Satori Smiles

This project is from Artistic Pursuits – The Way They See It book, which is their Pre-K book. I’m going to try and finish it this month so we can move on to their other three books for K-3.   For this project, we took visual notes on trees we observed in nature. So we headed out of our house to find the right tree.

We only have Lodgepole pines and Aspens to choose from, and I happen to think the lodgepoles are ugly, so we headed out to an Aspen grove.

First we did some bark rubbings.

I did not plan on participating, simply photo-documenting the experience.

Then some leaf rubbings. We used Prismacolor Art Stix for the rubbings, which are perfect for large areas of color.

We used Derwent watercolor pencils for the actual drawing. I love these pencils!

We found a natural bench to sit on and sketch the trees around us.

Here’s Satori’s picture, she couldn’t resist drawing herself in the picture.

And I couldn’t resist quickly joining in on drawing a tree at the last moment.

Nor could I resist taking one more picture of our little tree-hugger!

This weekend also marked our very first foray into our new art enrichment program, Meet the Masters! Satori and David had been coloring on the living room floor, so I snuck a laptop in front of them and started playing the lesson. This program is online, so we watched both the Preview and van Gogh Unit lessons. This viewing was Step 1, and we loved the lesson and enjoyed listening to “Starry, Starry Night” by Don McLean. (music and video shown at end of this post)

Step 2 of our van Gogh lesson explored texture and had a few worksheets in the Downloadable Art Packet for Satori to practice drawing texture.

Step 3 is the Create a Masterpiece Art Activity! We used van Gogh’s technique of using little line dabs to make texture, and made our own starry night.  We used black construction paper (actually sulphite) and used oil pastels. The oil pastels really stood out upon the black paper.

The whole family made their own artwork, and we had a print of Starry Night propped up in front of us. (This is our new Art Appreciation binder I made a few days ago).

Here’s Satori’s Starry Night masterpiece!

We used the directions for Track A, Year 1 ages 5-7. There are two other levels you can use if you have older children, so you can get a bit more sophisticated. For Track A, there are age levels of 5-7, 8-9, and 10-adult.

Satori turned around and made another picture, she wanted to draw birds flying on a landscape.

It actually reminded me of Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Wheatfield with Crows”, although I don’t think Satori ever saw it. Now I have it up as a desktop wallpaper on the kitchen computer. We have various van Gogh painting as wallpaper on all our computers now.

Vincent’s story was very sad and tragic, but we loved learning about his life and his passions and sorrows.

Lyrics and explanation found here. An alternative YouTube video without the depressing text at the end is found here.

We are now seeing van Gogh’s paintings everywhere! Now that we studied him in just this initial lesson, we can’t miss his unmistakable art techniques, colors, and subjects. This is exactly what I wanted in starting an Art Appreciation program!

I have a bunch of read-alouds and other activities that we’ll do the next few weeks to continue with our van Gogh study. Meet the Masters only has 7 units, so we could easily whip through the entire first “year” in just a few months. We loved our first lesson, but I’ll have to find ways to slow it down by doing this more slowly, and adding our own fun supplements.

My previous post I mentioned some great sources for art prints. Just this past week my Art Page-A-Day Calendar 2011 arrived and looks fantastic. Of course we’ll have to stare at the front cover for a few more months, but we’ve all looked through it and are excited about the daily images it will bring next year. This is the same publisher that makes the Brain Quest and What to Expect products by the wayl.

It comes in a plastic case with dimensions 7.4 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches. Here’s what it looks like on our window ledge for size reference.

Here’s the first photo. It isn’t all famous paintings, there is also sculptures, pottery, textiles and more. That’s fine with us, already we’ve seen some Ancient Egyptian art that we can appreciate. The images are in a square format though, so if the original image isn’t square, it may cut off some of the painting. They do show a thumbnail of the whole image in the upper corner if this occurs.

