Category Archives: art history

{Art Together} Take Your Art on a Field Trip

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{This post is part of the art together series. You can see all the posts in the series here.}

Drawing at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

One of the best, unexpected things that happened once I made art-making a priority for all of us is that my kids became accustomed to bringing sketchbooks on day trips and outings. This is as simple as it sounds; when packing for the day, sketchbooks and pencils go into the bag along with snacks and water. Why do I like having our sketchbooks along?

* Inspiration is everywhere! Sometimes you just need to draw your idea when you see it.

* It’s a balancing activity in a busy day—a time to focus and settle and look closely.

* It adds another layer to remembering the day. We have not just photos and memories but drawings and notes.

* If we’re learning about something in particular, those drawings and notes are part of project work.

Sketching in our own yard.

You don’t need to go to a museum or tourist destination to take your art somewhere new. We take our sketchbooks into the yard and on nature walks too. Take them on a city walk or on your daily errands. Sometimes the kids ask for them at certain points, and sometimes I ask if anyone wants to join me in drawing something. Sometimes ours don’t come out of the backpack at all during an outing; that’s okay, too. I’m not trying to force them on anyone, rather, just make sure they’re available.

Some things to keep in mind:

* If you’re visiting a museum or other institution, make sure to check their visitor’s guidelines before bringing your sketchbooks. Most art museums, for example, list restrictions on what type of drawing materials are allowed, and some limit the size of your sketchbook, too.

* If you’re going someplace where guidelines don’t apply, consider bringing along more than just drawing pencils. Experiment with watercolor pencils, watercolors, and colored pencils. A water brush makes using paints and watercolor pencils even easier. This shows you how to make your own.

* Clipboards can be really handy for loose sheets of paper.

* If you want to be ready for anything, consider putting together a traveling art box for the trunk of the car.

I bring my sketchbook when I go places by myself, too.

The more you and your kids keep a sketchbook with you, the more it will get used. I keep this as rule-free and simple as possible. At minimum, I have a pencil pouch with a variety of drawing pencils. If the destination allows, I’ll bring my pouch of drawing pens and markers, too. We all have more than one sketchbook going, and the kids bring whichever one they want. (It would be more organized to fill one completely before starting another, I know, but I have problems doing that myself.) It’s nice to date the drawings and make a note of where you were and what you were looking at. And that’s about it.

Take it Further

Brainstorm a list of where you might take your sketchbooks. Is there any place on your list you go regularly—daily or weekly? Challenge yourselves to take your sketchbook and draw in the same place more than once. Do you notice anything new the more you visit? Does your drawing habit force you to look more closely?

Take your sketchbook to the zoo or a farm and try to draw some animals. How is your child’s approach different from yours? Which animals are easier or harder to draw? I find chickens really hard—they never stop moving! They force you to practice gesture drawings.

I love this little post of Lori’s from several years ago, showing her and her son’s drawings of a place they pass often.

Further Resources

There are numerous books full of sketchbook inspiration.

Clare Walker Leslie focuses on nature sketchbooks. If that’s what you’re called to sketch, you’ll enjoy looking through her books for inspiration.

Artist’s Journal Workshop is just gorgeous to page through and has information on materials as well.

Drawn In: A Peek into the Inspiring Sketchbooks of 44 Fine Artists, Illustrators, Graphic Designers, and Cartoonists is on my wish list, so I can’t tell you exactly what it contains. But I suspect, by the title, it covers a wide range of styles, reinforcing that a sketchbook is whatever you want it to be.

If you’re drawn to cityscapes, you may find inspiration in The Art of Urban Sketching.

Truly, a few minutes searching Amazon for “sketchbook” or “art journal” will bring up so many choices…I could spend all day browsing there.

Share Your Work

Reminder, if you have any photos of art-making going on at your house that you’d like to share, feel free to join the Flickr group.

Painting Like Monet

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(Inspired by Monet, of course, and Linnea in Monet’s Garden.)

Materials: Watercolor paper, tempera cakes and/or liquid watercolors, brushes of various sizes

What with all our looking and reading and visiting, N was keen to try to paint with dabs, like the Impressionists. So we opened the Art Book for Children (Book One) to the picture of Monet’s Waterlily Pond to inspire us, set ourselves up with tempera cakes and paper, and got started.

There are various lesson plans online for teaching children how to paint like the Impressionists, but my admittedly quick look only found lessons that had a specific end point, and you may have figured out by now that that’s not often how we approach things in the studio! N wanted to experiment, and so he did, producing a picture with various elements, where he’d tried different things.

Later in the week, N decided to make another picture using dabs and splotches, this time using liquid watercolors.

Although we have a full set, I don’t put all the colors out at once; I ask the kids what colors they want to use. N almost always asks for red, blue, and yellow because, he says, “I like primary colors because I can make any color I want with them.” And so he did.

While he was working, he asked me why Monet’s bridge is so famous, anyway. “Because he painted it,” I said. I watched him turn that over in his mind and realize that an artist has the ability to make his subject famous simply through his own interest. Powerful, isn’t it?

N wanted to know if we could visit Giverny, and I explained that it’s in Europe, but if we ever get to France as a family, we’ll make sure to visit Monet’s Gardens, too. “But remember you want to go,” I told him, “because if you get to Europe someday on your own when you’re older, you should have a list of things you want to see while you’re there.”

When I visited Europe over 15 years ago, I didn’t have Giverny on my list. Hopefully I’ll get back with N, but if not, I bet he’ll send me postcards. Are there any art-related items on your list of places you hope to visit?

Looking and Reading

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On one of the many snow days in the past month, I brought out some of my art books for the kids–at first, mainly my six-year-old–to look at. (Click pictures to embiggen and see titles.)

(Appropriately, my art history book from college is anchoring this pile!) We started by flipping through The Art Book for Children. I was curious what would interest my son. Right away he wanted to know what was going on in this picture:

How exciting it must be to see that for the first time–an adult, flinging paint around like that. (That, of course, is Jackson Pollock.)

He was also struck by the Op Art pieces by Bridget Riley. The other kids were drawn in, and we spent some time flipping through the books, talking about what we saw. My six-year-old also gravitated right to a small black-and-white reproduction of Van Gogh’s Cypresses, which was in the Georgia O’Keeffe book.

The next time I was at the library, I picked out some more books to bring home

and requested a few more through inter-library loan.

(The Op Art book that is open in the picture above is Optic Nerve by Joe Houston and Dave Hickey, and the large Pollock book is Jackson Pollock by Ellen Landau.)

A few days after I read Linnea in Monet’s Garden to my six-year-old, he gave a succinct and correct explanation of Impressionism to his brother. Meanwhile, we’ve learned that Cypresses is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and we are making Someday Plans to see it in person.

As with anything else, when you start looking at one thing–an artist, a movement, a picture–you begin to pull on threads that lead to other things. We are meandering through some art history right now, seeing what we like and finding connections. And it is so exciting to me both to share artists I like, and why, and to hear what my children like and are responding to. I’m thinking we’ll be trying some different styles in our own studio, too.

The other night, N asked, “What do you think it would look like if the Impressionists tried to do a close-up flower like Georgia O’Keeffe?” I don’t know! How exciting to wonder about it, though.