Studying the Art of the Middle Ages: A Review of Artistic Pursuits Inc.

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

Like most homeschooling families, our family enjoys incorporating art into our other subjects. Artistic Pursuits Inc. makes that very easy to do with their four-year course for kindergarten and elementary students. It takes children through history as they produce a variety of works of art. In the first volume, students work on building their visual vocabulary (read our review here: Building Visual Vocabulary). Then you can either complete the volumes in chronological order or pick and choose which ones interest you and your children. We have reviewed both volumes 1 and 2 (Art of the Ancient review) so we decided to pick Art of the Middle Ages which is volume 3 to review this time.

Our children love learning about anything relating to knights and castles so this book was an excellent choice for our family to review! There are 18 lessons which cover a variety of art techniques. There is a combination of text lessons and video lessons to teach your children how to produce different artworks. No matter which type of lesson you are using, all of the materials are listed in the book.

The video lessons provide some background historical information presented by video host Ariel Holcomb. The video lesson then presents the art project and instructs how to complete the art project, step by step. You can choose to view the video lessons in order or select from the main screens. When the video lesson demonstrates how to create the art project, you will be watching an over the shoulder viewpoint as the art teacher, Brenda Ellis, works.

The text lessons vary in that they sometimes provide prep notes (which can be helpful if you are teaching the lessons to a large group of children outside a classroom setting). There is then historical information given and questions to answer such as "Can you name the bold colors used by the artist?" in the Christ in Majesty tapestry. After viewing real-world examples, the steps are laid out for how you and your children can create the art project yourselves. Photos of the work in progress are included as well as a photo of a finished product by a child.

Here you can see the historical information (surrounded by the tissue paper we used).

How Did We Use Art of the Middle Ages in Our Homeschool?

While we could very easily have used this alongside a history curriculum focusing upon the Middle Ages or a literature curriculum in which we read about the kings and courts of the past, I choose to work through the projects with our children based upon what materials we had and which ones they wanted to try out.

We completed the following projects:

• Paper Loom Weave: The kids completed both a basic weave and then the crown. I love that our children could complete this project more than once if they wanted to weave using different colors.  

• Art in Monasteries – Medieval Illumination: We used clip art and scrap paper rather than having our children draw pictures to add to their large letters. They also decided to choose letters based upon their gaming characters. 

• Art in Basilicas – Byzantine Mosaics: This fit in perfectly as we had been watching a program that shared the mosaics in the Christian churches like the Hagia Sophia. 

• Straw Loom Weave: I think I had more fun with this project than the kids. Maybe in a few years when they are older, they will want to try again. They had trouble with moving the yarn over and under the straws so our older son and I helped them complete their project. 

• Low-Relief: Our children had so much fun creating their own modified versions of shields. We used animals from the ocean as it is almost summer and then used modified materials. This project encouraged our son to want to read more about heraldry and what all the colors and symbols stood for in the Middle Ages. 

• Art in Windows: Gothic Glass was a very fun project as the kids got to pick and choose different color tissue paper to create the glass effect. 

I used the lessons from the Art of the Middle Ages as fun homeschooling lessons. We often like to incorporate arts and crafts into our week so these were perfect. I could share a bit of history about the topic with our children. We either watched the video lesson where historical information was shared or we read the text and answered the questions together. Then our children could have fun creating their art.

My Thoughts

I love that the book is hardcover with full-color, glossy pages. The quality of the book is fantastic and will be able to last through much referencing. There is also space to keep the discs in the front of the book.

I would love it if the video lessons had more detailed instructions that were either printed in the book or you could download. I like to read and re-read instructions rather than just listen or watch instructions. That is my personal learning style. So when we were watching the video lesson, I wrote down notes to reference for when we would be working on the projects. (I also had trouble playing the discs. We ended up having to play the Blu-ray disc in our gaming console as it would not work in the Blu-ray player. I also could not get the DVD disc to work.)

I like that you have the option to purchase the materials directly from Artistic Pursuits Inc. (with or without the book). However, you can make substitutions if necessary and your projects will be okay. For example, I thought we had Gesso which is one of the materials for the Low-Relief project but we didn't. So the kids painted the shield with white paint and then they painted the sections and the animal with regular paint. The shields still turned out really cool.

I would recommend the K-3 books from Artistic Pursuits Inc. as they are well made and provide many great art activities for your children. I love the incorporation of art history which I feel makes the curriculum even more versatile. I also like that we can go back and use the lessons again as our children grow more skilled and create new artwork.

Do You Want to Learn More?

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Artistic Pursuits Inc. offers a great variety of curriculum for your homeschooling needs. Members of the Homeschool Review Crew had the opportunity to review items for PK-12 grades, so be sure to check out their reviews!

