Visual Arts for Kids

How the course is built

• It climbs. Unit 1 is what visual art even is. Unit 12 is standing in front of a painting with something to say about it. Each rung assumes the one below it.
• Every unit has a project, written for two ages. The materials are the same, so a Grade 6 child and a Kindergarten child can work at one table on the same idea. The older track says what to do alone. The younger track says what the grown-up does.
• Everything is made from things you already own. Paper, a pencil, crayons, a potato, a torch, three pots of paint. Nothing on the materials lists needs an art shop.
• Colour is taught properly. Nearly every children's resource says the primary colours are red, yellow and blue and stops there. That is true for paint and wrong for light, where they are red, green and blue. This course teaches both and says which is which, because the alternative is a correction landing years later in physics.
• Artwork facts are checked, not remembered. Every artist, year and gallery was verified against Wikidata, and the record number is kept so it can be rechecked. Where a work exists in several versions, the lesson says so.
• The worksheets never run out. Colour and art history questions are generated from that same checked data, so a generated question and its answer cannot disagree with the lesson.

The twelve units

Everything you need, for the whole course

Twelve projects, and this is the complete list. Nothing here needs an art shop.

• A ball, an orange or an egg
• A big sheet for the background
• A blunt knife or a spoon handle
• A brush
• A cloth
• A desk lamp or a torch
• A jar of water
• A mirror, or somebody willing to sit still
• A palette or an old plate
• A pencil
• A piece of card
• A plate or tray to mix on
• A potato cut in half by a grown-up
• A rubber
• A ruler
• A soft pencil, B or 2B if you have one
• An apron or an old shirt
• Coloured pencils or crayons
• Crayons with the wrappers peeled off
• Glue
• Newspaper for the table
• One artwork to look at, from a book, a museum website or a wall at home
• One real object such as a mug or an apple
• Paper
• Poster paint on a saucer
• Red, yellow and blue paint
• Red, yellow and blue paint only, no other colours
• Scissors
• Thick paper
• Thin paper
• Two jars of water
• White and black paint

Primary colours: it depends what you are mixing

The three colours you cannot mix from anything else are called the primaries. Which three they are depends entirely on whether you are mixing paint or mixing light, and this is the single most commonly mistaught fact in children's art.

Paint mixing is subtractive: every colour you add takes more light away, so the mix gets darker and all three together make a muddy brown. Light mixing is additive: every colour you add puts more light in, so the mix gets brighter and all three together make white. Your paint box does one, your phone screen does the other.

Complementary pairs on the paint wheel: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. Side by side they look brighter. Mixed together they make mud. Warm colours are red, orange, yellow and they come forward. Cool colours are blue, green, purple and they sit back.

Ten artworks worth knowing

Every line of this table was checked against Wikidata rather than written from memory, and the record number is kept in the code so it can be checked again. Print it as a reference sheet.

Some of these exist in more than one version. Edvard Munch made several Screams, and Claude Monet painted water lilies about 250 times, so the picture you find may differ slightly from the one in a book.

🎨 1 · What Is Visual Art?

Kindergarten to Grade 2

Visual art is art you look at, rather than art you listen to or read. A drawing is visual art. So is a painting, a photograph, a pot, a printed poster and a statue in a park. Anybody who makes one is an artist while they are making it.

What it teaches

• Visual art is anything made to be looked at. Music and stories are art too, just not visual art.
• Most lists name seven elements of art: line, shape, form, space, value, colour and texture. They are the ingredients.
• The principles of design are how you arrange the ingredients. Lists vary a little, but nearly all include balance, contrast, emphasis, pattern and unity.
• Art does not have to look real to be good. It can be a feeling, a pattern or a puzzle.
• There is no wrong answer in art, but there are skills, and skills come from practice.
• Artists copy, trace and study other artists to learn. That is normal and always has been.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

✏️ 2 · Line

Kindergarten to Grade 3

A line is the first mark anybody makes. Someone once said a line is a dot that went for a walk, which is exactly right. Every drawing you have ever seen started as lines.

