Artist Study: Raphael

Our latest artist study was on Raphael.  As I sat down to plan out what we would do I was wondering why I chose him--other than the fact that one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is named for him.  There aren't a lot of kid-friendly resources on Raphael, but we ended up having a good time anyway.

 

 Our library didn't have a video about Raphael only, but we did watch this one.  We have watched several from this series and they are kind of annoying but they have pretty good information.

 We talked about the Renaissance and we used a Getting to Know... biography.  We also used The Usborne Book of Famous Paintings that I picked up at a book fair a few years ago.  We have used it for several of our artist studies, so it was a great buy!

 We visited our local museum to see some art from the same time period.  We read that many of the changes in art during the Renaissance started with sculpture and then moved to painting.  Before the Renaissance, figures would usually be shown more formally instead of embracing each other, for instance.

 Jack spotted this detail on a statue and asked why it said 1525 and was able to figure out that it was because that's when it was made--during the Renaissance!

 We were able to see some art that was made before the changes of the Renaissance began to take place--I *think* this one is from the late 1300s, but I can't remember for sure.

 Jack said this later painting was different from the one above because of the perspective.

 We had also talked about how the church funded so much of the art during this time, which is why so much of it has a religious theme.

 A security guard was nice enough to turn on the dance floor for the kids.  I have many memories of playing here as a kid, but then they covered it with a rug for a while.  Now it's uncovered, but not usually on.  One of the major perks of homeschooling is being able to visit places when they're not very crowded, which often leads to perks like this!

 I wasn't sure what art project we would try until I came across this fresco idea at Laugh, Paint, Create!  It was perfect since we still have quite a bit of plaster left over from when we made our faces during our Remington artist study.

 The plaster dried a little faster than I thought it would (You know you're a homeschooling mom when you find yourself yelling, "Quick!  We've got to make these frescoes NOW!"), so it wasn't too damp, but I think they turned out nicely anyway.  We used some disposable cake pans since I already had them and they worked well.

I'm so glad we went ahead with this artist study even though it seemed like our resources were limited.  We had a great time!