He *ASKED* to do art!

Let me say that again: HE ASKED TO DO ART!

Excuse the yelling there. It boggles my mind.

M1 has *never* liked art. It's too abstract. From an early age, it's been difficult for him. Never mind the difficulty he has with fine motor skills, even imagining a picture is tough. Getting it onto paper is nearly impossible.

Imagine:

I say, "Draw a tree."

Most kids, M2 included, will happily draw you something swirly and green with a brown stalk coming out the bottom in about 10 seconds and move on to something else.

MY son has a thought process: 'What kind of tree? Oak? Maple? Pine??? What season is it? Should I draw seeds, too? What about roots?'

And then he panics and asks, "MOM!!! Can you draw the tree, please? I'll color it in if you draw it!"

So I have pretty much foregone art this year. I did think, at one point, about learning about artists, but... nahhhh.... didn't so much happen. Art history ain't my bag, anyway.

And then I found
It's been sitting in the homeschool bookshelf for a month or two, and M1 found it last week.

"Mom, what's this?"

"Oh, it's an art book. I figured we'd pull it out from time to time next year and maybe do a few pages if you wanted. It's technical art, so you don't have to do any coloring. These are the kinds of drawings that architects and engineers make and use."

"REALLY???? Can I do some next week? For school?"

*blink* "Um... if you want...???"

But he meant it!
It's different from every art book I've ever seen because it doesn't focus on paintings or imaginary drawings or different mediums or colors, all of which overwhelm my boy. Nope. This book focuses on pencil drawings of pictures that are GIVEN to you. It's wonderful. The first page, which he did today, was four simple shapes. Circle. Equilateral triangle. Right triangle. Acute triangle. THE. END. You trace them using a sort of dot-to-dot format. And then it encourages you to try to draw these things freehand. And M1 *did*. That was huge for me. The fact that he even tried just blew me away.

Once he finishes with the basic shapes (oval, ellipse, trapezoid, etc.), you move on to simple shapes.

Then 2-dimensional sketches.

Followed by isometric shapes,

isometric sketches,

... and all of a sudden...

... you're understanding vanishing points, perspectives, depth of field... and all still tracing those same shapes that you use at the beginning of the book!

I can't wait to see how much M1 learns from this. More importantly, though, I'm excited that he's excited... about ART.