Discovering Art

Calvert's video course, Discovering Art, shows the same attention to detail that characterizes their other offerings. The six videocassettes include 32 art lessons intended to span a school year. The story line features both child actors and professional artists—including a computer animator, a paper artist, a sculptor, and an artist who assists "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz on special projects. Lessons are TV-quality and cover both art appreciation (works from all eras are shown) and artistic techniques.

In a typical lesson, the video children encounter an artist, ask questions, and are shown how to handle some artistic problem—line, shading, perspective, etc. Your own children are then given a project that employs the new techniques: for example, using contour lines to draw the outline of a plant. By the end of the course, you will have seen hundreds of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and photographs and created dozens of art projects. You will have studied dozens of art forms: drawing, painting, sculpture (with a variety of media), computer art, photography, fabric art, and so on. You will have a solid background in the basics of color (hue, value, and chroma), lighting, shape and lines, perspective, positive and negative space, and other foundations of art theory.

You get more than videos, of course. The course includes a 178-page, spiral-bound guidebook, project instructions for one student, six fine art postcards, and an art kit, as well as the videos. The teacher's guidebook has complete step-by-step lessons, as well as voluminous suggestions for further reading and art study. The art kit comes with tools and materials of the highest quality: an abundance of different kinds of art and construction paper, a rubber brayer and block ink, colored chalk, washable markers, colored pencils, washable tempera paint, drawing pencils, a black marker, foam board and a foam block for carving, oil pastels, watercolors, crayons, white glue, yarn, masking tape, a pencil sharpener, a kneaded eraser, safety scissors, a ruler, and a camel's hair brush, all in a convenient cardboard suitcase with a carry strap. One art kit is included in the basic program, and another complete art kit and project instruction booklet comes for each additional enrolled pupil. If you bought the art supplies separately, it would likely cost you more than the price of enrolling an additional pupil.

Our kids, as is normal, squirmed during some of the contrived video scenarios, but loved the projects. I appreciate the effort the Calvert staff put into pulling together so many art examples to illustrate each point, and their suggestions for additional reading, study, and field trips are excellent.

-- Mary Pride