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Norman Rockwell, Edgar Degas, Grandma Moses.  These are a few of the artists we’ve met this year since adding Picture Study to our learning time.  Picture Study is a Charlotte Mason inspired idea.  

At our house, picture study looks like this.  

• I pick an artist and find a nice large book containing his/her paintings from the library.
• Each week, for six weeks, we look at one piece of art from the book.  I keep it displayed prominently in our family room, so that as we pass by it seeps into our memory.  
• Sometime during the week, I take the book down and we look at the painting together.  We spend five minutes trying to remember as many things as we can about the painting and then I close the book.  Everyone takes turn sharing what they remember.  We open the book and see how we did and add elements we might have forgotten.  
• Like the click of camera, now we have added the painting to the gallery in our mind.
• If I find interesting books or videos about the artist, we add those as well.
• Every 6 weeks, we start a new artist.

This takes us up about 10 to 15 minutes in our whole week, and already we have begun building a gallery of great works.

This week, I felt inspired by another element of picture study added by this family.

I confess, I was nervous about M and J’s reactions.  ”I can’t draw that, ” seemed the least of the worries.  Falling to the floor and giving up completely because they couldn’t BE the artist was more of my concern.

So last night I showed the girls samples from the blog above and we talked about how we weren’t trying for perfect and all of our sketches would look different.

Today we tried it and it went great!  I know that having this positive experience is going to make the next time that much more fun and enthusiastic.  Here are the girl’s work side by side with our artist’s painting of the week, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Marc Chagall.