Cartoon drawing satisfying results,

Drawing still-life as realistically as possible is an excellent mental exercise, and improves art skills in the long term, but immediate results look quite bad. I must admit, I was not consistent in requiring my children to draw. But what little I did was worth it.

ART STUDY

In our homeschool, we study art by learning about an artist, and then studying a couple of his works of art.

We learn about artists from this book series.

Charlotte Mason explains a very simple way to study works of art in her book that was published in 1922. I have followed her directions and gotten good results:

A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist’s life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, a little picture is studied ; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail. Then the picture is turned over and the children tell what they have seen,––a dog driving a flock of sheep along a road but nobody with the dog. Ah, there is a boy lying down by the stream drinking. It is morning as you can see by the light so the sheep are being driven to pasture, and so on; nothing is left out, the discarded plough, the crooked birch, the clouds beautiful in form and threatening rain, there is enough for half an hour’s talk and memory in this little reproduction of a great picture and the children will know it wherever they see it, whether a signed proof, a copy in oils, or the original itself in one of our galleries….

There is no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, but the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman.