Teaching Art in Your Homeschool with ARTistic Pursuits - TOS Review

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

My kids love when it's time for art lessons in our homeschool day! ARTistic Pursuits is a company we are familiar with as we have used several of their products over the years. You can read my previous reviews here:

Middle School Book Two, Color and Composition

Early Elementary Book One

WHAT IS ARTISTIC PURSUITS?

ARTistic Pursuits offers a comprehensive curriculum for art instruction which includes art history, art technique, and art instruction. There are books for every grade level from Kindergarten through 12th grade. There are eight volumes for Kindergarten through 3rd grade which focus on the history of art in sequential order. There are two beginner level Art Cores for Upper Elementary, an intermediate level Art Core for grades 7th and 8th, and an advanced level Art Core for 9th through 12th graders. 

WHAT DID WE RECEIVE?

For this review, we received Painting with Watercolor Pencils, Art Core 2. These hard-cover books are full-color and come with a DVD containing the video lessons. You can also stream the video lessons online, which is what we did. Art Core 2 has 9 units:

• Primary Colors
• Secondary Colors
• Tertiary Colors
• Complementary Color Pairs
• Neutral Colors
• Color Tint
• Color Values
• Monochrome Colors
• White Space

The art materials we needed to purchase for this course were:

• watercolor pencil set of 12 or more (we bought Prismacolor)
• plastic or vinyl eraser
• hand held pencil sharpener
• 40 water color paper sheets 9x12
• #8 round brush
• 1/4 inch flat brush
• small mop brush
• plastic T-square
• drawing compass

You can also purchase an art supply pack that contains all of the needed materials. I purchased what we needed from Amazon, but it would have been very quick and easy to purchase the art supply pack! You can look at the art supply list for any of the volumes by looking in the sample pages.

There are text and video lessons in this course. The different types of lesson in each unit are:

• Art Materials: Video Instruction - Your child will watch a 6-10 minute video lesson. This video gives step by step directions on the art instruction. The videos show your child how to achieve the technique being taught. The entire art project is completed, sometimes in time lapse, so your child can see exactly what they need to do. Then your child is instructed to make their own piece of art.
• Creativity: Building a Visual Vocabulary - Your child will read the page in the textbook and study the topic of the unit. Your child may be instructed to watch another video or to complete an assignment. 
• Art Appreciation and History: American - Your child will be shown a piece of artwork from an American painter. They will read about the artist and then use the techniques they've learned about. 
• Master Lesson: Assimilating Knowledge and Skills - Your child will create their own work of art, applying what they've learned in the unit and using a variety of technique - still life, landscape, and photographs. 

HOW DID WE USE ARTISTIC PURSUITS?

Silas, age 12, and Titus, age 10, used this program once or twice a week over the course of the review period. We completed Unit 1 - Primary Colors, and we have moved on to Unit 2 - Secondary Colors. The boys have really enjoyed these art lessons! Working with watercolor pencils has been so much fun for them. They've learned quite a bit about technique, the color wheel, shading, and just how much water to add to their paintings. 

Learning about hard and soft edges in Unit 2

Still life with primary colors - Unit 1

More still life - Unit 1

Still life with primary colors

WHAT DO I THINK?

I like the new format of their courses. The video lessons are a huge help for those of us who aren't naturally artists and offer plenty of guidance and tips for making our artwork look nice. I love the fact that art history is included in each unit with the study of a famous artist and piece of their artwork. The quality of the book is fantastic. The pages are glossy and full-color!

 I also feel like the assignments are very doable for children of this age range (4th through 6th grade). They take less than an hour to complete, once a week. That would be very easy to add in to your homeschool schedule! We cut our watercolor paper in half most of the time, and that was very helpful for my boys. They didn't feel as if they had such a huge area to work on so it wasn't as intimidating. They don't want to have a lot of white space, and having half a sheet of paper to work with was much easier for them to fill.

ARTistic Pursuits would be a great addition to your homeschool curriculum line-up! Check out what the other Crew Members thought about ARTistic Pursuits and the other volumes and art cores they offer by clicking on the banner below.

Artistic Pursuits for Middle School

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

I've mentioned before that my 12 year old daughter, Mercie, loves art! The past month and a half she has been using ARTistic Pursuits Middle School Book Two, Color and Composition.

WHAT IS ARTISTIC PURSUITS?

