Living with Artists

I live in a house full of artists. Unfortunately I can't really put myself in the same category as hubby and Grace. Grace draws constantly - hours upon hours. Do you have someone in your family like that. They have a passion that just exudes from every pore of their body. Well that would be my husband and my daughter. I wish I had something that I was that passionate about. I have hobbies, things that I like spending my time doing, but it is no way the same as a true passion. Grace loves creating characters - especially bending the line between animals and humans. Also fan art is a biggy for her.

Today we sat at the table for almost three hours while she created and completed the above drawing. She has aspirations of continuing this theme into two more. They are characters from an online anime game.

Moving on to Scott, my husband . He is a man of many talents but his preference is using found objects, wood, etc. and turning them into art. Sculpture and pen and ink are his favorites to work with. Painting is not a favorite, but every once in awhile I can talk him into creating something for the house. This chicken painting was a Christmas gift from him to me a few years ago. The inspiration actually came from a painting I saw, fell in love with and asked him to reproduce it for me.

Scott currently has his art in four different art galleries. The above photo represents some a sculpture and pieces he is toying with to create a new piece.

Scott is known for his rocks. He collects river rocks and uses pen and ink to create wonderful little pieces of art. Somethings he creates jewelry this way and sometimes just something decorative to sit on a desk ,etc. To create these rocks it takes a steady hand and be able to draw very intricate designs. This of course as led into his new passion which is apprenticing to becoming a tattoo artist. Many people over the years have told him because of his intricate work he could easily work at becoming a tattoo artist. He will tell you there is nothing easy about it. Lots of time, practice, etc. goes into the apprenticing. 

This was another Christmas present from Scott to me this past year. It is hard to see the intricate designs in a photo. It is all 3-D. I love Owls and he used that theme to create a small piece that currently hangs in my dining room.

This is my contribution to the art in the house. I art journal. Today for the girls art journaling group we were to create or journal about fantasy worlds. I decided to do a page about Wonderland. Grace woke up sick so the group was canceled for today. Maybe next week.

I linked up with Virtual Refrigerator. 

Art Day Tuesday

Continuing with our current tradition, Tuesday is art day. Today was full of all kinds of creative and productive work. Even though it was art day we still read a chapter from our read aloud, A Peep Behind the Scenes, and from our devotional. Next we started on all sorts of things to ignite some sparks in Grace's art adventures.

In our Graphic Arts study Grace is in the process of putting together the layout for an Anime/Manage magazine. The above photo is the drawing that will be on her cover. She also put together a page about the current anime book she is reading with drawings and some cosplay photos of the characters.

Another Graphic Arts project is the ongoing project of creating bookmarks and note cards to be sold at an arts festival in May.

I found this book at the library yesterday and have included it with our art days. So You Want to be a Comic Book Artist is written for kids about the obvious, becoming a comic book artist. In the first chapter Grace learned some general things about the art of comics, what some of the actual terms mean (panel, gutter, balloon), and it highlighted the creator of the Ninja Turtles and how he got started in the business. She actually enjoyed reading this book so far, which is saying a lot of Grace.

Other Items of Interest From Today

We read over, studied and discussed two poems in a review we are doing on The Art of Poetry. We also read some more from When I Grow Up I Want to be an Artist and learned about wages that are earned by different types of artists in different cities around the United States. Grace created a pencil drawing of a landscape with texture for our Artistic Pursuits review (photos will be included with review next week). She also read a couple of pages from God's World News about finding the bones of Richard III and the pollution in China. Later this afternoon we will travel to co-op to attend more fine arts classes. In Art History Scott is actually teaching the class and he has put together a slide show presentation of some contemporary artists that are creating art in interesting ways. Grace is excited that in drama today she will finally get up on stage to practice her lines and big song. She will also be attending choir practice before us heading back home for the evening. Today was a wonderful morning of creating and learning in the craft she hopes to make a career as she matures.

I just linked up with the homeschool village. Go check out what other families are up to on their homeschooling adventures.

More Thinking Out of the Box for Schooling

Yesterday was our day of art in school. The afternoon classes at the cooperative consisted of Drama (practicing for Aladdin), Choir, and Art History. In the morning before cooperative I set up a (what I hope) interesting morning of art that also kind of trickled into today. Here is some of the things we did:

Read and studied two poems from The Art of Poetry. This is a TOS Review Crew item we are reviewing and the review post will be up in March. We did read a chapter in our read aloud from A Peep Behind the Scenes. We keep hoping this one will stop being such a depressing book, but so far the hits just keep coming. Devotions were also taken care of through the Who Am I series from Apologia. Once we finished these three items we jumped into our art stuff.

