I would be very happy if anyone involved in Home Schooling could make use of the tuition on this website. Please get in touch if I can help further.
Through this website I have been privileged to come into contact with many people and groups throughout the world. Here for your interest, is one such group, extending our insight into various approaches to art teaching… Julie
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We are a group of home school students meeting for drawing and painting classes in Littleton, Colorado. We meet three times each month and our classes are two hours long. We take a break after one hour and have a snack. Our class is broken into two groups based on age. We have a teacher for each group. We begin each class with a prayer and devotion that is tied to the lesson we are teaching that day. For example, when we learned about perspective we talked about what a world view is and what a Christian world view looks like compared to other world views.
The younger students are learning about elements of design such as line, shape, color, texture, and value. They have been using activities from a book called “How to Teach Art to Children”, published by Evan-Moor. A few of the activities they have worked on include wonderful line quilts and pin wheels using primary colors that look like secondary colors when they spin. They created interesting textures by painting with forks, combs, and splayed paint brushes. They also placed construction paper over raised, uneven surfaces, and colored with markers across the top side of the paper.
The older students are studying still life composition and learning about notans (balancing light and dark areas), and balancing shape and color. For one of our lessons we made a Golden Rectangle on tracing paper and drew diagonal lines from corner to corner. We put a dot in the middle of each line between the corners of our rectangle and the intersecting lines so we had four dots in all (the eyes of the Golden Rectangle). We used these to place over photos of famous still life paintings to see how the objects lined up within the rectangle’s eyes. We also learned how to draw Fibonacci spirals which was a lot of fun. We looked at pictures of nautilus shells, sunflowers and pine cones to see how this ratio occurs in nature. Last month we studied linear and atmospheric perspective in drawing and painting. We used watercolor glazing technique to paint a picture of the Smoky Mountains. A mountain range that borders Tennessee and North Carolina in the southeastern U. S.
Here are some pictures of our busy students:
Teacher, Laraine kindly shared an visual exercise which can be viewed on the Post on Perspective.
2010 update: Laraine’s co-teacher, Beth Cooper, sent these wonderful photos of the group with paintings of sunflowers after studying Van Gogh. This was a project from a book “Dynamic Art Projects for Children” by Denise M. Logan. The project involved using chalk pastels on black Canson paper over a line drawing in Elmers gel glue.
Here are Adam and Lela working on their project…
and below, Peter (studying colour mixing) and Mari applying chalk pastels…
I have to agree with Beth – yes I think you did end up with some masterpieces! Congratulations to all!
Many thanks for sharing your projects with us and happy “arting” Littleton group! Julie
For further information, visit their website http://homeschoolart.org
