The Gardner Museum

Another wonderful field trip we took this week was to the Gardner Museum.  Back in the late 19th and early the 20th century, Isabella Stewart Gardner used her wealth to collect art.  She then build the museum to house her impressive collection and show it to the world.  She had to expand the building once in her lifetime.  The gorgeous new wing, a contemporary building built beside the original and now the official entrance, just opened about a month ago.

Upon her death she left an endowment for the museum with the stipulation that the art be left as she placed

All children up to age 18 are always free. Typically adult admission is $15, but visiting with my mother and aunt we again made use of a library pass that allowed up to 4 adults to be admitted for $5 each.  The museum is well worth it.

The boys did really enjoy the art and wondering through the many rooms.  Everyone was impress with the beautiful courtyard mosaic and garden at the center of it all.  We may go again with our history co-op as we are studying the late middle ages/early renaissance and the museum has an abundance of pieces from this period.

The museum was the target of a highly publicized and yet unsolved theft in 1990 when 13 pieces were stolen including two by Rembrandt.   The empty frames remain on the wall keeping vigil in hopes of their contents' return.

Talent Show

Our homeschool enrichment group had its annual talent show. Ds#1 was the Master of Ceremonies for the evening and did a great job! He was also in a skit while Ds#2 played piano. Here's a slideshow of the fabulous evening.

Christian Heritage Art Program

We just started using the Christian Heritage Art Appreciation program from Catholic Heritage Curriculum. This is art appreciation and study from a Catholic perspective covering the breadth of art history. The program has eight levels, each level divided into 6 time periods. We are using the program with out TORCH co-op, the younger five kids using level 1 and the older five using level 3.



Both levels start withh prehistoric art. Level 1 focused on cave paintings. After the kids watched the video with examples and age-appropriate discussion of cave paintings, they painted on crinkled brown paper bags to simulate cave walls.





Level 3 focused on Native American art and geometric shapes. They too used crinkled brown paper bags, but they made stencils of geometric shapes which they used to make designs. The program is enjoyable, informative, and easy to use and I particularly like using it in a small co-op setting.

da Vinci Advent Art Study

I was inspired to include an art and music study during our Advent break by Studeo: Marian Songs for Advent. I wanted to put together some Madonna pictures for an art study; I needed to look no further than Leonardo da Vinci.

About.com: Art History has a collection of da Vinci images that includes 9 relating to Advent. And they're large images, too. Be careful--some of the later images are not da Vinci but were influenced by him. And I love his final work, St. John the Baptist.

Shown here is The Virgin of the Rocks, ca. 1483-1486.

The Gallery blog carnival

Miss Julie has started a new blog carnival at her Art Projects for Kids blog to showcase kids' art work. It's called The Gallery and it is fabulous! Submit one of your projects, get some really great ideas, or just enjoy the wonderful artwork.

New! The Gallery Blog Carnival

Art Lessons For Kids at Ms. Julie's Art School is starting The Gallery Blog Carnival of Art Projects for Kids. Each month the carnival will showcase wonderful how-to blog entries. The first issue will be published on September 1st and I am looking forward to reading it!

Art Camp

This year, much to my joy, my mother decided to teach an Art Camp this summer for kids 8 and up, which included Ds#1 and Ds#1 and many of their friends. My aunt, who just retired in May, was her assistant. They put a lot of time and effort into five mornings of projects, and the kids really enjoyed themselves. The results were spectacular!

They worked with a lot of color and texture, working mostly with chalk pastels and various papers, though they used other mediums as well. Ds#3 was not officially in the camp, but he would bring some of his coloring pages from home to show Grammy, and she let him in on a few of the projects as well.





It was a big hit all the way around, and something I hope they do again next summer!

Creating an Artist Study

Not being well acquainted with artists and their works, I have some difficulty putting together an artist's study. I prefer to have a new picture each week for a term, but what do I choose? Where can I find images? I found a couple of free resources from my local library that has made this much easier.

The What Make A... series by Richard Muhlberger is readily available through most library systems. These books are around 50 pages that are both biography and art appreciation by following the life and the works of great artists. The series is put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who has many images available online to view and download.

My library also offers free access to many online databases from home using my library card, one of which is Oxford (Grove) Art Online. This database has thousands of large images available, many of which are from the NY Met.

I decided to study Monet for this term, so I borrowed What Makes a Monet a Monet? from the library. I then logged into Oxford Art Online and downloaded the pictures, and printed them on matte paper to put in our art study notebook. I googled the few images in the book that were not available through the database; those pictures are smaller, so they don't print as well, but at least I had them. Now we can read through the book each week and study the images. Maybe we'll even make it back to the Met this summer and actually see these works!

Spring!

It's been a long winter, and it's still only 30 degrees. We've had several teasingly warm days but nothing lasting more than two together. The snow is almost gone and a few birds have returned. We're getting a bit of cabin fever.

Instead of our regularly scheduled school day, we spent the day making a spring project using a Klutz Window Art kit. First we made the outline with the black paint and left them to dry.

Later in the day the boys finished filling in the colors. Ds#2 picked the space ship that looks like it is breaking through the window. After he peels it off the plastic and sticks it to a window he gets to use the black paint to make the window look like its cracked even more. What fun!

We spend the rest of the school day working diligently on our Journey North Mystery Class data because today we got the clues we needed to pinpoint our longitude. Visit AtHomeScience to read about this great project.

