Art Together Giveaway

At our house art takes many forms: a color pencil drawing, a paper mache mountain, an abstract collage filled with ripped bits of cardboard, pipe cleaners, and bottle caps, or even rocks gathered and arranged in just the right way. There are few bounds to what we consider art. Even when mining books or websites for ideas, the things we run across are more like jumping off points, rather than the ultimate project to be followed step by step.

And, I learned early on that any attempt to get these kids of mine to conform to a cookie cutter project was going to quickly fail. That is, it would be considered a failure if I wanted the end result to look like the one in the book, on the website, or the cute little example on Pinterest.  The successful result would be that they would take all of the supplies I had gathered for this special project and make something completely original and unexpected. I just had come to see it as a success!

When we are between projects and the kids are in a bit of a lull, I like to introduce new techniques or skills to inspire, or add to their stockpile of internal resources.

And this leads me to Amy and how much I really appreciate her approach to art. Her focus on process and technique over result is just what I need in guiding these kiddos of mine to grow their skill set, and continue to create art uniquely their own.

I was excited when she asked me to take a peek at her new e-zine, Art Together - named after her wonderful series on art with children, because I am always game for new art inspiration in the form of technique, philosophy and skills!

This week we have spent time with some of the exercises and suggestions made by Amy in Art Together. It has been wonderful to see some of those lightbulb moments that come with not only learning something new, but applying it in new and creative aways.

A color mixing review, and talk about tone, brought on new inspiration to not only make a color, but play with the tone and the exact match to what was in the minds eye.

Which, in turn, resulted in just the right green for the top of the pond!

Continuing with the theme of color in this issue, we used the color wheels we created to paint with color schemes in mind, combining this with the suggested activity of using black outlines with color. For our black outlines we used india ink with a stick as our drawing utensil, filling in with watercolor.

The results were stunning. It was so neat to see how the colors complement each other and how the different schemes work together to make a visually pleasing piece. 

Along the way Amy shares links and visuals of famous artists, with a splash of history to add to the understanding of a philosophy or technique. She also shows examples of art from her own children, which my kids loved to see.

We still have more to do and lots of resource suggestions to check out. This issue will keep us busy for quite some time.

Amy has generously offered to give an issue of Art Together away to one lucky reader. 

To enter the giveaway please leave a comment on this post. If you would like to share something you love about art, making art with kids, or even what most intimidates you about it, we would love to hear your thoughts! Optional sharing, of course. 

Comments will close and I will announce a winner here on Friday, October 4th. 

In the meantime click on over to check out Art Together and all of the other wonderful posts and resources Amy has over on her blog!

And the winner is Kim! 

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