What it teaches

• A line has length and direction. It can be straight, curved, zigzag, spiral, wavy or dotted.
• A thick line feels loud and heavy. A thin line feels quiet and light. Changing thickness inside one line makes it look alive.
• Lines can show edges, but they can also show movement, like the speed lines in a comic.
• Contour lines follow the outer edge of a thing. Drawing only the outline is called a contour drawing.
• Hatching means lots of parallel lines close together to darken an area. Crossing them over is cross hatching.
• Holding the pencil further back gives you looser, lighter lines. Holding it near the tip gives you tight, dark control.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🔷 3 · Shape and Form

Grades 1 to 4

A shape is flat. A form is solid. That one sentence is the whole difference, and once you can see it you can draw things that look like they are really there instead of stuck on the paper.

What it teaches

• A shape has two dimensions: height and width. A circle, a square and a triangle are shapes.
• A form has three: height, width and depth. A sphere, a cube and a cone are forms.
• Every flat shape has a solid partner. Circle to sphere, square to cube, triangle to cone or pyramid.
• Geometric shapes are the ruler and compass ones. Organic shapes are the ones from nature, like a leaf or a puddle.
• The empty space around and between shapes has a shape of its own. Artists call it negative space.
• Almost anything complicated can be broken down into simple shapes first, then fixed up afterwards.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🌈 4 · Colour

Grades 1 to 5

Colour is the element everybody notices first, and it is also the one most often taught wrongly. The three colours you cannot mix from others are called primaries, but which three they are depends entirely on whether you are mixing paint or mixing light.

What it teaches

• For paint, ink and crayon the primaries are red, yellow and blue. Mixing them makes darker colours, which is called subtractive mixing.
• For light the primaries are red, green and blue. Mixing those makes brighter colours, which is called additive mixing. All three together make white light.
• That is why a screen and a paint box behave so differently. Your phone mixes light, your paint box mixes paint.
• Paint secondaries: red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, blue and red make purple.
• Colours opposite each other on the paint wheel are complementary: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. Side by side they look brighter. Mixed together they make mud.
• Warm colours are red, orange and yellow, and they seem to come forward. Cool colours are blue, green and purple, and they seem to sit back.
• Hue means the colour name. Value means how light or dark it is. Those two words save a lot of confusion.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🧶 5 · Texture and Pattern

Grades 2 to 5

Texture is how something would feel if you touched it. In art there are two kinds: the real texture of a bumpy collage you can actually feel, and the pretend texture of a drawing that only looks rough.

What it teaches

• Real texture is texture you can feel with your fingers, like sand glued to card.
• Implied texture is texture you only see, like pencil marks that make paper look like fur.
• You make implied texture with marks: dots for grainy, short flicks for fur, wiggles for wool, long strokes for hair.
• A pattern is a texture that repeats on purpose. The repeating part is called the motif.
• Patterns can repeat in a line, in a grid, or by flipping and turning the motif.
• Rubbing a pencil over paper laid on a rough surface is called frottage, and it captures a real texture as a flat picture.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🌗 6 · Value: Light and Shadow

Grades 3 to 7

Value means how light or dark something is. It is the element that turns a flat circle into a ball you feel you could pick up, and it does more work than colour ever does.

What it teaches

• Value runs from white through greys to black. A value scale of five steps is enough to start.
• Squint at anything and the colours fade but the light and dark stay. That is why value matters more than colour.
• On a lit ball look for four things: the highlight, the lit side, the shadow side, and the cast shadow on the surface.
• The cast shadow is darkest right where the object touches the surface, and softer further away.
• Contrast means how far apart the values are. High contrast is dramatic, low contrast is calm and misty.
• Light has a direction. Decide where your light is coming from before you shade anything, and keep it there.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🛣️ 7 · Space and Perspective

Grades 4 to 8

Paper is flat, and yet a good drawing can feel like a window you could climb through. The tricks that do it are hundreds of years old and every one of them can be learned in an afternoon.

What it teaches

• Things further away look smaller. That is the first and most useful rule.
• Things further away sit higher up the picture, closer to the horizon.
• Things in front overlap and hide the things behind. Overlapping is the simplest depth trick there is.
• Distant things look paler, bluer and less detailed. That is called atmospheric perspective.
• The horizon line is your own eye level. Move your eye level and the whole picture changes.
• In one point perspective, all the lines going away from you meet at a single vanishing point on the horizon.
• Two point perspective uses two vanishing points, which is what you need to draw a building from a corner.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🖼️ 8 · Composition

Grades 4 to 9

Composition is where you put things. Two people can draw the same bowl of fruit with the same skill and one picture will hold your eye while the other slides off it, and the difference is nearly always composition.

