ARTistic Pursuits

I've mentioned a couple times that we've been doing more ART than usual lately.  We got the opportunity to try out the ARTistic Pursuits homeschool art curriculum.  They have several different books available, and we got Early Elementary K-3 Book One, An Introduction to the Visual Arts.  Honestly, I think the title is a bit misleading.  My reviewers were in grades 4, 7, and 8, and they were plenty challenged by the materials.  The recommended age is 5 and up, and my 10, 12, and 14 year olds really got a lot out of it.

Book One, which sells for $47.95, is divided into three parts:  What Artists Do, What Artists See, and Where We Find Art.  Since I knew we couldn't finish all 36 lessons in our 6 week review period, I made sure to pull from all 3 sections.

In What Artists Do we learned that artists Compose and Imagine.

I particularly appreciated the instructions for how to use a paintbrush correctly.  Hopefully, I won't have to shriek, "Gentle!" when I see the kids painting any more.

The lessons are structured with a reading, a work of art to look at with questions to answer about it (these help the students really observe a piece, as opposed to just glancing at it), and then a project.

The watercolor crayons quickly became a favorite media.

When blended with a wet paintbrush, they produce lovely results.

We spent several happy sessions, listening to audio drama and doing art.

This piece is one of Eli's, and it depicts the Radiator Springs Racers at Disney's California Adventure.

In What Artists See, we took a look at Shapes.

One of the projects involved cutting shapes from construction paper to create a picture.

In Where We Find Art, I cheated a little bit.  I was so excited to find a Greek Pottery project that we did that one first.

We haven't done clay work before, so this was a very tactile new learning experience.

We made pinch pots!

Using a little water to smooth the sides...

...made for some slimy hands!

It was hard to wait a couple days for the pots to dry and harden sufficiently before the next step.

We used a little water to help the black watercolor crayon glide smoothly on.

We all fell in love with the watercolor crayons.

I never would have tried them if they hadn't been on the materials list!  I didn't know what we were missing out on!

Brianna even made a lid for her pinch pot.

Jack's pinch pot has fierce warriors on it.

Where We Find Art was my favorite section.

The reading part for Art In Caves was fascinating, and our cave drawings were fun to make.

Working with the soft pastels was a little bit messy, but interesting.

You can see the influence of the Brother Bear movie in this piece.  The reddish orange is a hand print.

In Art Underground, we learned about Near Eastern Pottery.

It was back to working with clay, making figures.

We used cardboard tubes as the base for our figures.

Unfortunately, some of the "details" of Jack's figure fell off as it dried.  For me, this served to illustrate how amazing it is that some of these ancient relics have survived so many years.

ARTistic Pursuits has materials lists for each of their books, and I was able to order all my supplies easily online.

I ended up using a dedicated Thirty One bag just for our art review materials.  I liked being able to keep everything together, ready for our next lesson.

And I loved the new supplies and concepts that we were introduced to through this homeschool art curriculum.

Totally on her own, Brianna decided to make try creating some blended colors with the watercolor crayons.  This is actually a "key" that shows the various "recipes" she came up with, and the result of each.

You can see how she used some of those blends in her frame here.

ARTistic Pursuits has books for all ages, from Preschool through High School, and includes a variety of media, even their new Sculpture Technique books!

We have love, love, loved this review!  Even though we've only worked through 7 or 8 lessons so far, I feel we've learned new things.  This program is a great fit for our family, and I look forward to completing the rest of the lessons in the book.  If our curriculum for next year did not already include an art program, you can be sure I would be adding another ARTistic Pursuits book to my shopping list.

You can follow ARTistic Pursuits on Facebook, and you can read what other Crew families had to say about this and other books from ARTistic Pursuits by clicking the box below.

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ARTistic Pursuits

ARTistic Pursuits was one of our all time favorite reviews last year, and we were so excited to be chosen to review another book this year!  This time, it's Early Elementary K-3 Book 2 - Stories of Artists and their Art.

We started off learning about Cimabue, and went outside for our inspiration for these pieces.  Jack's is a flower in a flowerpot, in honor of the birthday flowers Paul planted for me recently in our front yard, and on our porch.

Eli's painting was the houses at the end of the street, which he chose to give a modern twist to, by painting them in unexpected colors.

Next, we learned about Limbourg, and what a Book of Hours was from the 1400s.  This was timely for us, as we're in the Middle Ages right now in our history program.  Our project was "from sketch to watercolor."  Eli depicted a plane flying against a background of fireworks exploding.

Jack chose to do a farm scene.

Like last year's book, we were introduced to entirely new mediums in this course!  Here we have freshly smoothed spackle on hardboard, neither of which we've played with before.  The spackle goes on pink, but dries white, which we though was cool.

I recently bought liquid watercolors, so we used those, instead of pan watercolors for this project.  They're becoming another favorite.

We went outside the box even further with this assignment, choosing to combine our art project with our current science theme:  space!

 Eli's piece shows a sunrise from the surface of another planet.

Jack's piece is the surface of the moon, complete with craters.  I think the texture of the spackle really adds something to the final effect.

Working with watercolors again, we learned more about Cimabue, and about the use of gold leaf in altarpieces.  Brainstorming, we came up with scenes that would include gold.  Then we painted everything but the gold part.

As I was tossing out ideas, I suggested the boys could do a golden goblet.  When neither of them decided to use that idea, I painted a background for it myself.  What I learned from this is that I should have painted the whole background, instead of leaving the area to be "gold leafed" white.  It's hard to get your gold leaf the exact size of your blank space.

Before and after of the boys' gold leaf paintings.

The book taught us that we can also "texture" the gold paper to give it more visual interest.  Eli's making dots on his sun with the back of a paintbrush.

Project 3 was about Giotto and scratch art!  First we colored a page of watercolor paper using a light colored oil pastel.  Then, we went over it thick and heavy with a darker color.  (I ended up buying a box of black pastels so we could do more of these later.)

Eli was very happy with the way his scratched airplanes came out!  I like the sky effect the dark blue gives.

Jack made a castle!

We read about Jean Arnolfini and did more work with oil pastels.  This is Jack's.

And this piece, in honor of the cartoon books we picked up on a recent library trip, is Eli's.

In another lesson, we learned a technique that will be very useful:  painting with watercolors without them bleeding into one another!  You see a lot of bleeding of colors in the works at the beginning of this post, so I'm really happy that we learned this.  The eggs were mine.  The boys liked having me paint with them, and I have to admit, despite having very little art background, I enjoyed working on some of the projects with them.

The taco is Eli's.

And the flower, trees, and Easter basket is Jack's.

You can tell we really learned a great deal from this book!  I like how easy ARTistic Pursuits is to teach.  There's a materials list in the front of the book (also available on their website), and each lesson has a quick read aloud and then instruction.  It's a good combination of art history and art technique in small bits.

Although the suggested age range for this book is grades K-3, my boys, grade 5 and 8 got a lot out of it, and I learned a few new things, myself!  The print above is Eli's.

We'd never done printmaking before, and it was really interesting, spawning a discussion about how the printing press changed the world.

Early Elementary Art, book 2 sells for $47.95.  With 36 lessons, this would be a full year of homeschool art lessons for a family that does art once a week.  We tend to do art more than once a week, but we still have plenty of great projects left to try out.

You can connect with ARTistic Pursuits on Facebook.  To read about what other Crew families have to say about this book and the other books and levels of ARTistic Pursuits, please click the box below.

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