Lesson 2 – Getting Started

After decades of teaching, this is what I’ve found:

Great Art Lessons have 10 key characteristics. 

In this lesson, you’ll learn how using these essential characteristics helps your young artist enjoy learning and improving their art. All of these characteristics are used in the Homeschooling Art curriculum. 

1) SIMPLE 

You know how I said you need a whole bunch of lists, different methods, instructions, how-tos, and other secret knowledge to teach art? No? Well that’s because I never said that. At least not that way. 

I said you need 3 tools. 

1. Methods to train
2. Encouraging know-how
3. Lesson plans 

Now I’ve repeated these 3 tools 3 times. It’s simple and easier to remember. 

2. FUN 

Why do artists make art? Because they 1) enjoy it; 2) they want to express themselves, and 3) they like the praise when their work is good. Enjoying art for a child means it must be loads of fun. A project needs to be more than just about how to do something, it also needs interesting components. Even when students are older, having fun elements in the lessons really makes it more enjoyable. 

If artists are enjoying themselves, then they practice more. When they practice, they improve.  

As they improve, an they enjoy it even more! 

The lessons you’re about to use have the same kinds of simple devices to help students remember and learn important concepts. These are not only simple, but also concrete, meaning that there is no abstract thinking needed. 

3) CONCRETE 

A concept that is found in art teaching, is the idea of negative spaces. But this is a very abstract idea, and hard for kids to think about. What are negative spaces?  

It’s not easy to explain this kind of concept to a child: 

“Negative spaces are the spaces in-between positive spaces. Well, I guess the positive spaces would be better labeled as solids and not spaces. Things like a chair are positive and the space around and through the holes in the chair… no, not holes in the seat, that you would fall through, I mean holes in the legs, or the back, like in-between the… no, not like swiss cheese holes…” 

Even if the young artist understands, they have a hard time remembering to look at something that is an abstract memory. They need it to be concrete. 

The following is an example of one of our teacher talks, which is a dialog you can use to speak to art students in a way that protects their self-worth and also explains things in simple, memorable ways. These teacher talks are all through all of our lessons. 

Teacher Talk 

“When you’re drawing a hand like mine [hold up your hand], you see all the finger-shapes? You would probably look closely at those shapes as you draw them. Well, here’s a cool new idea for you; look at the air-shapes too. You can also see all the air-shapes in-between the fingers.  

“If you draw all the finger shapes accurately that’s great… but, what if you drew them too close together? The fingers would look accurate, but the whole hand would not. Your drawing wouldn’t look good to you even though you drew the shapes well. This happens a lot with artists. 

You can solve this problem though! If you draw the air-shapes accurately too, then your finger shapes will be in the right place, and you will have drawn the whole hand perfectly accurate. Won’t you be a lot happier with your drawing of the hand? 

The abstract “negative spaces” has been made concrete as “air-shapes”. 

4. CLEAR 

Have you ever read a lesson plan and exclaimed, “What are they saying? This person can’t communicate at al!” It’s very hard to be clear when you’re writing step-by-step instructions. However, if you do write everything out in great detail, then it can be too long, and hard to read. Neither way is very communicative. So, in our lessons we have worked to be both clear and simple too.  

Clarity is something that we can always use feedback on though, so if you see something that needs work, please comment on it so we can make it better. 

5. EXPRESSION 

Everyone loves a story. The best story of all? Well, that’s my story, of course.  

Students are creating their own story with every piece of artwork they make. This is the most important thing to them, which means they desperately want to make their own decisions about their art. 

You want to know the biggest complaint we hear from students about their public school art teachers? “They never let me do what I want!” 

This is the very core of being an artist – self-expression. So how do you get students to do specific exercises and lesson plans that focus on the things that improve their art? You must allow as much choice by the artist as possible. If there is a still life, then they need to arrange it. If there is an animal project, they need to choose the animal. 

We call this, Artists’ Choice. Free draw implies that you can play, so we quickly learned to avoid that term, and we replaced it with something that sounds important. Having a choice sounds really good too, and tagging it with the identity of an artist elevates what you’re doing.  

