Art At Home

We are very blessed to be able to take art classes each week that all of the children can participate in and are very affordable.  But, if you don't have an opportunity to take an art class, you can still do art in your homeschool, even if you have no artistic talent at all.

I have very little artistic talent.  I can't even draw a stick figure well, but there are many, many resources you can utilize to be able to teach art in your homeschool without having to spend a small fortune.  You can choose from online lessons, DVDs, or books.  You can even just use the internet.  Google an artist, take a look at some of their work, and create a project based on what you see.  *Use caution when using the internet looking for art, always look ahead of time without your children to ensure there won't be any subject matter that you do not want them to see.  Also use this caution when looking through art books(even children's art books), or for art studies.

While you do not have to buy the most expensive supplies available, do not buy the cheapest either.  I have discovered in the past with very cheap art supplies you get what you pay for.  Children will get frustrated if their supplies do not work like they should and then they may not want to create art.  It is good to keep a variety of supplies on hand, so that when the children want to make something, they can.  We try to always have paper, paint, glue, crayons, pastels, drawing pencils, colored pencils, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, markers, paper plates, and purchase specialty supplies as needed.

Last year when we were on break from art class, I had an opportunity to review an art DVD from See the Light.  You can read my review on it here.  One DVD lasted for 4 weeks worth of art classes and the children created some beautiful art work based on the Bible story of Moses.

One of my favorite places to buy art books is from Usborne.  They have a great variety of drawing books, arts and crafts books, and books on artists.  Their books are fantastic!  The drawing books show children step by step how to draw something in very easy to digest chunks.  When Nick was little, he learned how to draw a variety of different things knights and castles, animals, sea creatures, all kinds of different things using these drawing books.  You can see a couple of his drawings here that he drew back in 2008.

Today, I pulled one of our art books off of the shelf.  Last month in art class we learned about Picasso, and this month Matisse.  I had intended to take some time to talk about Picasso last month, but we were so busy I forgot!  And I still wanted to talk about Matisse with the children.  Even though we learned about their styles of art in art class, I like to give the children background information on the artists, and let them look at some of their work.  So today we had an opportunity to do that for Picasso and Matisse.

I really like this book because it has features several different famous artists, gives some background on them, shows one of their works of art, and then gives step by step instructions on creating a project based on the artists work.  The children have been listening during art class because as soon as I started talking about Picasso, Anthony said, "Picasso liked to work with lines and shapes like triangles and squares."

page about Picasso and picture of one of his works

project page for children to recreate

Lily (4)

Anthony (8)

Christian (6)

We spent about an hour including clean up on this project today.  They learned something and had a lot of fun!  And I didn't have to buy anything special, just used supplies that we had lying around the house.