Do you have an artist taking their first steps? There is a 16-week summer series where children can learn to draw from observation. Check out the blog here: The Artist's First Steps.

If you are interested in the K-3 level books (like those we have reviewed previously), then perhaps you might want to take a look at the online courses. For example, for the Art of the Middle Ages, you will receive 18 lessons online which is perfect for international homeschooling families.  

Art for the Whole Family: A Review of Beyond the Stick Figure Art School

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

For the past several weeks our family has been working through the Beyond the Stick Figure Complete Drawing Course PLUS 3 Bonus Courses together. These courses are offered by Beyond the Stick Figure Art School and can be by everyone in your household. It is designed to be used as a daily program for the homeschool year but we have been working on different parts in a quicker fashion as fits our needs and homeschool style. With over 60 lessons, we can incorporate art into almost every day of our homeschooling week.  

What is Beyond the Stick Figure Art School? 

Working on the premise that famous artists use techniques and skills that they have learned and practiced, your family will learn the very basics of drawing that they then can take with them into more artwork. The person behind Beyond the Stick Figure is Sally who is from England (so expect an English accent while you are learning your art!). She homeschools her children and wants to share her passion for art with other homeschooling families. 

What Are the Courses? 

There are four courses that we have access to for the review: 

• The Beyond the Stick Figure Complete Drawing Course 
• The Complete Pen & Ink and Watercolor Course
• Introduction to Acrylic Course 
• Introduction to 3D Design Course 

The courses focus on techniques that you can use to develop your drawing skills using various materials. In the first drawing course, the short videos are sometimes accompanied with PDFs to download for drawing, tracing, and practice.

There is a list of materials that you will need to purchase before you begin creating your art that is now available before you start looking at any lessons. You can then view specific videos within the courses that show and discuss the necessary materials. (For example, Acrylic Part 2 Materials, you can view the video that shows the paintbrushes, paints, and other items you will need to create a beautiful brown and white lake scene.)

We had to pick and choose which supplies to purchase for the review of Beyond the Stick Figure courses. As our teenager was going to be working on the painting portion of the course with me, we spent the money we allocated to the course on those supplies. In the future, we will purchase the marker set but with the current state of things we were unable to purchase them. We also had to substitute a few other things (like picking a different color paint) due to being able to go to the craft stores and online supplies being limited. (Personally, I don't think using a different color for our watercolor painting was too detrimental.)

The picture was supposed to be drawn with a black fine point sharpie marker but I couldn't find ours anywhere in the house!

How are the courses set up? When you log into the site, you will see that you need to go through each lesson and watch the videos and then mark them as complete. You cannot skip ahead to the further courses (I went through and marked the courses as complete so we can do the different drawing and painting lessons. This was a bit time-consuming.)

Here you can see the parts of the course are listed to the left side of the screen.
There are a couple of ways to navigate once you have checked off courses as completed. 

But beyond getting the materials you need ready (purchasing or printing out documents) and have accessing to the lessons online, Beyond the Stick Figure Art School can be very easy for homeschooling parents. There is no need to write out lessons or spend time doing the teaching yourself. The instructions are provided in each video.

How Are We Using the Courses in Our Homeschool? 

Our younger children and I are working on the beginning Drawing Courses. There are three parts to the Drawing Course which focuses on the basics of drawing. Our children have been drawing straight lines, curved lines, circles, and dots. They then took those skills and worked on drawing abstract pictures and flowers.

I really like that the children work on 8 x 11.5 papers cut into fourths. It makes it a lot easier to provide them with page after page for drawing as well as being less intimidating, as is talked about in the lessons. (You aren't staring at a huge drawing page that you have to fill.)

For many of the beginning lessons, our children worked on mastering drawing lines and shapes.

There were also some parts in the early lessons of the Drawing course where children practiced dots, circles, straight lines, and curved lines. We printed out the pages for our younger son to complete included pages that examined primary and secondary colors.

I watched and completed the first Pen & Ink drawing myself. I plan on working on the second one from Part 2 but I need to purchase tracing paper prior to completing the tree scene. I also went through and watched the Introduction to Acrylic Course videos.

I am really looking forward to completing this painting. I just need the tracing paper!

I am looking forward to painting with acrylics. 

At the end of each course, there is a rubric that you can download so you can determine how well you think you did during the course. The rubric focuses upon self-reflection. So, if your children are younger, you may want to complete it with them.

Our teen and I sat down to complete the watercolor course together. As we did not have access to the recommended gray color paint, we each choose a different color to create our small painting. I think I will have fun practicing this painting more and more to get the technique and details to my liking.

What Are We Looking Forward To?