Some days we devote the entire lesson to artists’ choice, and the kids really look forward to these lessons. Even so, we use it to teach things like how to plan your work and how to set up for different media. How do you choose what to do? This takes effort and discipline, or you may end up daydreaming for a couple of hours, or being overwhelmed with too many choices and shutting down. 

One great technique is to set a time limit for each step: 5 minutes for inspiration (looking at other artists’ work); 10 minutes for finding reference.  

6. SUCCESS 

It’s good to put this next, because it relates to the choices I mentioned in the last section. 

Imagine a student asking to paint a lion. Then letting them look through random photos of lions until they find one they like. The photo they chose is taken at night, and the camera flash has blasted away all the shadows that define the face, and made the eyes glow. The mane has a gossamer edge all around it, with the millions of cream-colored hairs ending on the black background. They love this photo, and this particular lion is now their friend for life.  

However, a photo like this is a disaster waiting to happen. It will cause the student to not enjoy themselves and almost surely will lead to a painting they dislike. 

Painting fuzzy hair is very difficult, and kids tend to outline their work. There is no way to outline a hairy man. Because our brains fill in the gaps in real life, we see information in photos that is not actually there, so kids can’t paint what they think they see. A painting is very different. It’s an interpretation of the world, and when people look at it, they tend to criticize their brain doesn’t fill in the gaps like in real life. This means many photos can lead to frustrating and un-liked paintings. 

So photos need to be curated for success, and we’ve done that for you in our lessons! If your artist needs their own photo reference, make sure the photo looks great, and doesn’t have any blurry areas. 

One more thing: is it ok to copy someone else’s photos? The answer is yes, if you are doing it to learn, for a personal portfolio, or just for yourself to keep. It’s no, if you’re selling your work or promoting yourself for any kind of profit. 

If you need photos, take your own when you see something inspirational. You can also look at the website: morguefile.com which has free photos that are ok to use in paintings to sell. 

7. COMPREHENSIVE 

Most art curriculum falls into two categories, and neither takes the development of the artist into consideration.  

Emotional Lessons 

Students create projects based on famous artworks or craft-like things that are loads of fun, but there is no goal other than making today feel good. Eventually the fun leads to frustration. There is no plan at all for training and learning the full range of techniques. 

Fragmented Subjects  

Art is compartmentalized into one media at a time. You take a course on drawing, watercolor, or color theory. If you sign up for a course in watercolor, and you want to try something else and come back to watercolor later, you can’t. You’re stuck on one thing for a while. 

More critically, any student who is painting a watercolor needs to know both color theory and how to draw accurately. You need a comprehensive approach. 

We’ve designed our lessons to be taken in an order that supports learning things that go well together, and keeps kids interested. Some of the lessons are seasonal, so they relate to what’s going on around us. Having a plan for the big picture leads to happy artists. 

8. COMPLETE 

I hate it when you get a lesson plan, and then you have a lot of work to do gathering and creating all kinds of teaching tools. Don’t you? 

So Homeschooling Art has everything in place. Slideshows, Pin boards, videos, examples, teacher talks, worksheets, and references. Even checklists for supplies can be viewed and printed. 

9. RELIABLE 

My wife is a great cook. She once splurged and bought a cookbook by a very well-known chef-person. I was looking forward to some great dinners! But after several meals from this book, we were both pretty upset. She realized that they had made up most of the recipes without testing them! Just so it would be a big book, presumably.  

So relying on the famous-ness of the chef-person didn’t really work. I’m a successful artist but so are many teachers, so don’t rely on my word. Rely on this: our lessons have been tested in classrooms for 15 years. 

10. REVIEW 

This is a no-brainer. However, artists like to think once they’ve done a lesson, they never need a refresher on it. We try to make the reviews very different, and with more choices and challenges. 

And that is my list of the 10 essential characteristics of teaching art and for a great curriculum. Review it often.