Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review, nor was I compensated in any other way.
I live in a family of artists, literally. My husband does graphic art and comics for a living, and our older boys are following closely in his footsteps by doing illustrations for some new stories we’re working on. The younger set also want to begin learning all about art, so this review from Artistic Pursuits Inc. was well received. Because I’m not much of a “traditional” artist (I knit and crochet, of course, but that’s not so helpful in something like this), I delegated the teaching of Art for Children, Building a Visual Vocabulary to Ballet Boy (16). He and Grasshopper (7) spent several days working on art class together.
Art for Children, Building a Visual Vocabulary is part of an 8-book set, and each book has 18 lessons. The entire course is designed to take four years, giving your student a complete elementary-level art history education. Each book comes with a DVD and a Blu-Ray with video lessons to go along with the text lessons of the book. We don’t have a player for either of those, so my kids used the book alone and didn’t have any trouble with it (but again – artists).
The book has a focus of building an understanding of the elements of art, rather than just looking at pictures. Students are given lessons in landscapes, still life, animals, figures, and portraits. Rather than going through in order, we ended up selecting lessons based on the supplies we had on hand. (Yes, they’re artists, but we work mostly with pencil and/or pen and ink in our family.) This meant that the kids dove in to the still life lessons.
From Ballet Boy:
To start off the still life lesson, they provide examples of images that capture the essence of what still life is supposed to do, which is to capture your imagination and fascinate you with everyday items. It casts normal household things in a new light that draws you in, holding your interest. For example, they show a van Gogh painting of a table covered with various sized, colored, and shaped dishes. They explain to you something that you don’t even notice that you’re noticing. That is the focal point, the thing the artist wants you to see. In this case, he wanted you to notice a chipped dish, and so all of the dishes on the table are arranged in such a way as to draw you into the painting. All of them are angled the exact way to catch the light just right to make it so that you focus on exactly what he wants you to, like a magician. The art of still life is not, therefore, in drawing what you see, but it is in capturing the attention of the viewer and making them see it through your eyes and feel it the exact way you want them to.
The way I taught this to my little brother was, as I was going over the information, he was really confused. I had to make him learn to take what he was looking at tell his own story through the items. I had to demonstrate to him how to make the art “make itself” – how he could feel something when he was drawing and let the drawing show him where he should draw the next line. You can never fully understand still life until you know how to put feeling into your lines. To do this, I had him draw a triangle. Then I made him draw another one. Then I had him throw in a square for good measure. As he saw what was happening, I could see his eyes light up. What was happening was a mosaic of shapes, all with that feeling in them – the feeling of confidence in what you were doing. Knowing where the next line needed to be. He filled a page, every square inch, with shapes and shadings. Then I made him look at what he’d drawn very carefully, for at least five minutes. When he was able to see the outline of a horse hidden away in those lines, I drew a line right down the middle of his page and on one side (his choice) I drew a tiny circle and colored it yellow. I said, “Everything on the yellow side is in the light. The other side is in the dark. Color it black.” He did, and he ended up with a very stylized, elegant horse drawn in a cubist style.
Since then, he’s been doing cubist drawings of everything, so I figured we’d take a stab at putting that feeling into another style of art. He and I worked together to create this still life of a NERF gun. He truly has begun pursuing the artist in himself!
Other members of the Homeschool Review Crew have been working with a variety of books from Artistic Pursuits Inc. and reviewing them this week. Click through to learn more!