Painting 101 Continued

 This week we are wrapping up our painting skills lessons from I Can Do All Things art curriculum which we began last year. I say painting skills because in this art lesson being creative was not our objective. The objectives were to learn the skills of painting such as mixing paints, wielding a brush, mixing colors, and  planning what to paint first then second etc. I think this is an important first step to being able to create. They are a few of the foundations that one must master so that when the artist has a worthy idea it can be expressed as the artist wishes.

Each time we sat down to paint inevitably Zak would ask, "How do you make Green?" after three or four lessons it changed to "How do you make brown?" Now he can make any kind of green or brown that he wants. 

Learning to wield a brush os not easy, it is different than the markers the boys are used to in that it is flexible and must be eloped with paint often. The boys became better at not scrubbing the brush, when loading it and when painting. They also learned how to move the brush to stay inside the lines. Some better and more patient than others but all in all they all improved in this. They also learned how to use the brush from the tip and how to move it t make different kinds of strokes.

They were always given red, blue, yellow, white and black to begin the paintings form there, they mixed what they needed.

They learned how to mix secondary colors and see how they relate to each other. 

They learned how to use tiny bits of blue added to white to make a sky blue but not too blue.

Because we are painting a drawing already drawn for us the student can focus on the painting not the drawing part of making a picture beautiful. Each lesson picture once painted looks great so the student can feel good about his or her efforts.

The prescribed drawings were often looked at by the boys and they would exclaim, "I could never paint that!" but by breaking it down and learning maybe a new skill or two they were bale to do it. Thus the title of the curriculum is true, the body learned they CAN do ALL things.

During the lesson above with the clown the boys realized that planning what things to paint first or second or third would help them paint the picture better. So on this lesson we talked through why the eyes, eye brows, lips and all the details came out messy, and they learned that they must paint from the background to the foreground so the paint can overlap and leave clean lines.

More challenges with shadows and how to make a darker green to illustrate that.

Some lessons just did not turn out all that well. There is always next time.

More practice making colors with the parrot lessons and adding white to make the brighter.

Max did this painting and because he had learned how to plan what to paint first his flowers came out beautifully!

I had one rule that we always followed and that was that they were never allowed to use the paint straight from the tube, they must mix at least two colors together. 

I hope you enjoyed seeing their good work!

Thanks for stopping in.