to decide on colours and design. We had one boy in our class who DIDN”T want a dress on his doll so we learned to make pants, and then later a cape. We had one girl who choose to make a elegant evening gown and then a simpler evening dress. I made a gramma doll and the children HOOTED. 🙂

Anyways, this was an amazingly simple craft to do with the children and we had so much fun.

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

My Vacation Drawing Book