Artistic Pursuits, Inc is a complete art curriculum, including art instruction, art history, and art projects. It does not simply teach art - it involves your child in the art process by showing them how to observe, engage, and create their own unique art projects. Artistic Pursuits has books for every age level:

• Pre-K
• K-3rd (Early Elementary)
• 4th-5th (Elementary)
• 6th-8th (Middle School)
• 9th-12th (High School)
• 6th-12th Sculpture

MIDDLE SCHOOL BOOK TWO, COLOR AND COMPOSITION:

Mercie is going into 7th grade, so we chose the Middle School level book focusing on Color and Composition. You will need some supplies to complete the art projects - hard pastels, oil pastels, a fixative such as hair spray, kneaded erasers, a sketchpad and pastel papers in assorted colors. The supplies were easy to find and relatively inexpensive on Amazon. ARTistic Pursuits does offer an Art Supply Pack for $85 that contains all of the art supplies you will need for this book.

There are 16 units in this book, and each unit contains 4 lessons. It is recommended to spend one hour a day on the art lessons, twice a week, for a total of 2 hours a week. This is a totally independent art course so you won't have to do any of the teaching!

The 16 units in this book are:

1. Hue and Intensity
2. Primary and Secondary
3. Monochrome
4. Complementary Pairs
5. Neutrals
6. Warm Analogous Colors
7. Cool Analogous Colors
8. Color Application
9. Balance in Color
10. Parallel Rhythm
11. Converging Rhythm
12. Space With Little Depth
13. Depth
14. Viewpoint High
15. Viewpoint Low
16. Emphasis

Each unit is broken down into 4 lessons. I'll briefly describe each lesson portion.

1. Building a Visual Vocabulary - Your child will learn art vocabulary that is taught using words and pictures. 
2. Art Appreciation and Art History - Your child will observe the unit topic in works of art by the masters, learning about artists and art history. 
3. Techniques - Your child will learn how to use the supplies and art techniques being taught by creating an original work of art.
4. Application - Your child will complete a final project for the unit.

AN EXAMPLE OF A UNIT:

I'm going to go through Unit 2 - Primary and Secondary Colors - to show you exactly how each unit works. 

Lesson 1 - Mercie learned the vocabulary words of primary and secondary. There's a nice color wheel showing the colors, and she learns what intermediate colors are. Her assignment is to go outdoors with her pastels, find something interesting and draw it.

    

our rose bush

Lesson 2 - Mercie looks at a work of art titled Red Deers II by Franz Marc. She reads about how he used secondary and primary colors and how it makes his work stand out. She reads a short biography of Franz Marc and how he was condemned as a degenerate because his artwork used bright colors and bold applications of color. They ordered 130 of his works to be removed from German museums! Her challenge today is to draw an object that uses a primary color and a secondary color sitting next to it on the color wheel. She drew a red apple with purple shading and a yellow pear with green shading, like the example in the book.

      

Lesson 3 - Today Mercie learns how to layer pastels. Her assignment today is to draw some bright fruits or vegetables from a high viewpoint using the technique of blending.

      

Lesson 4 - Her final project is to draw a picture using primary and secondary colors. There is a materials list, a student gallery with a student example of the project, and ideas for her project. 

her final project

As you can see, each unit is full of hands-on projects and learning! Every lesson has a challenge or assignment to complete so your child will get lots of practice with the new techniques and materials.

Here are a few more examples of Mercie's artwork using Artistic Pursuits:

a picture done in monochrome of a cat

the ducks in the pond 

a girl with a lamb

a tree and a waterfall

a basketball in the yard

our horses and cows eating hay

a purse my mom brought her back from Nicaragua

WHAT DO I THINK?

I love Artistic Pursuits! I love how organized each unit is, how full each lesson is, and how beautiful each page is. The book is comb-bound spiral and the pages are thick and full of clear, colorful artwork. The pages are also printed single-sided, which I really like, and I remember it being one of the things I loved when I reviewed ARTistic Pursuits back in 2016. I like how each lesson has a materials list, making it easy to grab what you need before you sit down to start working. I love the student gallery, which has actual artwork from students in the same level. This helps Mercie to see that there is a wide range of artistic ability within her age group! If the examples were all from adults or professional artists, it may get discouraging when your child's artwork was not up to the same quality. Having student examples was really encouraging and motivating for Mercie. I also really love that she is getting art history in each unit, learning about famous artists and observing famous pieces of art. I am very impressed with the instruction in each unit, too. It is so easy to understand and very well-written. She is learning so many new techniques and elements of art. I have seen such an improvement in her artwork!

Mercie is going to finish this book and then use the Middle School Book One, The Elements of Art and Composition, as part of her 7th grade curriculum. She is almost halfway finished with this book because she loves it and wants to do it all the time!

WHAT DOES MERCIE THINK?