What it teaches

• The focal point is the thing you want looked at first. Every picture should have one.
• The rule of thirds splits the picture into nine with two lines each way. Putting the focal point where lines cross usually beats putting it dead centre.
• It is a rule of thumb rather than a law. Dead centre is powerful too, when you mean it.
• Balance means the visual weight is spread so the picture does not feel like it is tipping over.
• Symmetrical balance is a mirror down the middle. Asymmetrical balance uses different things of similar weight.
• Contrast draws the eye. The lightest light next to the darkest dark is where a viewer looks first.
• Leaving empty space is a decision, not a mistake. Space around a subject gives it room to breathe.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🧍 9 · Drawing People

Grades 5 to 9

People are the hardest thing to draw, because everybody knows what a face looks like and everybody notices when it is off. The good news is that most of the errors are the same few, and they are all fixable with measurements rather than talent.

What it teaches

• The eyes sit about halfway down the head, not near the top. Nearly everyone gets this wrong.
• The bottom of the nose sits roughly halfway between the eyes and the chin.
• The mouth sits between the nose and the chin, closer to the nose.
• The ears run roughly from the eyebrow line down to the bottom of the nose.
• There is about one eye's width of gap between the two eyes.
• For a whole body, an adult is roughly seven to eight heads tall. A young child is nearer five or six, which is why children's heads look big.
• These are averages to check yourself against, not rules. Real people vary, and that variation is what makes a portrait look like a person.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🖌️ 10 · Painting and Mixing

Grades 3 to 9

Paint is colour you can push around. Different paints behave in completely different ways, and knowing which one you are holding saves a lot of muddy disappointment.

What it teaches

• Watercolour is see through. You work from light to dark, and the white is the paper itself, so you plan where to leave it.
• Poster paint and acrylic are solid. You can paint light over dark, so mistakes can be covered.
• A tint is a colour with white added. A shade is a colour with black added. A tone is a colour with grey added.
• Mixing a colour with a little of its complementary is a better way to darken it than reaching for black, which flattens things.
• Wash your brush between colours or every colour on your palette slowly turns brown.
• Big brushes for big areas, small brushes for detail, and detail comes last.
• Let a layer dry before painting over it, unless you actually want the colours to run together.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🗿 11 · Printing, Collage and Sculpture

Grades 2 to 8

Not all art is done with a pencil. Some of the oldest art there is was pressed, stuck, carved or built, and these ways of making are often the ones that click for a child who says they cannot draw.

What it teaches

• A print is made by putting ink on a shape and pressing it onto paper. The point is that you can do it again and again.
• Whatever you carve away stays unprinted, and whatever you leave standing prints. That takes a moment to get used to.
• A print comes out mirrored, so any letters have to be cut backwards.
• Collage means gluing materials down to make a picture. Cut and torn edges feel completely different, so choose on purpose.
• Sculpture is art in the round, which means it has to work from every side, not just the front.
• Sculpture can be made by taking away, like carving soap, or by building up, like coiling clay.
• A relief sits partly raised off a flat background, halfway between a picture and a sculpture.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

🏛️ 12 · Looking at Art

Grades 6 to 12

The last skill is the one that lasts longest: standing in front of a picture and having something to say about it. There is a method, it works on any artwork, and it takes about four minutes.

What it teaches

• Step 1, describe. Say only what is actually there. No opinions yet.
• Step 2, analyse. Which elements did the artist use, and how? Where is the contrast, where does your eye go first?
• Step 3, interpret. What might it be about? Give your reason from what you saw in step 1.
• Step 4, judge. Do you think it works? Now you are allowed an opinion, as long as you can say why.
• Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa from about 1503. It hangs in the Louvre in Paris.
• Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889, using thick swirling brushstrokes you can see from across a room.
• Katsushika Hokusai made The Great Wave off Kanagawa around 1830 as a woodblock print, so many original copies exist.
• Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in black, white and grey, about the bombing of a town.
• Some famous works exist in several versions. Edvard Munch made more than one Scream, and Claude Monet painted water lilies about 250 times.

Sample questions and answers

Worksheets in this course are generated fresh, with new questions every time you press New Worksheet, and every answer is computed rather than stored.

Working safely

Nothing in this course needs anything sharper than school scissors, except the potato print in unit 11, where a grown-up does all the cutting. Every project that involves a blade, a hot lamp or paint carries its own safety line, and those lines are checked automatically so one cannot go missing when the course is edited.

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