I am a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew. All opinions are my own.
During our home-school days, Mary and I have never had an actual art curriculum even though she loves art very much. I just haven't been able to find one to suit her needs. We did however try an online art class but Mary wasn't really into it. There's no substitute for using your actual hands. So eventually we started going to a home-school art class at our local arts guild. But due to lack of participation, the class was canceled. So for a long time, we haven't had art in our daily routine.
But for the past month, we've been able to use ARTistic Pursuits Inc., Sculpture Technique Model, in our daily home-school routine. When I was in school, art was once a week and it was always looked forward to. Since I don't have a strict routine on what I follow with Mary, we do art when we have the materials and the time. Usually this ends up to be once a week for us too.
For art, I believe it's a lot more than actually drawing something or learning from a book. I love showing Mary about art through museums. We spend a lot of time at our local art museum, especially when they change out the exhibits. Just this week we went over to see their new exhibit and I had Mary go ahead and do a color scavenger hunt.
Making the scavenger hunt was super easy too. Before we went to the museum, I went to Lowe's and got a bunch of free paints swatch samples. When I got home, I hole punched them at the top and put a string through them to tie them together. Then when we got to the museum, I fanned them all out for Mary and let her go around and try to find the colors I had. It was a really hands on way to see the colors and explore the art more.
And since the book we received from ARTistic Pursuits Inc. was Sculpture Technique Model, what better way to introduce it than going to an outdoor sculpture field? I planned a field trip to our local one for the home-school kids in our area and a tour leader came out and explained each of the sculptures. Most of ours were very abstract but it was still fun to see how the kids interpreted them.
To start our lessons with Sculpture Technique Model, I went through the book by myself to see just what would be needed. Most of the projects were based in putty, clay or wool so I knew I would need those materials on hand. But since I don't have any wool around and wasn't sure where to get any, I decided we would start with putty.
Putty is super easy to work with and it's a great starter for any sculpture lesson. I also decided that we wouldn't do the book in order either. The book itself is perfect for that since you can skip to different parts if you want without worrying that you missed something. So the section we started on first was Project 4, the Pinch Method. Basically it's teaching how to make pinch pots out of clay. Since I was never very good at sculpture as a teenager and I wanted to start off slow with Mary, this lesson was perfect.
First we gathered our materials and then decided what we wanted our pinch pots to look like. Since we're studying about fossils right now, we decided that inside the pots, we wanted to make indents almost like a fossil.
The book showed us everything we needed to make the pots and we were finished within a few minutes. Then we took the materials we wanted to use to make the indents and pushed them into the bottoms.
The first one we made has a sand dollar emblem in the bottom and the second one looks like a shell. Overall they turned out great and we learned art plus science at the same time!
Sculpture Technique Model currently is recommended for ages 11-18 and retails for $47.95. I would suggest it to anyone who really wants to learn sculpture in a straightforward way, pace yourself way.
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