Drawing for Older Children and Teens

I mentioned in an earlier post that we purchased two books on drawing to begin to work through over the Christmas holiday.  We have decide to start with the book Drawing for Older Children and Teens by Mona Brookes.  Here is the blog post from Renee’s Book of the Day that inspired me to start with this book first.  Beside the stellar recommendation for the book, the blog made a very interesting and inspiring comment about the author’s motivation for learning to draw.

…in order to truly appreciate the beauty of something that you see on your travels, you must attempt to draw it. The act of drawing, even if you are a terrible artist, forces you to truly look at, even study, the object of beauty. It obliges you to make decisions about why this thing is beautiful or special, and the attempt itself of capturing what makes it exceptional brings about a greater appreciation of what you see. I loved this idea too.

This will be a much longer program than the two and a half weeks we have available to us over Christmas vacation. I hope we can continue to work for a half an hour or so per day after work/school when spring semester starts on January 5. I am going through a little bit of homeschool withdrawal anyway. Again, we will try to post some of our results here as we go along. We will save Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards for another time.

We have another book on a completely different topic we need to study for our work on the GaugeCam project. It is titled A Beginner’s Guide to R. The R programming language is a tool to do many things, one of which is to prepare graphical output from statistics for presentation, publication, and analysis. I will discuss our efforts with respect to learning R and statistics over on the GaugeCam blog.