Simple Art Study: Reynolds

L13 is currently working her way through a simple study of the great artists.  She studies one artist per week and her goal is to learn one new technique with each study.  A couple of weeks ago she studied Sir Joshua Reynolds using the excellent and free art lessons from Concordia University:

The lesson, which I downloaded and printed out for her, is only two pages long.  L usually reads the lesson and we go through the questions together.  The first page focuses on the history of the artist:

whilst the second page focuses on the actual piece of art being studied, in this case ‘A Strawberry Girl’, along with lots of questions which guide the student to a greater appreciation of the painting:

Although there are many suggestions for art activities at the end of the second page, they are geared towards Grade 1, so L and I often come up with our own alternatives.  L chose to attempt to replicate the girl, focusing on how Reynolds created the light and dark:

I thought this was a hard project to do because of the light and dark, and the lack of any kind of contrasting colours, but L was looking forward to getting stuck in, drawing the figure of the girl beautifully:

She painted the girl in oils on canvas, and then, after struggling for a while to get the background right, chose to paint it black!

She finds painting humans, in particular their faces very difficult indeed, and I think she did a great job!  Practice makes perfect and soon, the more she paints the easier she will find them 🙂  Here is her final piece:

As this was primarily a study in light and dark, we played around on Ribbet photo editing for fun, to see if we could learn a bit more:

Cool, eh?  It was a great study for L in terms of learning.  Next up, she will be studying Norman Rockwell.