Budding Artist

Inspired by the hummingbird nest in our backyard (in the same tree that we watched some hummingbirds grow last spring, too), we sat down to draw some springtime pictures. My loose "suggestion/assignment" was to draw a bird's nest.

Our neighbor was playing with us at the time, and she was drawing a large flowerbed. She quickly filled her page with large, colorful spring flowers drawn with markers and crayons. Owen, however, took his time and carefully, meticulously drew branches and a representation of our patio furniture....
Like most of his incredibly detailed projects, this is probably only about 1/4 of the way finished --and it took him quite some time.

Lately, Owen has been saying he wants to be an artist when he grows up (although scientist is still high on his list). We looked into some art classes for him, but frankly I'm not finding the right class for him. I think he would love to learn some actual technique, like how to use pencils and shading, texturing, contrast, watercolors..... a lot of the art classes for this age group are more general "creative expression" classes.

Can anybody recommend a good book to look at? Maybe we can do some art classes at home, on our own.

Summer is coming. I've already signed Owen up for a couple of summer camps that fit right in the pocket of his interests right now -- and I'm already hatching ideas of family drawing times, book making and general art exploration.... but before summer is here we are trying to explore the budding springtime of creativity, as well.

I'll let you know how it goes!