Welcome to Exploring the World of Art, Homeschool Art Lessons for Kids of All Ages

Course Sample for Exploring the World of Art, Our Homeschool Art Lessons for Kids

Unit One: Colored-Pencil Drawing – Animals

In this project, we will create a colored pencil drawing of an animal.

Supplies needed for this project:

• Sketching pencil
• Eraser
• Sketching paper*
• Set of colored pencils*

*Most sketching paper works well with colored pencils, although there is special paper designed specifically for colored pencils if you’d rather get that. Check what the package says. If it says “works well with all dry mediums,” it will work for both pencil and colored pencil.

*You can purchase a good set of colored pencils at any craft store. I don’t recommend getting a cheap brand such as Rose-Art. Crayola colored pencils are fairly high quality, as are others such as Sargent Art. If you want an extremely high quality brand, you can go with Prismacolor, although it is also expensive.

Lesson One: Pencil Sketch

Supplies needed:

• Drawing pencil
• Eraser
• Drawing paper

This week’s project is a colored-pencil drawing of an animal of your choice. Today’s lesson will be the basic sketch of the animal. After you gather your supplies, you will need to choose a picture of an animal. You can look in a book or on the Internet for this. Try to find a colorful animal or one with a lot of color surrounding it. For example, you could choose a plainer animal such as an elephant, but it can still be a colorful picture if it’s an elephant in the savanna. If you are able to, print off your picture roughly the same size that you want to draw it; this way it is easier to get the correct proportions on your own drawing.

You can choose to draw this sketch with colored pencils if you wish, but colored pencil do not erase very well, so I would recommend using a graphite pencil for this first line drawing. Set your photograph close to your paper and look at it a lot while you draw. The more you look at it, the more familiar you will become with the shapes and lines in it, and the better your own drawing will be.

Before we start, please remember that there are no mistakes in art. This is hard to believe if a project does not turn out as you had imagined it, but it is true. Your drawing will be unique and completely your own creation.

When you are ready to begin, look at the outside edges of your animal first. How far away are they from the edges of the paper?

Start by lightly drawing lines that show the edges. Try to have good proportions and not make your animal go off the paper because you started drawing it too high or too low. When you draw lines that aren’t quite right, try to go over them and fix them rather than immediately erasing them. What shapes do you see in the animal? Does it have a round circular body, or is it more like a rectangle? Keep these things in mind as you sketch.

Keep redrawing, erasing lines that don’t belong. Little by little, you will see the animal more clearly and accurately. You can do some shading if you want (I did some shading on my red panda to indicate which parts need to be a darker color) or keep it simple and do only the lines.

Once you’ve got it close to how you want it to look, congratulations! You’re finished! In the next lesson, we will start adding color.

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