St. Patrick's Day

Besides being the feast day for that great evangelist that converted an entire nation, and besides being Evacuation Day in Boston, it is also Ds#1's birthday. Happy 10th!

In anticipation of the day, we did a shamrock-related art project that teaches about shades and tints we saw at Ms Julie's Art School. She has another great project posted as well.

Free Homeschool Webinar with Maureen Wittmann!!!

A webinar is an online seminar. You can attend in your jammies with your favorite warm drink beside you! You can both see and hear the live presentation (they don't see you,) and you can type in questions for the speaker to answer. All you need is a computer and speakers!

While Maureen Wittmann is well worth paying to hear speak, she is currently offering FREE webinars at Homeschoolconnections. This Wednesday, March 4th, she's discussion using literature for art & music appreciation. On April 1st she's discussing a topic near and dear to me, using literature for math & science. I "attended" her talk on history literature, which was sold out when you did have to pay to attend.

Another upcoming webinar is for homeschooling dads--so little is available for them! It is given by Mary Kay Clark and Deacon Gene McGuirk, both from Seaton, called Homeschool Dads: Husband, Father, and Teacher.

Soon full courses will be available (for a fee) at Homeschoolconnections. Exciting stuff!

Color Wheel in Clay

This project is a variation on a theme as our art book moves into color wheels. I thought an interesting tactile approach would be to using modeling clay as a medium.

We used RoseArt clay that costs $1 per box at Michael's. This clay is not the most pliable but that actually made it fun. When blending colors we had to knead the clay, just like bread, with a pushing and sliding motion to smear one color into the other. Just squeezing the ball didn't work as well.

Ds#1 started a green blend but was so impressed with the swirl pattern he made that he decided to save that and make another green ball. He keeps it on his desk.

This of course led to further clay sculpting...

Primary Secondary Overlapping Art

This week we used both primary and secondary colors for our creations.

We drew overlapping shapes onto our 11x14 wet media paper. You can make a template out of cardboard or cardstock as the book suggests, but we had some PlayDo cutters that worked just fine.

The boys painted the shapes, except the overlapping areas, in primary colors. They then mixed their own secondary colors and painted the appropriate overlaps with them.

I found some $1 tablecloths at Walmart to cover our homeschool table--so much easier than newspaper, even if it is not very durable. I should be able to get a few uses out of each one.

Radial Patterns in Secondary Colors

First thing this morning the kids played Blurt! instead of doing PLL or ILL. After finishing MEP and reading St. Thomas Aquinas and the Preaching Beggars, I looked through the Using Color in Your Art and put together this project.

I used the small radial cutter to cut 6 circles out of finger paint/wet media paper. I folded the circle 3 times to produce 8 segments. The boys outlined the segments and painted the same pattern in each using only secondary colors.

I asked what a radius was, and Ds#1 knew from reading Sir Cumference books.

They made some wonderful creations! As the book suggested we also looked at the use of secondary colors in The Green Violinist by Marc Chagall.

String Art

This week I went back to our Color book and got this idea for string art.

We use only primary colors for this and blend them to form secondary colors.

We cut lengths of string and dipped two at a time each into a different primary color, wiping of the excess. We placed the strings randomly onto a folded piece of paper, leaving a tail outside of it, and then slowly pulled out the strings one at a time while holding light pressure on the folded paper.

Ds#2 figured out even before we pulled the strings that the result would be symmetrical.

When we were done I mixed together small areas of the intense primary colors to form the more muted secondary ones.

Starry Night

Last week the boys interpreted Van Gogh's Starry Night. I thought it interesting that they found the old tree to be the focus of the painting; personally, I am always drawn to the bright swirls of stars.

For some reason I don't know where ds#3's composition ended up. Hopefully it will turn up soon!

Artist study and art project

I got this idea from this post at Eclectic Education. It is so natural, so obvious, yet I didn't think of it until the post, part of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival, probably because of my general art neglect, LOL.

I read the post but did not do the art project until a few days later. I chose Van Gogh's Sunflowers because ds#3 has actually drawn that picture before (yes, and still the idea did not occur to me.) I went back to comment on the post and saw she had actually used the same work! I must have really liked the whole idea, LOL!

More abstract art

We've continued with primary colors, abstract art, and lines. This time we traced tools on our paper and then drew lines across them. Each new little section is colored in a different primary color.

I happened to have a board book with pop-out cardboard tools in them that I used--it was easier than trying to hunt them down in the garage.

I've moved art to Wednesdays and Science to Fridays in hopes of doing more art, since we do so much science anyway. It seems to be working so far.

Wow, another art project

Amazingly, I was able to get in another art project before making lunch, frosting pumpkin bars, and heading out to a casual and fun harvest party!

This is based on the work of abstract artist Piet Mondrian. Trying to create something with just the right balance of color and white, just the right rectangles (golden ratios, perhaps?) gives an appreciating for this style of art.

The kids' work came out pretty well. We used oil pastels on sketch paper. The oil pastel tends to smudge into the white space, though.

Art project, finally

The kids finally completed an art project a week later than I expected. It seems our Fridays continue to be taken up with all sorts of different things...

This simple project involved making patterns with primary colors. While my boys do not have the drive to create perfect reproductions in each square, the results were still pretty good.