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.

Pharaoh Masks

Zak's Mask

We are just about half way through our mini books of the Kings and Queens of Egypt and we took a break from the 2-D projects we have been working on to do these fun 3-D masks of an Egyptian Pharaoh.

T.J.'s Mask

While painting with our acrylic paints, we listened to Howard Carter describe what it was like to open King Tut's tomb from the old time radio show You Are There!

Max's Mask

And we listened to Jim Weiss tell us the story of The Mummy's Tomb from his album entitled Egyptian Treasures: Mummies and Myths

It was a nice change of pace to do something different.

Latin Can Be Artistic

Detail of T.J.'s Latin painting

We had allot of fun in our Latin lesson this week. Our vocabulary to master is father (pater), mother (mater), Sister (soror), and brother (frater). To begin the lesson I used these Montessori cards which I made at the beginning of the year. We did a few activities with them until I could see the boys were getting the vocabulary down. Then I pulled out some large drawing paper (11x17) and we drew and then painted a picture with those four elements in it....and allot more creativity too.

T.J.'s black and white sketch.

The first thing we did was to draw a pencil sketch of the father, mother, brother and sister and then put them into a setting. It was really cool to see these guys just fill up their paper with ideas. It was as if there wasn't room enough on this rather large space for them to get all the ideas out. They quickly drew the four required elements and then 'went to town' drawing houses, snakes, fish and stair cases etc. What a delight to see them drawing with such gusto.

Zak's black and white sketch

The spiral-like shapes on Zak's drawing are snakes. We had a snake adventure with some neighbor boys this week which I am assuming inspired the images of snakes in his and Max's pictures. The neighbor boys saw a tree snake going up a tree just outside of our house which is in the neighbor’s yard. They tried to shoot the snake out of the tree with a few shots from a gun which was loud enough to give all of us a good shock. Turns out the snake had bit a baby bird in a nest up in the tree and the neighbor boys had rescued the now half dead baby. It had a bite mark on it and some blood. The boys spent the afternoon hunting for the snake which got away in our yard, and my dh spent part of that time educating the boys on snake safety.

Max's black and white drawing.

After they did a pencil sketch they drew over the top of the pencil with black marker pens. Then we added some color with paint. We used water color and I think looking back I would not have them use the black marking pens since the black bled too much into the water colors and made the colors muddy. Lesson learned for next time.

T.J.'s finished painting.

Zak's finished painting

Max's finished painting.