A handful of pages…

Once my 2011 calendar arrived, I loved it so much I jumped online to purchase previous years. Unfortunately, they were not the $10.87 I paid, they averaged anyway from $45 on up into the hundreds! I did manage to snag a used but unopened 2009 calendar for just $19.95. Once that was gone, I was shocked to see remaining ones go up to $999.98!

That is why I think these calendars are a great investment. After the year is up, keep them and use them for art appreciation projects. Use them for art games, flashcards, etc… Or, keep it for a few years and sell for a profit! Here’s the current listing for Art Page-A-Day calendars so you can see what they’re currently going for.

Meet the Masters Curriculum

Satori is going to begin studying fine art this year. We’re going to start with the program Meet the Masters, which is centered around art appreciation. MTM (Meet the Masters) is currently 50% off at Homeschool Buyers Co-op, a Bundle goes for $44.95. We purchased Bundle 1 – Track A (for ages 5-7) which studies Van Gogh, Cassatt, Mondrian, Picasso, Monet and Homer. Meet the Masters has a 3 Step Curriculum.

1. Introduction to the Master Artists – go online and get a short lesson of the artist.
2. Download the Art Technique Packets – learn to implement an art concept the artist used.
3. Create a Masterpiece Art Activity – use step-by-step instructions to create your very own masterpiece!

Although MTM alone would probably be fine, I can be a very thorough person and would love to explore more. We have other art books on hand to help us study master artists, and I’ll mention them as we get to them throughout the year. I also want to build a collection of quality art prints to study, so the rest of this post describes different options I found.

Fine Art Prints

It’s always good to have art prints on hand for study and other activities. But collecting fine art prints can be expensive. If you want large Fine Art Posters for your wall, you might like to check out Poster Revolution. Van Gogh’s Starry Night in a poster 36″x24″ is $7.14. This is their sale prices, I’m not sure if it’s one of those continuous sale prices. You may find both smaller and larger prints, they seem to run on average $4.80-6.80.

Crystal Productions offers prints, posters, bundles, flashcards and games catered for art education for schools and homeschools.

List of online sites to find prints, please let me know if I’m missing your favorite!

• Poster Revolution (mentioned above)
• Crystal Production (mentioned above)
• National Gallery of Art Shop – the site was slow for me and difficult to navigate
• Child Size Masterpieces – on the expensive side, we only have the first set and don’t have the “How to Use” book. Various post-card sized prints you cut out
• University Prints – prints are only 5.5″ x 8″ but only 26 cents each, you can also create your own bound book. Interesting site, they even have special topics for kids, here’s their Ancient World sets. Unfortunately, they do not offer online orders, just mail-in orders.
• 24 Art Cards by artist – fast way to get 24 postcard-sized art cards on one artist, most are 4-for-3 promotion, making them $5.21 each

Masterpiece – looks very interesting. I signed up for their Free Introductory Package. I’ll get 12 Masterpiece Reproductions on high quality paper, a nice portfolio case to store them, and an Art Display easel totally free (valued $88.95), even if I cancel. But of course they need to get money out of you somehow, so they also tempt you with 4 extra prints, which if you like, pay $9.95 and then $12.95 for each new packet which will be sent every 3 weeks. I wish they sent it every 4 weeks, or even 6 weeks, but we’ll try it out, as we can cancel at any time.

Once I get it and if I like it, I will definitely blog about it more. (The parent company, IMP, offers “inspiring and informative” packages on a variety of topics. I haven’t seen many reviews on them though.)

FREE PRINTS – Print yourself

This is just a fabulous resource. If you want to print out your own 8.5″x11″ prints at home, join the Ambleside Online Picture Study Yahoo group. I just did this and using my home printer, I had a few nice prints in just minutes! Then simply use page protectors and put in a binder and you’ve got a great Artist Study binder! I thank Beth on WTM forums for suggesting the Yahoo group and binder idea.