I think it's important to get a student's opinion of a curriculum as well. I love the curriculum, but I am not the one using it on a weekly basis. Here is what Mercie thinks:

"It is really fun drawing with pastels. The book teaches me different techniques and different ways to draw with the pastels. At first it was a little difficult to draw because I would draw it too wide, or it would smear. Later on it taught me different ways to draw with them depending on how wide or how thin I wanted the line. There was an example of a student's drawing in every lesson, which helped show me  what to do if I didn't really understand what it was telling me. It was usually very understandable, though. Artistic pursuits was my favorite so far."

ARTistic Pursuits Middle School Book Two, Color and Composition is available for less than $48! This is a great deal considering it's an entire year's worth of art curriculum. Check out the other books Artistic Pursuits offers by clicking HERE. Read my review of ARTistic Pursuits Early Elementray Book One, grades K-3 by clicking HERE. Artistic Pursuits is also offering a free, 16 week summer series with video lessons for beginning drawing students! You can visit their blog and find out more about this awesome opportunity (I know we will be taking advantage of it!) by clicking HERE. They also have online courses for the K-3 level books now available - click HERE to check those out.

As always, click the banner below to read more reviews on the different levels!

Home School in the Woods: Artist Activity Pak

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

My 12 year old daughter, Mercie, loves all things art! She loves to draw and doodle, paint on canvases and work with clay. When I had the chance to review the Artist Activity Pak from Home School in the Woods, I was excited! I knew Mercie would love to learn about artists and different art movements in history.

The Artist Activity Pak is one of the Hands-On History Paks available from Home School in the Woods for grades 3-8. The Hands-On History Paks provide everything you need to make a lapbook - a file folder filled with mini books and foldables containing information. The Artist Activity Pak was provided to me as a digital download, but you can also purchase a CD. The digital download is $18.95 and the physical CD is $19.95.

The first thing I did upon receiving the download was print everything out! Home School in the Woods makes this super easy by providing the download as a ZIP file. Each item is a separate file so everything downloads extremely fast and it's easy to do in chunks if you prefer. I printed out each item and stapled each section together with the directions on top. This made it easy for Mercie to do this almost entirely by herself.

Here is what is included with the Artist Activity Pak:

• Paint Box vocabulary mini book
• Art Medium mini book
• Art Movements mini book
• Paint Like the Masters
• Artist Exhibitions for 33 artists (mini books)
• Art Sketchbook
• Art Gallery Game

The Paint Box vocabulary is a foldable book that contains artist vocabulary words, like tertiary colors. The Art Medium book is a flip book in which Mercie had to put certain art mediums, like pastels and charcoal into different categories, like painting and drawing. The Art Movements was also a foldable that described each of the art movements to be matched with their time period in history.

Paint Like the Masters has ten projects for your child to complete which mimic the "masters" of art. Mercie painted while lying on her back to mimic Michelangelo painting the Sistine chapel.

She used a wooden skewer to paint with dots like Georges Seurat's pointillism.

She painted a lighthouse on a cliff in monochrome like Sesshu Toyo.

She used chalks to make a portrait in the style of Peter Paul Rubens.

She painted a portrait in the style of Picasso.

The Artist Exhibition gave Mercie a chance to do a small amount of research on 33 famous artists, from Picasso to Beatrix Potter. She had to learn the country of their birth, their art techniques, and several of their famous artworks. The directions recommend printing these on colored paper to color code each art movement, but I didn't have colored paper. I had Mercie pick a color for each movement and color the "frame" of the mini-book to color code. It worked just as well!

The Art Sketchbook is a printable journal for your child to sketch her observations in. There is a quote from a famous artist on each page.

The Art Gallery Game is a file folder game that will help your child learn about art history! You will print out 60 cards that have a work of art on one side, and the artist's name, artwork's name, date, and medium used. The goal is to make it all the way around the board by answering questions about the artwork. We played it this way: for each correct answer about the artwork, you could move ahead one space. So if we got the artist and time period correct, we could move two spaces. If we got the medium used correct, we would only get one space. This gave us the potential to move up four spaces per turn. This is a really fun way to get to know 60 famous pieces of art and their artist.

I had Mercie complete all of the components to the Artist's Activity Pak during her independent work time. She spent about 20-30 minutes a day working on the Art-Pak. She really enjoyed doing this! Her favorite part was the Paint Like the Masters. She enjoyed learning about the different techniques and trying to imitate them. She also enjoyed researching the different artists and doing the Art Exhibition mini-books. I really liked the fact that she could do most of this on her own. It's hard to get to all of the extras we want to sometimes, like artist study or composer study. This is a great way to fit some of this in!

We were both very impressed with this Artist Activity Pak! The only negative things I can think of are that it took quite a bit of ink and time to print the Art Gallery Game, but it is worth it to me because I believe the game is really helping us to learn about some important masterpieces. Also, you will need pastels, chalks, and possibly black ink to complete the Paint Like the Masters. If you don't have those you will need to buy them. I spent over $30 in art supplies.

