Fri Art

In our unstructured art class so far, we've been looking at lines and symmetry. (Note: I'm NOT an art teacher, and consider myself a beginner as well, so I  give my children art projects to do based on what I think is logical, or on what my children want to do.)

This week we decided on observation.
1) I gave my children this picture of the Little Red Hen, only I put the book upside down.
Assignment one was to copy the picture exactly as it is, upside down, without turning the book, or paper or head. :) Nel found this difficult, coz she said it felt unnatural to draw things upside down, and couldn't decide where to start. But I think she did a pretty good job.

Assignment 2 was to still look at the upside down picture and now draw it so it is the right way up (again without turning the book, paper, and no standing upside down to view it!). Strangely, Nel found this easier than the other. You'll notice there are minor errors in the picture bu pretty good. And she did it pretty quickly too.

2) We also looked at random pictures and objects and did pictures like the one below. What I wanted my children to see was the lines of the background around the object, and not the object itself (as shown in the red lines) Based on that, Nel did the chalk drawing. You're asking where is Jo in all this? ahh...she was too busy doing other stuff, which I'll show you later.

3) Again, because we were focusing on observation, we took a walk outside and looked at trees, at its branches, and how its bark contains patterns, diagonal and vertical lines. We felt the texture, and then sat back and drew.
Having drawn our tree, we tried using water colour to paint our tree. I asked the children to place the drawing of the tree upside down, wet the paper, and then add colours so it'd flow downwards towards the branches. I encouraged them to pull the colour out to form new branches from the thicker ones.

Jo at work

Nel's completed painting of tree

If you don't mind, here's a badly taken video of me showing my kids what to do. Mind you, camera in left hand, paint brush in right hand. I added too much blue too, but here's just my imperfect demo.

My End product

4) That finished, continuation on a different day, we went back to lines. We reviewed diagonal, vertical and horizontal lines, and we added curved lines. Using these lines, I asked my children to design something. Here's the example that I drew while demonstrating to them.

Here's Nel's End product.

Jo's which was done very hurriedly...and I'll tell you why soon.

Now, here's why Jo's not been participating actively in class. I suspect she's addicted to the IPad, which her uncle gave us. 

See the above? She came to me and said, "Mum, solve these puzzles." They looked strangely familiar, too similar to the game Craziness on Ipad!! (And, yes, she still writes her "g" backwards sometimes, and spelling errors are still common.)

Now, the picture above says it all. I found her writing this. Does this explain it all? :)