There are several Picture Study groups to join, but membership is instant. You can also get little Timeline Figures to cut out and stick on your timeline.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AO_HEO_PictureStudy_IA/ – 8.5″ x 11″ PDFs, Part 1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AO_HEO_PictureStudy_IB/ – 8.5″ x 11″ PDFs, Part 2
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AO_HEO_PictureStudy_II/ – 4″ x 6″, nice size for personal prints or in album
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AO_HEO_PictureStudy_III/ – 2.5″ x 2.5″ PDFs, nice size for matching/memory games
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AO_HEO_PictureStudy_IV/ – 3.5″ x 2.25″ PDFs, nice size for card games

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AOArtPrints/files/ – non-discussion homeschool list for the purpose of storing and downloading pdf files of the art prints that are scheduled with Ambleside Online

The Artchive

The Ambleside Online Picture Study group generally only has a handful of paintings on each artist. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, check out the Artchive. This incredible website gives great information on each artist and holds a diverse collection of art images. It even has a very cool Image Viewer so you can print the image out or save as a desktop background!

Now that we have a little art corner in our main room, what we needed next was a little something to brighten it up!

Using The Usborne Art Treasury, we replicated Kandinsky’s “Squares with Concentric Circles” painting. Page 53 shows the original artwork, with the opposite page describing a bit about Kandinsky and color. The next two pages walk you through making your own color contrasts artwork.

We used oil pastels for the circles and watercolor for the squares. The oil pastels show through the paint.

While most of the time I want Satori to concentrate on her own very original artwork, without copying step-by-step instructions, this book is still so much fun and has so many colorful projects.

A year ago we did another project from this book - “The Aquarium”.

Satori and Mom created these puppets for our Artistic Pursuits Puppet Project lesson. This project utilized the “odds-and-ends” drawer, encouraging us to use those art scraps we keep in a special drawer.

It was a simple, fast and fun project, Satori made a bird, Mom made a cat (whiskers fell off right away).  We then ran up to scare Daddy who was watching TV.

Today our family traveled back to prehistoric times where we lived as nomads. We had been struggling to find the usual herds of animals that we followed every year, so we returned to a certain cave to pray for plentiful animals to hunt. This cave was long and dark, but we had the use of fire to see the cave walls, upon which we did our paintings of animals.

Times have been hard for our family lately and the animals that gave us sustenance have been scarce. This cave ceremony we believed would bring more animals back to our area. We each drew animals, using colors like red ochre, hematite and charcoal. We outlined them in black and filled them in with reds, browns, and whites.

Mama was the shaman, and beat the drum while chanting our ritual songs. She also drew a herd of grazing animals.

Daddy remembered our Great Mammoth hunts, where we would hunt the plentiful woolly mammoths. But lately, we haven’t seen any mammoths, which give us food, shelter and clothing. He’s drawing his mammoth in hopes that we can find more of these creatures.

Baby (the youngest in the clan) drew lots of animals, but especially the mammoths. We worked by torchlight that consumed animal fats.

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Back to present times…

This family event was so much fun! We have some actual caves on our land, but didn’t want to wake any sleeping bears, so instead we used the closet underneath our basement stairs. It was perfect for our “cave”. It starts out spacious and ends up in a tiny crawl space, just like some of the actual caves the prehistoric people used. We had a tiny lantern as our torchlight and a carefully-tended candle to simulate fire. We put up cardboard on the wall, set out black permanent marker for the outlines and red, brown and white pastel chalks to fill our drawings in.

Cave paintings that were created during the Upper Paleolithic period occurred 40,000 – 10,000 BC. The first cave art was discovered in the 1860s, but not until 1092 was it accepted by anthropologists and art historians.

Below is some cave art of Aurochs (early cattle), in one of the most well-known locations – Lascaux, France. This cave was discovered in 1940 by 4 teenagers and their dog. The paintings are estimated to be 16,000 years old.