Grace did some reading and drawing from her two books Artistic Pursuits (another TOS Review Crew product) and Keys to Drawing. The Keys to Drawing had her draw something mechanical and only concentrate two areas of the object to draw intricately then just contour for the remainder of the shape. Artistic Pursuits has us working on texture which is tough for Grace. I keep challenging her more and more with her drawing to help stretch her talent.

We read about two artists from the I Want to Be An Artist e-book. The first was a sketch artist that worked or a newspaper by day and illustrated children's books by night and weekend. The other artist was a graphic designer. I decided to take the graphic designer aspect and kind of run with it. So I found a mini unit study online about graphic arts design. We discussed what a graphic artist is and what kind of mediums they would work in. Today we took that a step further and did two activities from the unit study that can be found here at Easy Fun School.

1. "Look at some food products in a store. What's printed on the packaging? What color is most dominant on the packaging? Sharpen your graphic designer's eye? What color or typefaces are pleasing"?
2. "Visit your local grocery store or other marketplace and make a list of five product designs that you like and five that you don't like. What do you or don't you like about them"?

Tomorrow will we work on the next step which is creating our own package for a real product based on what we learned from the packaging we saw today in the store.

We also visited the big library today and found some books about lettering, calligraphy, and drawing manga digitally. I also put many books on hold about graphic art that I hope to put to good use during this unit study. Of course the minute we go home Grace retreated to her room to try out the new Drawing Manga Digitally book. 

Yesterday we also discussed starting back with her mini business of making note cards and bookmarks to sell at art festivals. We searched around on Amazon and found what she needed to make this happen and it should all arrive tomorrow. Below you will see what we ordered:

I hope to start a series of posts in the next few days about Teaching School Outside of the Box. Some of the topics I will be covering are: health, fitness, current events, history, science, life skills, art, project based learning, cooperatives, service and volunteering, and Bible and devotions. I by no means think I am an expert, but I do find that as years go by Grace learns and I teach out of the normal realm of what most people would view as education. Each child is different and each child needs a different path. This just happens to be our path.

Tailoring Your Lessons to Suit Your Child's Strengths and Passions

Most of my long time readers know that Grace is crazy about drawing. It is how she spend most if not all of her free time. Grace wants to be an artist when she grows up. At this point she doesn't really know what that will look like, maybe graphic arts, or illustrating or just selling her own stuff. I have talked many times before about Grace's aversion to all things academic. We have fought this since 2nd grade. I even asked her a question yesterday to ponder, "What would you study if left to your own devices?". If you could pick anything to study and run with it what would it be. She gave me a blank stare and said "nothing". She said she was fine with me assigning her things and just doing them for the sake of getting through it. To me that just seems like such a sad way of making your way through the educational years. I had already decided with her passion for art that one day a week we would only "do" art. Today was that day. We had a couple of hours free this morning before going to a friend's house this afternoon for some fellowship and food. In the above picture is a few of the items we are using for our art day. Drawing with Children and Keys to Drawing are two books I am using in combination with a review for Creek Edge Press that will be posting later this month. Also in the pile is Artistic Pursuits that I am reviewing for the TOS Review Crew and that will post in March. 

Next I came across some very interesting e-books available through School House Teachers for free if you purchase a subscription. Of course the one above simply screamed at me, "Hey look at me". Some of the materials in the e-book are too young for our needs but the artist segments about true life artists and how they came to this career are really great reads for someone like Grace. 

Here are a few samples of some of the sketches she has done with the above books. She gets very frustrated with realistic drawing. She has spent so many years in the realm of anime, manga, and cartooning that we are trying to spread her wings and challenge her in other areas of drawing. Even though we use a couple of the above products more that once a week, I will definitely continue to schedule a few hours of art each week at home to help fuel her passion. Of course this doesn't even include her anime club she attends once a month, a mixed media class and an art history class once a week.

Art Class From See The Light

A couple of weeks ago I received in the mail for free the Art Class DVD from http://www.seethelightshine.com/. The first dvd is compiled of four lessons : Tools of the Trade, It All Starts With a Line, Contours and Composition, Draw What You See, and a Bonus Chalk-It-Easy Chalk Art Lesson. Every night this week my husband sat down with Grace and watched the lesson. Each lesson is short and easy to understand. Both Grace and hubby thought the master artist was a great artist and was easy to understand in her teaching. They were also appreciative of the fact that God's message was woven throughout all the lessons. The only problem for us is that Grace is already somewhat of an accomplished artist and needs more intense instruction. There are 9 dvds in the package for 99.00 or you can purchase each dvd individually for 14.99. In our opinion this program is for a beginning artist. I do understand that the company is working on a volume 2 which may meet our needs more. Overall we do like the product. The website is very nice also. Please take a visit to http://www.seethelightshine.com/ for more information.