Homeschool Art: Drawing with Children, and the Foreground

Our latest Drawing With Children lesson taught us how to draw things that are in front of or behind each other.

My favorite aspect of Drawing with Children is how PRACTICAL it is. If you're a natural at art, then the step by step method taught for doing this will undoubtedly seem silly and obvious to you. I assure you, however, that for the children, and for me--the basest, most beginning-level drawer--the instructions were exactly what we needed to do this successfully:

This lesson also marked the first Drawing with Children lesson that Will completed completely without fuss, entirely without reminders from me to focus and put forth her best effort. If Will has now internalized the self-confidence to draw without resistance, then I will be THRILLED.

Our assignment was to complete an artwork that had things in front and things behind, taking time and putting forth our best effort, including creative details and embellishments, and covering the page. Will drew an elephant robot (clear evidence that art instruction does not kill creativity, yes?):

I drew a scene inspired by our history lessons:

You can see where I totally messed up trying to put that second pyramid behind the first one, and then added patterns to all of them to cover up the mistake. This is what you're supposed to do according to Drawing with Children, and why we're asked to draw in marker, not pencil. Perfectionists, beware: we don't erase!

 Syd drew several geometric-themed "family portraits," then pretended that she was a famous artist and autographed them all for her fans (practicing her cursive all the while!), drawing Will into her play, which I'm sure helped Will have this better experience with the lesson. When she was bored with that, she decided that she liked my Egypt drawing, and copied it:

Drawing with Children is also really big on copying, and in our next art lesson (after Valentine's Day, probably, because those valentines aren't going to make themselves!) we'll be creating inspiration books and cutting images out of magazines that we can practice copying.