I am ashamed to say that we haven’t been doing many arts and crafts lately. Perhaps the fact that the Kraft Kitchen looks like a hurricane hit it? So I spent my Sunday cleaning and organizing our craft area, just in time for a Family Craft night!

Picking up on our Artistic Pursuits curriculum “The Way They See It”, we tackled the “Me Project”, where we make ourselves, using fabrics, buttons, yarn, etc… I decided to take advantage of this Lakeshore Learning People Shapes Project Kit I had lying around.

It was perfect! There are people shapes in a whopping 12 different shades of “People Colors”, so we really got to fine-tune the skin color to match ourselves. Which is cool, because our family does come in different shades of skin.

David, Satori, and I set upon designing our “Me” persons. We had so much fun customizing them, choosing our favorite colors and decorations. The hair in this kit was pretty cool, much more realistic than the yarn I was going to use. It even comes with googly eyes of different colors, not just black like you find in most kits. And just look at those cute little lips!

We made them into little puppets. Here Satori is holding up David and Satori puppets.

I’m back in full swing as Satori’s Super Homeschool Mom or Teacher. Kept my weight off that I lost while I focused on myself  the past few months. Last week with David’s encouragement, we decided to stop the unschooling-ish style we’ve followed for the past 2 months and get back on our schedule. Of course we’re way behind the schedule, but thanks to Homeschool Skedtrack, I was able to push the months we’re behind on out to Spring 2010. Love that program. We are going to try to add most weekend days, as I have high ambitions for Spring 2010 and I wanted to get some prep studies done this fall.

I got some great ideas for reading fluency, will cover later this week. Also reading up on fun ways to incorporate math, writing and more. Last week we reviewed all of RightStart Math and we’ll be moving forward now. Same with All About Spelling. Retention has been outstanding on everything.

For Artistic Pursuits, we combined Five in a Row by reading Harold and the Purple Crayon. Either someone has read this book to Satori the 3 years she was in daycare, or she remembers it from 3 years ago when I read it last. She knew everything that happened next…

FIAR added this book as a short lesson, and I’m happy, as it’s such a popular, creative, wonderful children’s book. We’ve read it twice already (we usually only do FIAR as 3-4 in a row, hehe). The FIAR manual of course made me appreciate the book even more. With our Artistic Pursuits program (art program not related to FIAR), we took a purple crayon and Satori set about drawing her adventure.

I tore off what I thought to be a super long sheet of paper off our roll and placed it on the floor for Satori to go wild. I was really hoping she’d be more creative, but she said she wasn’t as good a drawer as Harold. She had a great time anyway.

In this photo, as I’d hoped to illustrate, we get the idea behind vanishing point. The foreground shows the paper being very wide. The background shows it growing smaller. Had it gone on much longer, the lines would have converged in a tiny point. We also did some experiments of drawing perspective, drawing a book from a birds-eye view, and then from the ground.

First up, a little more about this book, which we are rowing with FIAR this week. As of last month, this book seemed to have gone out of print and was selling for $300! As of September, it is now back in stock on Amazon for $19.95, so if you want this own, and it is indeed worth it, I suggest getting it now! Or, be sure to check used book stores and such.

***I was just googling “Who Owns the Sun” and this very post is already on the first page of Google, I had published it ONE MINUTE AGO. Google rocks and they seem to love my blog.

Friday Satori replicated the glorious artwork of Who Owns the Sun? This sun image is shown on the title and on one of the first pages of the book.

We didn’t want to wait for normal watercolors to dry, so we used our new Neocolor II Artists Crayons, which are water soluble. They worked out GREAT!  We only have a small box of 15 though. I’d love a Wood Box Set of 84, or the Gift Set of 126, but $200+ is out of our budget now.

Neocolor

As you can see in the first photo, Satori then brushed a wet paintbrush outwords from the sun, resulting in our Who Owns the Sun sunburst!