Pastels, Nova Scotia and John Constable

Fridays are a day to celebrate being Canadian, to follow our hearts when it comes to our schooling, so sometimes our math gets done and sometimes... we explore the world.   As I type this my son is having fun with a fan, string and paper.     Observing air movement while having fun.   It's all good.    He just asked "MOM!   Can this be our science today???"       I told him I would think about it.  :) 

Before he did that though we spent time reading books (currently going through four books) and continuing our Nova Scotia studies.

We also like to do art on Fridays, and if we can find a way to combine the two so much the better.   I originally wanted to do an abstract art but my lad simply couldn't wrap his head around that.  So we switched to pastels.

I gave my son a choice he could draw free hand or use a colouring sheet... He chose the colouring sheet.   He did a good job eh?    Took us a bit of time to determine the angle it was taken from... pretty sure from the water side.   He had fun experimenting with the pastels.   It was our first go with them.

I chose to work on a free hand style of Peggy's Cove. 
Query.. How DOES on draw white so you can see it against a white background????   I chose to outline with black so it was visible but that's not really true to life.   It came out kinda looking like a silo but I have no clue about how to draw edges with white and doing black lines just seemed wrong... So it is what it is eh?   :)

As we coloured and talked we watched a variety of videos.   From learning about the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to how to shuck a scallop... did you know that parts of a scallop are poisonous???   This video was so interesting for my lad he actually STOPPED talking to watch it...and almost forgot to do his art as well.    He thought it funny that Canada's oldest recognized flag became Canada's youngest flag.  :)

We got our inspiration to do pastels from this handy little art book we keep around. 

John Constable was an artist who loved doing pictures of the English Countryside.   His paintings had a lot of sky in them.   The art lesson connected his love of sky to using pastels to get shade and variations in landscapes by smudging the pastels together.    I practiced this with the ground and a bit with the sky, the lad practiced this with blending the greys into his rocks.

Do take a look at the website linked above.. some of his works are just simply  gorgeous.  This one with the stormy sky really caught our eyes.