Our teen son and I are looking forward to working with acrylics. This part of the course is in three parts. We have about half of the supplies we need but with the current state of affairs, it has been difficult to get all the materials suggested or needed. I have gone through and watched them. I can't wait till I can start to practice painting a lovely sky, a mountain scene using brown and white, and another lovely countryside scene.

The final course, which we have not started, is on 3D Design. There are three parts to this course. I think our children will enjoy working on this part as they will get to create an animal.

There are a few things that I feel could make the online courses even better that mostly deal with navigation. I wish that the lessons were labeled with more detail. As in Watercolor Part 1, Day 9: Foreground. It would make it easier to navigate back to lessons when taking a break. And while I understand the skills taught in the courses are meant to build upon each other but it is difficult when one child wants to work on art while another is more interesting in painting. We had to go through and click complete on parts of the courses we actually had not finished yet. Perhaps each course could be individual rather than be grouped together.   

The lessons are full of some great advice – including a video just for moms (or dads) that encourages us as parents to not crush the spirit of our children when they are going through the lessons. Another piece of advice I enjoyed hearing was that of not squeezing the paintbrushes in the paper towel. Never thought anything of doing that till watching the videos at Beyond the Stick Figure. I really think everything is presented in a very clear manner to help those who are not used to drawing or working with the different types of paint or clay used in the courses. If you are looking for a beginners course to help you or your children get started as artists, Beyond the Stick Figure Art School will be a great resource for your homeschool.

Do You Want to Learn More?

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There were many families who had the chance to review the Beyond the Stick Figure Art School courses. Be sure to check out the Homeschool Review Crew reviews!

Virtual Refrigerator Weekly Art Link-Up

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What do you think of when someone says, "arts and crafts"? Do you imagine fun activities where everyone gathers around the kitchen table? Or perhaps you see spilled glitter, glue in your kids hair, and tears spilling as crafts are broken?

I admit I have to be in the mood to do arts and crafts with my kids. I struggle with change and need everything to be set up beforehand, so I do not have to run upstairs for construction paper or downstairs for another glue stick. But when we get the chance to create something together, it is fantastic. The kids – especially our daughter – love to create.

To Make Crafting Time Go More Smoothly 

1. Provide a drawer or box of materials that your kids can use at anytime. Pick things to put in there that won't cause a mess – things that you or the kids can easily clean up. Our kids have access to scrap paper, pencils, and crayons pretty much all the time.

Our son has been creating people using the scrap paper - cutting out the arms, legs, and facial features.

2. Use a prepared kit. There are so many different companies that produce kits for arts and crafts ranging from preschool ages all the way up to teenagers. From the Paper Tube Ocean kit that our daughter received for her birthday to a more elaborate rock tumbler, there are a variety of options for all ages.

One of many kits ready and waiting for your kid.

All the materials are separated and it even comes with a glue stick.

We are making one craft a day. This is the cute lobster. 

 

3. If you are doing a paper craft (like a paper bag puppet or a paper plate craft), prepare everything ahead of time and place all the materials in a thin box and use an envelope for the paper items. I still do this when we are crafting except now I let the kids cut out most of the items themselves.

4. Work on arts and crafts outside!

Sometimes our kids do arts and crafts on their own and other times they need a little bit more help. How do you incorporate art or crafts into your homeschool day?

Won't you join us this week?

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Art of the Ancients – a Review of ARTistic Pursuits Inc.

Looking for a fun and creative way to bring art into your homeschooling experience? ARTistic Pursuits Inc. is "the curriculum for creativity!" Choosing from several different volumes (K-3rd Grade Level, Volumes 1-8), families can easily bring art into their home even if they are not artistic or creative. Last year, our family reviewed the introductory volume, Art for Children, Building a Visual Vocabulary and this year we are using Art of the Ancients, K-3 Vol. 2 to learn about the ancient Mediterranean World and create art representative of the styles of Ancient Greece, Egypt, and other cultures of the time.

It is recommended that one starts with Art for Children, Building a Visual Vocabulary, K-3 Volume 1  and then you can either follow chronological order through volumes 2-8 or you can skip to any historical period that interests you or your children. These volumes from ARTistic Pursuits Inc. provide families with a four-year course from kindergarten to third grade with one art lesson a week planned for you with text and video lessons.

All the materials needed are laid out in the beginning of the book. I simply took the book with me to the arts and crafts store to purchase the items we required. While some of the suggested brands are not always found at your local store, we found what we needed on this trip so we could get started with the lessons.

What Do You Get?

One hard cover volume
2 discs (one blu-ray and one DVD)

Instructions for 18 projects
12 Text Lessons
6 Video Lessons

A list of materials needed from the art materials that we purchased (such as a soft pastel set, 5 lbs. of gray self-hardening clay, and a wire clay cutter) to household items like paper towels and hairspray.