Here are some pictures of her completed lapbook:

Home School in the Woods has many different Hands-On History Paks. They even have one on US Elections, which we completed back in 2016. You can read our review of it here. This is very timely as it's an election year! I'm considering having all three of my home-schooled kids complete this so they can learn about the different parts of our government and how elections work. They already have many questions about it as they've watched some of the Democratic debates and news coverage.

Amy also has a blog called "Words From the Woods" that contains really helpful articles, like explaining the difference in history studies and a la carte history projects.

Click below to read more reviews on some of the different products Home School in the Woods has to offer.

100 Days of Art: Day 5 - Kandinsky Insipired Concentric Circle Art

*I'm back here at My Full Heart, because it feels more like 'home' to me.*

We've done quite a bit of art projects since I've last posted. It's been nice having a break from posting, but I have missed blogging and hope to be regular again since our school started by today!

Mercie, Silas, Titus, and I completed a really neat art project today inspired by Kandinsky's Concentric Circles. We first watched a short video biography of his life, and then we looked at some of his artwork. The process was simple and quite fun. Here is the piece of art that we replicated in our own way!

(Wassily Kandinsky)

I opened a pack of construction paper and handed each child a sheet of white cardstock. Then, we started cutting and gluing circles. I tried to have them make 12 squares in a 4 x 3 grid like Kandinsky's, but Mercie and Titus's circles were too large for that, so I just asked them to make it a grid.

They had lots of fun with color patterns and sizing their circles. I had lots of fun, too! It was a relaxed and open-ended project. We didn't draw our circles first or trace them - Kandinsky's circles were all lopsided and uneven, so I told the kids not to make them perfect. They seemed surprised at the freedom to cut out ragged-edged and funky looking circles!

Here is our finished product. (Top left is Mercie - age 9, top right is Silas - age 7. Bottom left is Titus - age 5, bottom right is me - age 32.)

Here are our first four days of 100 Days of Art project!
Day 1: Learning to Draw
Day 2: Pyramids
Day 3: String Art
Day 4: Optical Illusion Art

One Way to Get Young Children Interested in Art

Most young children love to do art projects - cutting and gluing, painting, coloring, sculpting with clay. If I give my children a box full of paper, scissors, glue, glitter, stickers, and tape, they will be happy for hours! Children love to create things.

But how do you get your young child interested in real art? How do you get your child interested in the masterpieces by Van Gogh, Monet, Bassano, and da Vinci?

I have found one way - The Art Book for Children.

I purchased this book especially with my two youngest children in mind - Silas, 5, and Titus, 3 - but I knew that all of my children would read and examine it. We have never done formal artist study until recently {and, by the way, we love it!}, and I really wanted to get my younger children interested in art study now instead of later.

From the back of the book:

Can dressing up be art? How do you paint feelings? Why did Giuseppe Arcimboldo choose a grocery store to find his inspiration? How do you make an Alberto Giacometti? Can you paint a noise? Why did Jeff Koons make a giant sculpture from 70,000 plants?

Intriguing, right? Right off the bat, this has become one of our favorite books, and I'll be happy to tell {and show} you why!

This book has around 30 different works of art. Most of them are paintings, and a few are sculptures. On each two-page spread, there is a famous work of art, a description of the art and artist, and questions that will get your child thinking!

For example, this painting is called "The Party", by Pieter Bruegel. The first question on this page is "Can you hear the noise in this picture?" When you look at the painting, you can see men playing instruments like bagpipes, people talking and laughing, and people serving food and drink. You can hear the noise, when you start seeing it!

There are many details in this painting that are brought to the child's attention, and even six different pictures of people of the painting that your child can find in the big painting {sort of like "where's Waldo?"}. Titus had a fun time finding the people, and he even noticed some details I wouldn't expect him to - like the child eating the "pie" in the corner.

By far, Titus's favorite part of the book were the "splat" paintings done by Jackson Pollock. He laughed and said, "He's making a mess!". We are going to try to replicate this style by splat painting outside one day.

Titus had looked at this book almost daily since we got it. Seriously, I can come into the room and he is in his favorite chair, studying the pictures in this book.

Although my children have already read this book, I plan to use this once a week for my younger children. We will examine one piece of art, answer the questions in the book, and mimic the style of art. I also plan to buy the second in this series, The Art Book for Children, Book Two. The Art Book for Children has been a great addition to our library and such a great way to get my children looking at, thinking about, and discussing art!

** I am no longer an Amazon affiliate, as Louisiana passed a new sales tax law that prohibits it. Any Amazon links will be purely for your convenience and to share products I love. **