Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
I love doing art with my kids. Some of my favorite homeschool memories are of us all crowded around a table, listening to an audiobook and trying out new art techniques or doing something creative. We enjoy watching those ‘this is how you recreate this piece of art’ videos, and that’s why I was excited to try the Drawing with Graded Graphite Pencils, Art Core 3 by ARTistic Pursuits.
Drawing with Graded Graphite Pencils consists of online video-based classes which you can watch at your own pace and a textbook. During the video, a new concept about drawing is taught, and then you watch the teacher describe the process for what she’s drawing, why she chose it, and how she does it. Then instructions are given for students to choose a similar concept to draw to practice the skills taught.
The videos are professionally made and very well done. Each one opens with a little intro featuring someone else, and then the actual lesson begins. The videos are all around ten minutes long – enough to provide actionable tips and not so long that you get totally bored watching someone else do art. (The videos are actually sped up at times with voiceover done so that the drawing and instruction can happen in a timely manner. This was a nice feature.)
The required materials are simple and few, and that made them easy to acquire at an inexpensive price – both things I like! We actually had two sets of drawing pencils, and so My Little Man and I tackled these videos together.
I’ve had drawing lessons before, and I love playing around with light and shadows, texture and shape … but My Little Man prefers lines. While we’ve done lots of art, and we have done formal lessons before, this course goes much deeper into that than we’ve done in years – and that was a bit stressful for My Little Man. Maybe if we’d done the class that came before this, it would’ve been less of a thing – but that’s on me. I went by his age, and he did fine with it.
At first, we were both a bit lost when it came time for us to begin our own piece. We had the instructions, but for some reason I wasn’t expecting the free-draw aspect of it – though that totally makes sense. We had fun searching for images and putting together still life collections that met the requirements, and then since My Little Man is a fan of classical music, we turned up Pandora and got to work!
Some of our pieces came out much better than we expected, and we were happily surprised. Others were much harder, and it took time to figure out what was off. At that point I really missed having an in-person teacher – or at least one we could correspond with for feedback – but we definitely improved over the course of our work with this class.
There are nine video lessons in the course – but there are 36 lessons, and that’s where the textbook comes in. The video lessons are called units and there’s four lessons for each one in the textbook. This is where you learn about classic art pieces that feature the skill or technique you learned about in the video and where you receive more instruction about using it yourself.
There’s a whole video at the beginning of the course about how to use the textbook – but for some reason I struggled with this one. It’s pretty simple, really, but I didn’t get it at first, and so we jumped right in. I really like the added instruction and the connection with famous art pieces that the book adds. Take the time that you need at the beginning to get it all straight – it’s worth it.
ARTistic Pursuits recommends that this course be a one-semester class, where you met twice per week. I think that’s very realistic. That has you completing two units per month, roughly, and spending maybe an hour or so on art at each meeting – depending on how ‘into’ it your student is.
So if you’re looking for drawing lessons that progress though ages and stages, consider the drawing lessons offered by ARTistic Pursuits. This particular class is recommended for middle school kiddos, but there’s one for upper elementary and one for high school, so it could make a great series for art lovers.
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