I decided to focus our art lesson on drawing this week, building on these two famous artists. They were both extraordinarily gifted at drawing anatomy. Michelangelo actually dissected cadavers in order to study them. This is why his sculpture of David and the Pieta are so life-like, if they weren’t 8 ft. tall you would think they were real. His ability to carve the veins in a hand came from his study of the human body (in a most gruesome way, in my opinion – but it sure did work!). Michelangelo was fascinated with Greek sculpture. The art of Greek sculpting was a lost art and he pulled his inspiration from a famous missing sculpture that was dug up during his life-time that he got to see up close and study. He noticed the movement that the Greeks were able to sculpt and he was able to incorporate this in his own sculptures and paintings.
The Sistine Chapel took him many years to complete and he did most of the work himself, firing most of his apprentices. Painting was not his favorite thing to do and he mostly resented having to paint the chapel, which contrary to popular belief, he did not lie on his back to paint this. He stood in a backward arched position.
We looked at some anatomy cards to see the make-up of the hand from the bones to the tendons to the muscles. Then I showed them how you can use circles and cylinders to draw a hand. The circles are all your joints and the cylinders become your fingers and palm. Once practiced, it is an easy way to draw hands and feet.
DaVinci was known for, among his many talents, to be able to draw and paint a horse like no other. We, once again, studied the anatomy of a horse through a great book (see below resources) and used another book called Draw 50 Horses to try our hand at drawing horses. Through a series of circles, lines, curves etc… we did pretty well!
Another fun thing that I had the children do was to try their hand at writing backwards then checking it in a mirror. DaVinci wrote all of his notes in his journal backwards. My dear 7 yr old wrote “Mom is a cow”. I immediately pinched him to which he replied, “Well, you have those things that feed babies!!”. I’ll just end on that note. Maybe we’ll study the anatomy of the cow next.
The books we used:
Brenda can be found writing at The Tie That Binds Us.
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