Copy Cat

They say imitation the sincerest form of flattery. 

Natalie drew this:

Irene admired it and carefully copied it:

Leaning Tower of Pisa

Our latest article project was on a recent earthquake in Italy. The article was an especially rich one and involved many different subjects. Because of Italy's many historic buildings, we made Leaning Towers of Pisa that I think turned out nice!

Natalie - note the clouds!

Caleb

Annalise

Natalie's Self Portrait

Spot on!  (The line at her mouth is a straw.)

Background details show a playground.

 Natalie draws A LOT.  When the big kids watch a movie, most of the time she gets bored with it and goes to find the paper.  She will draw 5+ pages -front and back- filled with drawings and hardly look up.  My suspicion is that she is telling a story in her drawings, but getting the details from her isn't easy.  It is very hard for her to stop drawing.  If you ask her to draw one thing, she will keep adding extras until you take the paper away - or until there is no white space left.

A typical Natalie drawing.

Mommy and Natalie - I love how we both have blonde hair and bows!  The black "fingers" are bracelets.  She forgot to draw my arms.

Self Portraits: Then and Now

2011

2015

Animal Morphs

This was fun and easy. We made Animal Morphs and chose the animals to mix with the spinner from our animal bingo game.  You could just pick three animals.  The results:

Panpeacomingo

Dubutterfish

A princess observes a turtle and a lobster...by Natalie.

Rabowleep

Girapigpard

More Mr. Otter Art Projects

We did several projects with Mr. Otter, not all of them photographed well - mostly because I forget to take pictures of them until night time and the lighting in our house is horrible (this is a "So Miami" thing, I guess they figure we can't compete with perfect sunlight, so why bother?) and there is "something wrong" (as I mentioned before - orange light) with the camera.

This one is drawing a frontal view of a face.  Annalise has always liked to draw realistic faces and this tutorial was very gratifiying for her because it helped her draw a face and have it turn out much more like what she envisioned.

These are from the egg shell dragon project.  This is a harder project and has several steps - including removing the egg shell membranes.

Toothless by you-know-who

Annalise didn't want to do a dragon.

I made one of the dragon Kazul from Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing with Dragons.

A Basket of Ribbons

 One of our break goals was to look at art.  To accomplish this, I chose several paintings from the Art Renewal Center website and set them as the desktop background on my computer.  I kept them up until we all seemed to know everything that was in the picture - we didn't get through as many as I planned, but it still worked pretty well.

One we used was called A Basket of Ribbons by Christen Brun.  We decided to remake the painting as a photo - check out the painting here and see what you think or our recreation:

With sepia tone to match the painting a little more.

It turns out there are lots of paintings of people selling ribbons.  I guess it was either a popular career or one that was interesting to paint!

Watercolor Sunsets

We are starting to have a long list of skills that we have learned "on Youtube".  From pulling teeth without pain to repairing major appliances, you can learn just about anything there.  We found the channel for Mr. Otter Art Studio and have used their tutorials several times.  They are usually short - under 5 minutes - which is encouraging for kids.

This is from their video for a watercolor sunset.   (We also used their tutorial to do the shaving cream hearts.)

Caleb

This one was mine.

Annalise

Animals and The Moon

Wolves just seem to go hand in hand with a full moon.  However, when Caleb did a wolf report for his Little House class last fall, we learned that wolves do not howl at the moon.  They howl to find each other and it just looks cool seeing them silhouetted in the moonlight.

Many other animals do change their behavior based on the phase of the moon.  We did some online research and discovered that some animals become more active during full moons while others become more reclusive (predator vs. prey). 

Still we decided to use wolves as the focus of this craft.

Cut out a full moon.

Trace a wolf onto black paper to make a silhouette and cut it out.  (Cut out a piece to be the ground too.)

Layer it all together on dark blue paper and voila!

Moon Art

Although it looks like all we did was eat, we did have a few moon projects that were not food oriented!

One of my favorites:

I get a lot of art ideas from elementary school art teacher blogs.  I think that is where this one came from.

On a white sheet of paper, trace a plate for your moon.  Fill the circle with pieces of masking tape.  Don't go for uniformity, different sizes make this look more realistic.  Cut the circle out but allow a paper border around the moon - an inch or so is enough.  Using the same plate, trace a circle on a piece of black construction paper.  Cut that circle out and layer the two pieces together so that the masking tape moon fits in the hole.  Glue them together, add some paper stars and the tape the project to a sunny window and get a little moon glow in the daytime!

Brian and Adrianne by Annalise

Brian, I think she gave you too much hair!

Elsa and Olaf by Natalie

Egyptian Cat Art

We are studying Egypt this week in Annalise's world book.  She seems to really enjoy learning about other countries.  Usually she completes the workbook page and finds the country on the world map the 1st day.  The 2nd day we usually watch a YouTube about the country.  After that it really depends on the country.  For China we read a book about the Great Wall, for Canada we matched Canadian animals to their tracks, for Cameroon we looked at a missionary's blog.  Egypt is kind of confusing.  There is Ancient Egypt, that ends and a very long period of time passes, and then there is modern Egypt.  Mostly we have focused on Ancient Egypt because it is easier to find kid friendly activities for that.  Today we made pictures of Egyptian cats and read about how Ancient Egyptians viewed cats.  (Let's just say they all belonged to Pharaoh!)

First I talked them through drawing the cat.  I copied an art project I found on an elementary school's art blog.

Then we outlined the cat in marker.  (Natalie loves to draw and her drawing is improving quickly.)

We added a horizon line and some distant pyramids and a sun.

Some of it we colored with crayons, other parts we painted in water color.

Caleb's

Natalie's - hers got very busy once she added the color.  You can still see her curly cat tail and the "claws" that she added spontaneously!  The ears are actually the part in the small purple circles.  I think the person next to the cat was supposed to be Pharaoh...or maybe a princess.  Princesses show up pretty often in Natalie's drawings!

Annalise's - she really got into the fact that Ancient Egyptians put jewelry on their cats!

Interesting trivia - when a family's resident cat (remember the cat was Pharaoh's) died, the family showed their mourning by shaving off their eyebrows!

A Girl with a Headband

(The little scribbles on the top left side are her signature.)