Bison Paintings

 Banana Boy

 Pepper

 Sunshine

We got this fun idea from this blog.  I thought they were so cute, and the kids are always begging to do art. 

I did some sample bison and then the kids did theirs.  When they went to put their paintings together, I shared some of my bison with them.  BB's two front bison are his own.  BB decided to add a bison skull and a rock to his, as well.  He was initially very frustrated at his bison drawings, but once we got to the painting and gluing part, he took off.  I love how he cut one in half to make it walking into the scene.

Pepper's bison are all her own.  She hates drawing animals, but I think her little bison turned out really well.  Better than my childish stick calves!  Her lying-down bison is also really well done.

Sunshine's two HUGE bison are his own.  I like his sun and how he remembered to tuck the feet of the back bison behind the head of the front one.

Friday Art

We are studying world history this year.  Daisy and Pepper are doing Mystery of History and Banana Boy is doing Sonlight's Core 1.

Along with Core 1, I have added a craft/art package called Hands-On History for Core 1 from Handle on the Arts.  The first week's project was to do a cave painting.  The curriculum came with a printable art print of a cave painting with which you do a mini art-study.  We talked about the animals we saw in the painting and some of the elements the artist used when making the painting.

Then we got to make our own cave paintings!

Banana Boy and Pepper are here in the cave.  The wall is not very smooth, nor is it even. It slopes downward and has some big bumps. They brought along a hide to sit on and two torches so they could see.

Pepper's painting

Banana Boy's painting

One of the wonderful things about Mystery of History is how it ties Bible history in with world history so you get the whole picture.  We've been reading about Jubal and Tubal-Cain.  Their story illustrates that early man was not just a grunting caveman, but and intelligent being who lived in a civilization with the leisure time for music and the skills and wisdom for metal-work.

So while we study cave art, we don't by any means believe that all early people lived in caves.  Certainly, some of them did.  This project at least gave us an appreciation for how uncomfortable it is to draw in a cave in the dark!  Early man was a determined guy!

Friday Art

Catching up on some Friday Art.

This project was to color something in a surprising way. The girls really had fun with this one and it was actually HARD to choose the colors you weren't "supposed to."

This next project took us about 2 months. The girls began the paintings way back in September, I think, with a cool watercolor wash and a warm wash (not pictured) They had to dry, which put us all off track. The next step was to print leaves of the opposite temperature (warm on cool and cool on warm) onto the background.

By the time we were ready to print the leaves, there was snow on the ground. Luckily I had purchased some foam leaves in a bin one time. Four different leaves each in three sizes makes for a nice printing activity!  In the first two photographs, if you look carefully, you can see the foam leaves lying on the picture in the position the girls have planned out.  They are in the process of painting (or touching up) the first leaf.

Here is the finished product

At this point in the book, Daisy got annoyed with art and quit. So Pepper sponged this "cool" snowman and got to mix her paints, to boot.

The next exercise was to paint this "cool" tree. To be honest, I drew the tree (she wouldn't), but she colored it (after I demonstrated) and she painted it. When she was finished, it made her cry because her tree (which was supposed to resist the watercolor due to the crayon) had turned all blue and she hated it. For the record, Rose Bud thought it was awesome!

So, there you have it.  This fall's Friday Art!

Friday Art: Rainbows (and a family portrait)

We are still plugging along in our book, Using Color in Your Art. This week's assignment was to imagine what is at the end of the rainbow--in other words, what does the rainbow "do" where it hits the earth?

In the example, the child colored all the flowers at the end of the rainbow in rainbow colors. I chose to make the water the rainbow "touched" spread out in rainbow colors.

So did the girls. The other part of the assignment was to paint the sky in a wash and then dab it with a papertowel to remove some of the color and make clouds.

Here is Pepper's painting.

Banana Boy's grass turned all rainbowey.

Daisy's rainbow

And finally, the family portrait, drawn by Sunshine. Isn't this cute?! It's the first time he's drawn people and I love it! I'm the big one.

Friday Art

Today's lesson from Using Color in Your Art was to paint a still life of fruit. Here is the fruit.



Here is Daisy drawing, er, erasing her picture. She used pastels (Nupastels, to be exact) for her picture.



This is Pepper working on her fruit bowl using watercolors.




Sunshine used these handy-dandy Elmer's (as in glue) paintbrushes, which I didn't think I really liked, but in actuality, I now love! They were perfect for him. He put together a little blue with his yellow and made green and the bristles washed out perfectly when he was done. The paint is in the handle and he didn't go overboard with the squeezing out of the paint.

Friday Art

Our most recent Friday Art project in Using Color in Your Art was to make the color wheel and then build a picture around it.