Many of the text lessons also provide instructions for teaching the lesson outside of the home environment to a group of children.

How Much Time Does It Take?

"Each lesson is simple. It takes only ten minutes of your time, and yet your involvement is crucial to learning."


Reading through each lesson with your children and watching accompanying video lessons does not take a lot of time. The majority of the time will be while your children are creating their art. During this time, you can either observe, help, or join in like I have in the past.

Depending upon how much time and effort your child puts into each art project, the lessons can take from 15 minutes to an hour or more. Our five-year-old son usually spent about 30 minutes or so on each project from start to finish (not including the time we sat together and read the background history information). If your children are older, they might spend more time to perfect their art masterpieces.

How Did We Use Art of the Ancients in our Homeschool? 

Even though the lessons are geared for Kindergarten to Third Grade, our preschooler also joined in on the lessons as she likes to do everything her older brother does while homeschooling. The lessons themselves are not very difficult to adapt to complete with both our five-year-old and three-year-old. So, we focus upon the history-related information with our son and our daughter can join in with the drawing and sculpting.

The book is designed so you can do one lesson a week over the course of 18 weeks. We did not space it out in the same manner during our review period. There were some days where our children would happily do two lessons in one day – they were having so much fun!

As we had not used soft pastels in our home yet, we watched the first video lesson twice which instructed us on how to use them to draw pictures. This information would be invaluable for the next several lessons. Soft pastels were used in the lessons on European Cave Drawings, Minoan Fresco Painting, and Art in Pyramids (although we used regular crayons for this project) that we have completed so far.

Some of the kids' artwork using soft pastels 

Another art material we had not yet used in our home was the gray self-hardening clay. (The kids have played with play dough but not a more official art clay.) Our five-year-old son and my husband watched the video lesson together and then made their own hockey player as we love ice hockey (not football).

Art in Minoan Palaces lesson – our son chose a sheep to draw with the soft pastels.

What We Liked 

Just as with the review of the first volume, Art for Children, I really like that Art of the Ancients is a mix of video and text lessons. This provides a great way to meet the needs of a variety of learners. The video lessons are quite clear and both our five-year-old and three-year-old sat and watched the lessons together.

One of our son's favorite lessons was Clay: Slab Building. We watched the video and then with the help of Dad, he started creating his own figure – a hockey player. We had to make some adjustments as we did not have canvas or a rolling pin to use but everything still worked out okay. The only problem we had was that the arms and hockey stick did not adhere to the body figure. Perhaps they weren't scored properly as instructed in the video?

If we had used canvas as suggested in the video, our clay would not have stuck so badly.

Putting together the hockey player.

A finished project! 

The bright colors and images included with the text lessons make it easy to teach the lessons as if reading a story book. Our five-year-old son and I sat together on the couch and read through the history information before working on the art project. For example, before creating an Egyptian-inspired mural, we read the background information on art in pyramids and examined the mural Harvesting and Pressing Grapes using the questions provided in the book. Some of those questions include:

• How do men carry grapes from the vineyard? 
• Can you find jars used for storing the drink that was made from the grapes? 

After answering the questions, our son then made his own mural (inspired by a video game he has been playing lately).

Drawing one of the people on his wall mural.

Coloring in the first scene on the wall mural.

Working on the second scene on his wall mural.

The inclusion of objectives at the end of the book is a fantastic bonus for the homeschooling family. If you want to look for a particular art skill or history topic, you can review the 18 objectives and then pick the lesson to study. This would be beneficial in planning your homeschool schedule. 

I also like the inclusion of a bibliography and the fine art credits so if we wish to look for more information we have a starting point. 

How We Will Use Art of the Ancients in the Future 

As our two younger children get older and their art skills progress, we will be able to revisit the lessons in Art of the Ancients, K-3 Vol 2 as well as expand upon the history presented by doing additional research. Although I know the next project we will probably be doing is that of the Roman Portrait Paintings because our daughter has asked to draw pictures of ourselves. 

Our teen will be studying World History next homeschool year, so I will be able to incorporate some of the art projects into his lessons if he wishes to continue his pursuit of art. (He did join in the art projects last year when we reviewed Volume 1.) So even though the book is for grades K-3, we will be able to use the video lessons to review art techniques and then our teen son can create a clay relief as we study Mesopotamia or draw a portrait as we study Roman mummy portraits.

Art of the Ancients, K-3 Vol 2 is a wonderful hardcover book packed with 64 pages of great information and wonderful visuals! As each lesson includes a sample created image (either by Brenda Ellis or a student), children are sure to see that all art can be beautiful.

If you wish to learn more about ARTistic Pursuits Inc. and the other volumes in the series, you can visit the following sites including reviews by my fellow members of the Homeschool Review Crew.

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