Art and Artists

We're having another go at learning about art, artists, and drawing. I found a set of lesson plans that go with Drawing with Children, and they have made my life so much easier! I love the ideas in that book, but just could not figure out how to translate them into doing stuff with Monkey. Those lesson plans are wonderful. We're actually making (slow) progress now. And I'm OK with slow: it's so much better than none. One of the first things the lessons plans wanted us to do was make a notebook for our Great Artists Studies. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this until I saw this idea.



A "smashbook," where order is not so much a problem. One of the blogs I looked at said they'd created a table of contents by numbering the pages- but leaving the first 3 or 4 blank. I like that. Stuff goes in. Learning goes in, and gets remembered because we come back to the book from time to time. So we got those little composition books, and we're going to do it. A little at a time. In Baby Steps. Because small things add up, and it doesn't have to be a huge thing on any given day. It can wax and wane. We can do a whole bunch this week because making a collage to decorate the cover is fun, and then wane as we look at other things, but wax again when we find an interesting artist. And that's OK. Because in several months or even years, when it's done and the book is filled it will be much more than nothing. Which is what we're presently doing. Here are some ideas for what to put inside a Great Artists book.

I made this graphic to go on the cover of mine; Monkey just wrote on the lines on the front of the composition book. When they're done I'll come back and add pictures. But you can  have this "teaser" for now. And if you like it, you can use it on your Great Artists notebook. Drop me a line if you do - I'd love to see pictures of your finished product!

There. The cover is finished. Here are some pictures of mine. Monkey put his name on his, so you'll have to imagine the cuteness. We looked through Usborne's Introduction to Art and picked interesting pictures, which I looked up online and printed out. Then we glued them on our decorated notebooks. And, because our printer ink is very water soluble runs if you look cross-eyed at it, I covered them with contact paper. This will also make the covers generally tougher, which is a plus for a book I'm hoping will be sticking around for a while.

Front cover.

Back cover.

Front cover detail