We had to draw the circles using a compass and then use a protractor to divide the circles into 6 pie sections. If you haven't studied the color wheel, you'll notice that the three primary colors: red, blue and yellow alternate sections. Between them are the three secondary colors, green, orange and purple. And if you look closely, you'll see that each secondary color is between the two primary colors which mix together to make it.

Daisy and Pepper chose to make color wheel snowmen.




Banana Boy made a flower.



Sunshine just experimented with a little purple.

Friday Art

Today's lesson from Using Color in Your Art was to do a "wash" using watercolors. The project was to make an underwater scene. Here the girls are painting their fish and seaweed and below you can see their experiments in washes. We never did get around to a finished project. I brought down the lincoln logs to keep Sunshine busy and the girls immediately abandoned art for construction.

Friday Art

Daisy's MarkerPoint art

She thought this was so cool, especially since she's done cross-stitch on fabric. She worked most of the morning on it and I even caught her doing some math to figure out the placement of some "stitches."

edited to add: I wasn't very clear about the mechanics of this project. We printed graph paper off the computer (5 squares to the inch) and she made the design lightly in pencil. Then she traced over all the x's with markers.

Friday Art

We are back at art with the start of a new school year.  To keep things manageable, I'm only aiming to do it once a week on Fridays. 

 

Today's lesson was in pointilism and the artist was Georges Seurat.  Here are a few links:

Picture of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to color (it's just a black and white version of the painting--a little hard to color, in my mind)

Jigsaw puzzle of the painting to put together (fun for building familiarity with famous paintings)

Did you know this?  "The painting is featured in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Ferris' friend Cameron is shown locking eyes on the little girl in the center of the painting and being transfixed. The scene portrays Cameron observing a little girl up close whereupon he realizes that, though from a distance all seems on order, there is no shape or form to her face. " Wickipedia, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Here's an activity (the description of pointillism is better suited for older kids) called Dot to Dot Seurat using dot stickers.

Hmm, it wasn't really pointillism.  Read this.

Here are a few more activities (the color-mixing sounds fun!) and picture book suggestions.

 

We let Sunshine paint, too.

I think Daisy made the really great circle in the top right-hand corner of his paper, lest you be too impressed.  The rest is his own original creation though!

 

Oh, so what did we do for art?  The girls took some of our Lauri puzzles (remember those?) and traced shapes onto paper.  Lauri puzzles also make great stencils!  Then they painted with paint (red, blue and yellow) and Q-tips.

 

I'm not connected to my printer right now, but I'll get those scanned in for you to see.

 9/12/08  Here are the pictures I promised last week.  Pepper's is the fish, Daisy's is the butterflies:

And here is what they made after they finished the project.  They like to keep painting since they have the art materials out.  I love that Pepper made another dot picture, even tho it doesn't consist of mixed dots.  She did mix the paint to get green.  Daisy made a self-portrait, not with dots, but I love her frame!

A Color Puzzle

That was the title of last week's art lesson.  The idea was to blend the primary colors to make the secondary colors.  But leave it to me to look for the easy way out--we used highlighters to color the shapes (except for Banana Boy who used colored pencils) and we just used the appropriate color highlighter for the blended area (ie: instead of mixing pink and blue, we colored with the purple highlighter)  So the shapes are primary colors, except where they overlap to make the secondaries.  Cool, huh?

 

Pepper's

 

Daisy's

 

Banana Boy's  (and I must say, it is an experience to do color art actvities with a color-blind child!)  

 

Actually, I just noticed now, when proofing this, that he colored the overlap between the red triangle and the yellow square at the top of the picture green!

 

 

Peter Stuyvesant

One of the books we're reading, which I've mentioned before, is The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History by Jennifer Armstrong.  I have rather mixed feelings about it. 

 

I like it.  I like the drawings.  I like the stories it chooses to tell.  They are definitely multi-cultural, telling the stories of the Indians and the Jews and the Africans, etc.  I'm not far enough into it to see how fairly they represent Christians, if at all.  Seems like every group gets its day except for the Christians.

 

It is also a bit of a difficult read for the younger set.  I've found myself really having to explain what is going on in my own words to the girls.  Daisy "gets" more than Pepper does.  If it was just Pepper, a first grader, I don't know that I would choose this book.  

 

They've chosen an eclectic bunch of stories--some very well known, like the Pilgrims, Pocahontas, Paul Revere's Ride, Benjamin Franklin flying his kite--things I would consider the essentials for an early elementary American history survey.  But they've also included some lesser-known stories, which I like, such as People of the Longhouse, the city of St. Augustine, the Manhattan real estate deal, the planning of the capital, etc.

 

I think I'm beginning to contradict myself.  Anyway, I like it.

