Discovering Great Artists | Look Before You Live!

We arrived at our new “home” late this afternoon, and rather than trying to squeeze some homeschool work into the remaining daylight, we opted for some relaxing artwork. We recently ordered a really great book called Discovering Great Artists by MaryAnn Kohl and Kim Solga. The book introduces children to the great masters, some familiar like Picasso, van Gogh, and Michelangelo and others might be less familiar like Nevelson, Arp, and Hokusai. Each page is filled with hands-on projects that focus on one artist and one style of artistic expression. A brief biography and portrait of each artist is presented at the beginning of each project. This book is an excellent resource for children as young as three as well as older elementary children. The projects that represent each artist are easily imitated by all ages and abilities. This is a must-have resource for anyone who wants to explore art with children.

The artist we chose for today is Giotto (ZHEE-O-TO), the once chief master of cathedral building and public art in Florence, Italy. He lived from 1266 to 1337. In his day, paints were made from grinding minerals, clay, berries and even insect into fine powder and mixing the pigment with egg yolk. Apparently, the paint is very strong and long lasting. We can still enjoy Giotto’s paintings today which are over 700 years old.

We found some rocks around the campsite and used them to crush some artist pastel chalk for our egg paint. We have recently visited several Native American historic sites that feature the mano and matate used for grinding. It was fun to try our hands at this for our project.