Art with Anholt's artists activity book

Today we did art, inspired by Anholt’s artists activity book (at the Book People – they’re having a Week of Wonder this week, Wednesday’s offer is a flash sale see here) It’s an excellent resource, we’ve borrowed it from the library just now, but I think it’s going on my must purchase list. It’s not just painters either, there’s a good range of artists, including sculptors. You get a double page spread about the artist in question, and then instructions on how to work in their style. Plenty of material to keep us going for quite a while.

Here are small children, drawing. Cute, isn’t it? 😉

We talked about the swirly colours in Van Gogh’s portraits, and got out the acrylic paints. Smallest didn’t want to do a portrait of anyone except her imaginary friend, and she did it really rather beautifully. Tigerboy did swirls. I waited until they’d got bored (two pieces of paper each!) before I sat down with a piece of paper to look at the Monet section of the book.

I find watercolours intimidating. They don’t behave in obvious manners – I take on board the happy accident idea, but still, a bit scary. I’m not too displeased with today’s effort though. I laid down the first colours with my Cotman’s sketching box, then attempted the details of people with my Derwent Academy Watercolour Pencils. (Amazon link.)

I like them more than the other stuff I think, at least until I figure it out. So I also did this.

Which bugged me for a while – I couldn’t work out what was wrong with it. Until eventually I realised that the stripes shouldn’t be straight – fabric doesn’t hang that way. So I wheeled out Ollie the Oobicoo, to wear Smallest’s cardigan so that I could draw it more closely.

I think I’m getting there, what do you reckon?

(Laurence Anholt, by the way, is on twitter, and he’s lovely. Working on another in the artist’s series apparently. Why not look him up?)