Art Lab {Contour Drawing}

Do you have an Amazon wishlist?

I started keeping one as a way to take advantage of the $25.00 free shipping. I would wait to place an order until I had $25.00. Sometimes if I am a bit short of the $25.00 I just add something from my wishlist to get the free shipping. Granted it would be cheaper to pay for the shipping, but then I wouldn’t ever get anything off my wishlist. Yes, I know about Amazon Prime. I have signed up for the trial version.

Anyway, for a while I had Art Lab for Kids on my wishlist and I was finally able to purchase it. There are so many great art blogs and kid craft blogs out there. More ideas than one could ever do. As much as I like the ease of the internet, I still enjoy holding a printed items. This book is not a kids craft book, it is more of an art instruction book. There are 52 lessons – so many that I remember from all my days in art classes. If you want to really dive into art, whether you have any experience at it or not, I recommend this book. It has been fun to use with the kids, but I’d be happy going through it by myself too.

At first I wanted to just go through and pick out the ones that looked the most fun, but after a few I decided to start over and go in order. It is a good way to cover it all and to challenge myself and the kids to do things we would normally shy away from trying. This week we did the contour drawing lesson and I introduced the boys to charcoal for drawing. I would have liked to sit down and really taken my time to do one, but that just wasn’t happening on this particular day. Maybe later.

This summer I bought the older boys nice sketchbooks with heavy paper. We have been using them for more ‘serious’ art projects. This helps solve the problem of where to hang things and I think it makes the boys really try their hardest knowing they can’t just wad up the page and start over (well technically they can, but I don’t let them). I hope to have a collection of their sketchbooks one day. The only downfall of these books is if I do want to frame something I have to tear and trim the edges.

This guy is four. Some of the lessons in the book are a little advanced for him, but can still be made to work. He likes trying it all anyway.

Such a serious little artist.

While we drew…Little One was napping…and FireCracker was pretending Poppy was her baby.

I know I am terrible these days at responding to comments, but I really do try. I also know having some kind of email notification if I do respond to your comment would be nice. It only took me four years of blogging to finally search for a WordPress plugin to add that would work (fyi it is WordPress Comment Reply Notification). I know, with a very obvious name like that it is sad it took me this long to install it!

So, if you have a question you’ve asked before ask it again today. I’ll try to do some catch up on responses.

Happy Friday!