Mommio: Art Class- Durer

We are all excited to be getting back to doing our weekly art lessons using the Artistic Pursuits homeschool program.  We are on the second book and continuing to learn about artists from each period.

This week we are learning about Albrecht Durer.  He was a Northern Renaissance artist in the late 1400's and early 1500's in Germany who is most well known for his woodcut prints.  He was also the first artist known to produce and sell his own art to the general public.  We will take a look at his series of self-portraits.  The first one was done when he was just thirteen!

Then we will look more closely at some of his woodcut illustrations.  This one is called The Flight into Egypt and was done in 1511.  He was also well-known for including animals in his art and this piece of art includes lots of hidden animals that we had fun searching for.  Can you find the donkey, cow, deer, bird, two lizards and a rabbit?  We found all of them except the rabbit.

For the lesson we practiced making simple monoprints.  We'll learn to do some more complicated printing later on.  First we prepared the work area with lots of wax paper and tape, then applied black printmaking ink to one area of the paper.  Then we rolled out the ink area with our brayers.

Then the kids drew an image into the ink using the eraser on a pencil.

 After they were happy with the image they placed a clean piece of paper over the ink and firmly pressed down all over the paper using the side of their fist.

 Then we carefully peeled the paper up to reveal the print.  The first time we tried we used WAY too much ink so there was no image, just black, when we peeled it back.  We tried again with less ink and 

it worked great!

Here are all of the kids monoprints that they did today-

 The kids had lots of fun with this project and did it over and over again.  Gabe especially liked it, here he is still printing an hour after art class was over.

 Next week we will continue with Durer and printmaking by looking at his animal prints 

and working on reverse monoprints.