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My kids love when it’s time for art lessons in our homeschool day! ARTistic Pursuits is a company we are familiar with as we have used several of their products over the years. You can read my previous reviews here:
Middle School Book Two, Color and Composition
Early Elementary Book One
WHAT IS ARTISTIC PURSUITS?
ARTistic Pursuits offers a comprehensive curriculum for art instruction which includes art history, art technique, and art instruction. There are books for every grade level from Kindergarten through 12th grade. There are eight volumes for Kindergarten through 3rd grade which focus on the history of art in sequential order. There are two beginner level Art Cores for Upper Elementary, an intermediate level Art Core for grades 7th and 8th, and an advanced level Art Core for 9th through 12th graders.
WHAT DID WE RECEIVE?
For this review, we received Painting with Watercolor Pencils, Art Core 2. These hard-cover books are full-color and come with a DVD containing the video lessons. You can also stream the video lessons online, which is what we did. Art Core 2 has 9 units:
- Primary Colors
- Secondary Colors
- Tertiary Colors
- Complementary Color Pairs
- Neutral Colors
- Color Tint
- Color Values
- Monochrome Colors
- White Space
The art materials we needed to purchase for this course were:
- watercolor pencil set of 12 or more (we bought Prismacolor)
- plastic or vinyl eraser
- hand held pencil sharpener
- 40 water color paper sheets 9×12
- #8 round brush
- 1/4 inch flat brush
- small mop brush
- plastic T-square
- drawing compass
You can also purchase an art supply pack that contains all of the needed materials. I purchased what we needed from Amazon, but it would have been very quick and easy to purchase the art supply pack! You can look at the art supply list for any of the volumes by looking in the sample pages.
There are text and video lessons in this course. The different types of lesson in each unit are:
- Art Materials: Video Instruction – Your child will watch a 6-10 minute video lesson. This video gives step by step directions on the art instruction. The videos show your child how to achieve the technique being taught. The entire art project is completed, sometimes in time lapse, so your child can see exactly what they need to do. Then your child is instructed to make their own piece of art.
- Creativity: Building a Visual Vocabulary – Your child will read the page in the textbook and study the topic of the unit. Your child may be instructed to watch another video or to complete an assignment.
- Art Appreciation and History: American – Your child will be shown a piece of artwork from an American painter. They will read about the artist and then use the techniques they’ve learned about.
- Master Lesson: Assimilating Knowledge and Skills – Your child will create their own work of art, applying what they’ve learned in the unit and using a variety of technique – still life, landscape, and photographs.
HOW DID WE USE ARTISTIC PURSUITS?
Silas, age 12, and Titus, age 10, used this program once or twice a week over the course of the review period. We completed Unit 1 – Primary Colors, and we have moved on to Unit 2 – Secondary Colors. The boys have really enjoyed these art lessons! Working with watercolor pencils has been so much fun for them. They’ve learned quite a bit about technique, the color wheel, shading, and just how much water to add to their paintings.
Learning about hard and soft edges in Unit 2
Still life with primary colors – Unit 1
More still life – Unit 1
Still life with primary colors
WHAT DO I THINK?
I like the new format of their courses. The video lessons are a huge help for those of us who aren’t naturally artists and offer plenty of guidance and tips for making our artwork look nice. I love the fact that art history is included in each unit with the study of a famous artist and piece of their artwork. The quality of the book is fantastic. The pages are glossy and full-color!
I also feel like the assignments are very doable for children of this age range (4th through 6th grade). They take less than an hour to complete, once a week. That would be very easy to add in to your homeschool schedule! We cut our watercolor paper in half most of the time, and that was very helpful for my boys. They didn’t feel as if they had such a huge area to work on so it wasn’t as intimidating. They don’t want to have a lot of white space, and having half a sheet of paper to work with was much easier for them to fill.
