Welcome Wren to my blog today!!! Yes, she is a total sweetheart to help me out with my art series. She's going to be talking about a wonderful book called Art Lab of Kids by Susan Schwake. You will normally find Wren (and her sister) blogging at FinchnWren.
How do you approach art in your home or homeschool? Are you a
naturally talented artist yourself, for whom art creation just flows
out? Or, are you someone who would love to teach art but have no
ideas of where or how to start? Let me encourage you, if you fit
into this last category: it’s much easier than you imagine! Even
if you are not a trained artist, you really can teach the subject of
art to your own children. There are so many books and resources
available today to help you along in this. I’d like to share a
very well-rounded book to help you in this journey: Susan Schwake’s
ART LAB FOR KIDS. I refer to this book all the time for both
our own homeschool art, and for the art class I teach in our local
homeschool coop. What a resource!
ART LAB FOR KIDS is subtitled “52 Creative Adventures in
Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media.”
Practically, that means you could take one adventure per week and
have a year’s worth of art to do in your homeschool! Ms. Schwake’s
book contains practical, step-by-step instructions, lots of photos,
and pictures of completed artworks so that the artist (or mom)
understands exactly how to teach and create each project. The author
also provides a great resource list of recommended media in the first
section, explaining how different ones work and can be used. She is
an artist and art teacher with 20 years’ experience, so she brings
both the ability to clearly teach and a huge depth of art idea
resources to the reader.
ART LAB FOR KIDS has sections which cover the following:
-
How to use the book and how to create art with others
-
Drawing (ink, scribble, pastels, crayon, and more)
-
Painting (miniature, Fauvist, charcoal, watercolor, tempera, etc.)
-
Printmaking (silkscreen, stencil, cardboard relief, gelatin, and more)
-
Paper (stamps, tissue, torn-paper, Pop Art, vellum…)
-
Mixed Media (charcoal/watercolor, photos, watercolor and pencil, portraits, batik…)
While I think that ART LAB FOR KIDS would be ideal used as a
curriculum, I have personally just read through it many times and
selected specific art projects to teach, based on what my students
were learning or what we found most interesting. Some projects we
thoroughly enjoyed completing were painting an enlarged tiny section
of a painting on a small square; “Painting in the Style of...,”
and “Text as Texture.” And that’s only a fraction of the
projects offered in this book. We’re looking forward to painting
on tiny pieces of wood; reverse landscapes; gelatin monoprinting; and
many more!
I recommend this book for anyone who’d like to go deeper into the
world of artmaking, or art teaching, in a variety of art styles.
These vivid, fascinating projects will keep you busy for hours and
hours, happily creating!
Enjoy!
Wren from FinchnWren.
You can find this book through my affiliate links (helping to support this blog).
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com
Linked up here:
