To be honest, teaching homeschool Art History used to stir up mixed feelings for me. Feelings like:

• I love art history, but will my kids?
• I love art history, but how necessary is this now?
• I have to prioritize core subjects in my homeschool, and art history isn’t one of them
• How would I ever have time to teach art history?

You may have already been following along our Art History journey that started several years ago. I had the surprise of my life, our first year homeschooling, when Art History sort of fell into my lap!

Art History in Homeschool: Simpler Than I Thought

In previous posts, I have detailed how this journey started. Today, I’d love to highlight Andy Warhol, because he was our first review artist this school year!

I’ve kept this post short and sweet and simple, so that you can implement something like this in your homeschool, even this week, if you wanted!

Step 1: Pick a few favorite prints: most of the artists we study are from previous centuries, so their work is all in the public domain. Andy Warhol, however, is a modern artist, and died just about 40 years ago. His work is not in public domain yet, so it is not legally printable. You can definitely Google some of his famous pieces, and paste them into a Powerpoint or Google Slides presentation, to show your kids!

For other artists, I typically use the free full-color PDF prints provided by A Humble Place, on Ambleside Online’s website. This is also where I find the selected artists that year, for the Artist Study.

We typically hang these gorgeous prints in our sunroom, and look up at them all week as we learn about the artist, and their particular style.

Step 2: Learn how to do a picture study

Here is an excellent sample video, describing how to do a picture study!

Try this with your kids! You can start simple, and just do part of it. See what your kids comment about each piece of art. What colors do they notice? How does the art make them feel? Do they have any guesses about what materials or tools were used to create the art?

Step 3: Choose supplemental materials, as needed / as time allows

I love checking our local library for books about each author, or their style. Andy Warhol was known for pop art, so that is what I searched for.

I also made sure to check if Miss Beth had a video! Miss Beth is a teacher on YouTube, who had a series called HIGASFY— an acronym, which stood for “Have I Got A Story For You!” My kids absolutely love her.

Here is her story of Andy Warhol–see what you think!

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Pop Art Projects for Kids

Along with Miss Beth’s informational video about Andy Warhol’s life and artwork, I also searched for some good pop art projects for us to try!

We settled on this Pop Art Donut Painting project by SplatterBox Art. I loved the way the teacher shared fun facts as she drew, and explained her methods as she went along in the tutorial.

First, you sketch out four donuts, with a bit of variation for each. Then, you paint the donuts and their backgrounds in various bright colors! The repetition of a common, everyday object, plus the use of bright colors, are parts of pop art.

We used this watercolor paper, and these acrylic paints. My kindergartener had a bit of trouble with the painting, and got frustrated–so I may try these acrylic markers for him next time, so he has a bit more control over the project. 🙂

Here are a few other fun pop art tutorials we tried this week:

Pizza Pop Art: for this tutorial, you don’t need paint–just some basic markers and paper! I made accommodations to this project (as I did for the donut painting, above) for my kindergarten son. I drew the outline for the pizza and stripes and toppings, so that his task was mostly just coloring in the sections. He loves to draw, but the purpose of this project, for his level, isn’t so much the skill of drawing, but the color selection, and making the pop art, POP!

For this tutorial, she gives a great explanation of pop art, in the first five minutes. If you want to skip straight to the tutorial, you can start the video around minute 5:35.

Chalk Transfer Portrait: this one was so cool. I printed off pictures of popular foods that my kids love, as well as some pictures of their faces, to try for this activity!

For this Chalk Transfer Portrait, you can just use a regular pencil if you don’t have chalk or charcoal. That’s what we did! Here are the steps:

• Print off a photo you love of a popular object, person, or really anything
• Turn the paper around, and scribble the graphite of your pencil lead (or chalk) all over the backside of the paper, specifically in the area that has your subject
• Flip the paper back over, so the original image is facing you. Then, place that paper on top of a clean piece of paper (or colored piece of cardstock, like we used).
• Making sure the papers stay aligned, start tracing the details of the object, pressing firmly with your pencil. The graphite on the backside is going to gently press into the second paper, as you trace, and leave a mark for you!
• You can gently peek at the back paper, as you go, to see how hard you have to press. It isn’t too different than normal writing or tracing.
• Once you’re done, take a look at the finished product! Grab a black ink pen, or thin Sharpie, and trace over your lines. This will make your image “pop.”
• You’re done!

Watch the full video here if you’d like to see it visually. We loved this project!

Andy Warhol was a fun one to learn about, thanks to Miss Beth, some supplemental library books, and these fun YouTube projects.

Happy learning! With love,

Cait