11 (More) Homeschool Art Ideas

One of the many ways I feel fortunate this year is that I get to do art with my kids at least once a week. I'm not an art teacher; I'm just the one who procures the materials, clears the table, and says, "Let's do this now." For our own homemade art curriculum, we go on field trips (or went, pre-quarantine); experiment with new materials, subjects, and styles; and try to learn some art history. A few months ago I shared 10 activities we had done for homeschool art this year. Since then, I've remembered a few other things we've done in art, plus recently we've been finding new art projects that work well for various levels since I have both a fourth grader and a preschooler at home. Here's some more homeschool art activities we've enjoyed.

1. Step by Step Painting Tutorials
We found the Step by Step Painting web site, which has several free painting tutorials for kids to follow, step-by-step. Similar to a cork and canvas night for grown-ups, there's a sequence of instructions for painting the same subject, but everyone's result is beautifully different. My kids and I each made a panda sitting in bamboo last week. M said to me before we started, "I'm not sure if I'll be able to do this," but they were both so delighted with their paintings. W told me that he usually likes my artwork more than his own, but this time he really loved his own panda because he thought it had so much personality-- which was quite true!

Creating a streaky background after first painting the canvas with water

Chalk panda outline

2. Get into Art: People Book
We spotted this book (and several others from the same series) in the Currier Museum of Art's gift shop. It has a dozen or so works of art in it featuring "people" as the subjects. It gives a nice amount of information about each artist and how the work was made, and then gives directions to create artwork with kids inspired by the famous pieces. We have done several projects from this book. A favorite was when we made our own version of The Scream with chalk and oil pastels. We also drew people in proportion after learning about the David. We made sponge-painted figures in all sorts of positions (skateboarding, doing a cartwheel, skiing) after studying the many many ways kids are playing in Peter Bruegels's nearly 500-year-old Children's Games. I admit we petered out on our attempt at pointillism (we used a pencil eraser to dip in paint and make dots on our papers, which was cool)... but gained a sense for the patience it would require and why it took two years to create something as large as Sunday on la Grand Jatte using this technique.

The Squeal, three ways

Trying out pointillism

Sponge-painted people in motion

3. Cardboard Creations 
I've gotten a number of fun ideas from the Montshire Museum of Science's online resources during quarantine, including dissecting eggs and experimenting with chain reactions. But most recently they had some cardboard ideas that inspired lots of things in our house. I got out a stack of cardboard one afternoon, scissors, tape, and some templates I had printed out. We traced the templates onto cardboard and then folded them up into 3-D shapes. For M seeing what each array would become was a surprise. And that was a nice enough project. But then, since our house is the way it is, especially these days, the stack of cardboard stayed out in the middle of the floor until the next day when both kids were repeatedly found sitting in its midst, cutting, taping, sculpting, and designing. M made abstract creations that she then had to paint right away. W made a musket (he had once made a musket to go with a Halloween costume and was inspired to replace it as it was getting worn out), and then several knives and other weapons. I felt good about all the strength and motor coordination involved in manipulating cardboard. And they were really creative and really engaged using open-ended, free materials. It reminded me of the wonder and value in just getting out a new material and making it available to kids without guidance or instruction. They couldn't resist diving in-- and I didn't have to think up any art projects this week because they came up with their own!
 

 

3-D shapes from 2-D, scored cut-outs

W's cardboard arsenal

Painting a newly taped-together creation

Cardboard city

Cardboard tanks

 

Big Ben?

 

4. Can You Find It? Book
We haven't actually purchased this one yet, but we have the similarly titled one about music, also from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it's good, so this is on my list to try for the future for more art study and project inspiration.

5. Usborne Art Cards
I bought this pack of cards of "Famous Paintings" years ago and we had never used them much. But then a couple of months ago when I found our whole family was seated every morning for slightly more leisurely breakfasts than usual (since none of us were leaving the house), I pulled one of these out one day and we passed it around and talked about it, read on the back the artist, the date, where it was painted, where it is currently displayed, and some interesting facts about it. In the ensuing days I found myself getting out a new card each morning and doing the same. After a few days we started drilling the kids on the cards from previous days. Or M would get out the stack and drill us. This was never planned and just sort of happened. W has the whole pack pretty well ingrained and M has about half the artwork names down pat... although she'll still say "Edward Hopper?" when we ask who painted the Mona Lisa. It's been fun to see how thrilled they are with themselves when they know. We figure a little rote memorization is a good thing.

6. Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park
In October, our family visited Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire. We learned about Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a sculptor who lived there in the late nineteenth century. We learned a little about the many, many steps in creating a sculpture from a visiting artist who gave a talk. We took a tour with a nice park ranger and got to see some famous works of art (or replicas), intertwined with historical stories. (One of the most compelling sculptures tucked away in one of the terraced gardens was one I didn't get a picture of: the Adams Memorial, or Grief, as it is called in Eleanor Roosevelt's biography where she talks about visiting the real thing in D.C. during times of feeling low.) We enjoyed strolling the beautiful grounds on a fall day, including a trail to a swimming hole the artist used and tasting some grapes that were lushly growing on a trellis of one of the buildings on the grounds. It's a low-key place I recommend for a visit-- especially on a nice day, as a lot of it was outdoors. A treat was that our visit was free, thanks to W's National Park pass that we got online and which gets all fourth graders and their families in to national parks for free.

Standing Lincoln

Farragut Memorial

Shaw Memorial

Birch Allee

Blow-Me-Down Trail

7. Currier Museum of Art
W and I visited the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was a great art museum! They had a scavenger hunt for kids that focused on a theme (birds). It showed several close-ups of birds within works of art around the museum. It was a good challenge that kept him looking closely at the art to try to find each of them. Once, we had just meandered downstairs to explore a new wing, and W exclaimed, "I just realized where one of these is!" and he dashed back upstairs so he could show me the pheasant (or quail?) carved into an intricate sideboard we had just been looking at. The modern art section of the museum was intriguing to W, from interactive screens to quilts that had to be read like a story. Also, a lot of other learning sort of came together at our visit: we were pleasantly surprised how many artists and works of art we saw there that we recognized, included Picasso, Georgia O'Keefe, and several works by Augustus Saint-Gaudens whom we had recently become familiar with. It was also neat to see how many works of art W realized he knew the story behind due to his sizable knowledge of mythology (which he has gained mostly through reading Rick Riordan books). In the American Art wing, he was really excited when he realized we were looking at silver pieces engraved by Paul Revere, hero in our study of the American Revolution.

Modern art is fun

Scavenger hunt

An impressive paper weight collection

Grandma Moses

Enjoying the kids' space

"I don't really like Picasso"

Robert Louis Stevenson relief, by Saint-Gaudens

Miniature Standing Lincoln

Theseus Slaying the Minotaur

The Three Fates

Paul Revere made this!

8. Hood Museum of Art
In early March there was one weekend when I took our preschooler to a story time in the galleries at the Hood Museum of Art. We heard a couple of stories and visited a couple of relevant areas of the museum and did hands-on activities. That same afternoon, my husband took our fourth grader to a workshop there for older kids in which they discussed a current exhibit of abstract art, and then learned about the technique and tried it out themselves. W got really engaged and was in his element dripping and splattering paint. He brought home a really fun, brightly colored masterpiece that is hanging above his desk in our house now. (We were sad when things shut down this spring because we had several other Hood Museum of Art educational events on our calendar, including a tour I had set up for a homeschool group focused on an exhibit of Native American Art. I also have a brochure for a self-guided walking tour of all the sculptures on the Dartmouth College grounds that I'm looking forward to doing. I am sure in the future we'll be able to take advantage of this great resource near us again.)

9. Sister Wendy's Story of Painting YouTube Videos
These are admittedly a little boring for my preschooler, but W and I have watched several of them. There are ten total, narrated by a nun who gives a good, broad overview of the history of paintings, beginning thousands of years ago and moving forward in time with each episode. It's neat when we recognize elsewhere some of the styles or paintings or techniques she has discussed, such as gold leaf.

10. Art for Kids Hub
I've mentioned this site briefly in a couple of recent posts but can't leave it out here. Our go-to when we don't have anything else planned for an art project is to do these online drawing lessons (as well as those from a second site, below). Requiring only a device to play the step-by-step video, a piece of paper, and a pencil, they are fun and require no planning. Art for Kids Hub has lots of how-to-draw lessons and they can be as long as fifteen or twenty minutes, detailed, and better for older kids. W loves them and how the lessons take something hard and make it easy by breaking it up into steps, like a Star Wars character and an orangutan he drew recently. The man who narrates is so good-natured and encouraging, it's contagious, and you can't help but have fun as he draws, talks, and gives tips to his own children who draw next to him in every video.

11. Young Rembrandts Drawing Lessons
M is a huge fan of Young Rembrandts. It's very similar to Art for Kids Hub, but most of these are simple, shorter how-to videos, more geared to younger kids. She produces really cute drawings  I've shared before from these demos. She loves to be in charge of pausing the video to draw each step and then starting it back up again. The best part is that I feel she's actually learning some drawing techniques that carry over. When she is free drawing, she now often draws a "reflection spot" on the side of things, and she's also started drawing little marks next to her subjects to show movement.

Monkey, bee, mouse from online drawing lessons

This letter-A person, with movement marks by its head and feet, is a baby walking

...Recently, we've even done art over FaceTime! Here's M drawing a snowman, in a step-by-step tutorial by her cousin.