 

So today we read "A Manhattan Real Estate Deal" and "Keeping Watch, Keeping the Faith."  The first story was about the Dutch buying the island of Manhattan from the Indians.  We had a good discussion comparing it to someone coming to our house and offering Daisy $10 to buy her bedroom.  Daisy takes the $10 and the bedroom belongs to the newcomer.  Only, then RoseBud gets off the bus and finds a stranger living in her room!  She didn't agree to this deal, she got nothing from this deal and so she chooses to ignore the deal, sleeping in her bed as usual.  Of course, the newcomer is not happy that she refuses to vacate his new room and quarrels ensue (probably a few arrows and bullets exchanged).  Daisy meantime is happily living across the hall with Banana Boy and her $10.

 

"Keeping Watch, Keeping the Faith" was a story I knew little about.  Peter Stuyvesant, the new governor of New Netherlands (aka Manhattan Island) was all alarmed to find a boatload of Jews moving in.  He refused to grant them citizenship or the rights of citizens, including the right to stand watch at night. Instead, he "allowed" them to pay a Dutch citizen to take over their watch.  All fine and good if you had the money, but what if you were poor?  Asser Levy was one such poor man who could not afford to pay to have his watch covered.  He would joyfully stand the watch--he had lots of time!  But PS would not allow it.  Eventually, Levy persevered and just stood the watch anyway, gaining the right of citizenship for the Jews in New Netherlands.

 

The very fun part of this was that I also had at home a library book called, The Day Peter Stuyvesant Sailed into Town.  It went along perfectly with this story and was a charming rhyming picture book about cranky Peter Stuyvesant (who had a peg leg!) and how he whipped New Amsterdam into shape and made it a successful colony.  Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel  (author of Frog and Toad books--love those!)  The illustrations were funny--my kids love clever illustrations.  For example, on the last page, they show PS sleeping in his bed with his boot next to the bed.  (As Pepper said, "His ONE boot!")

 

 

In other recent school developments, we did art one day!

 

We are still in Secondary Colors and the project was to make a picture which radiated out from the center.  Here is what the girls came up with (mine just looked dumb.  I hate art)

Daisy's is on the left and Pepper's on the right.  And that's my toe at the very bottom of the picture...

 

Left to their own devices, the girls also come up with their own art projects.  Lately, they've been cutting up paper plates and decorating them.  Banana Boy got in on the activity, too.  His is the white one.

 

 

 

And this is Banana Boy's latest artistic endeavor.  I think it looks like a monkey, but he assures me it's a person.  It has a pet on a leash in its right hand and what I thought was a ball in the other.  But it's an Easter Egg basket.

 

Further Adventures of my Unschooler

The best way to motivate Pepper, I'm finding, is to assign something to Daisy.   Suddenly Pepper is all interested in the project and takes off on her own, doing way more than I would have asked of her or she would have done for me had I asked.

 

Daisy and I have been exploring colors in art.  We've moved on to the secondary colors and our first project was a symmetrical string painting.  The idea was to dip two strings in two different primary colors, lay them in a sheet of paper, fold the paper in half and pull the strings out.  The two primary colors would mix together, creating a secondary color.  And we could talk about symmetry as the halves were mirror images.

 

Of course, as soon as the paint came out, so did every kid in the house from Rosebud on down to Sunshine.  So everyone did the project.  Unfortunately, the red and the blue did NOT make a lovely shade of purple, but rather an ugly blackish color, so Daisy and Rose Bud will not get their paintings displayed here.

 

However, here are Pepper (yellow and blue make green) and Banana Boy's (yellow and red make orange) paintings:

 

Over the weekend, Pepper took it upon herself to do further work with secondaries after she found 3 primary paint pens in the paint drawer.  Here are her results (of which she was very proud!)

As I said, had I set before her the task of mixing and painting a picture using the secondary colors, it would have been like pulling teeth.  "I can't!  It's too hard.  I can't think of anything to paint!"  Left to her own devices, she did a beautiful job!  (That's an orange and a bunch of grapes near the top there)

 

 

Another Art Project

Daisy made a Hidden Tools Abstract painting.  Can you find all the tools?  There are 4, plus two screws.

 

We are reading about the Southwest Indians this week and learning about the Mid-Atlantic states.  Daisy began her Singapore Math 3A book today.

 

We got 9 new inches of snow, so Rose Bud had a snow day and hung out reading Garfield books.

Today: Art

Daisy and I are working through a fun art book Using Color in Your Art.  It begins with a lesson on the primary colors red, blue and yellow.  Our first project was a pattern picture using the primary colors.

 

Our second project was a picture in the style of Piet Mondrian  (click the link if you want a cool, free lesson on PM).  Daisy had fun with this and did a great job!