Beyond the Stick Figure Art School {Homeschool Crew Review}
Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. My girls LOVE art. We’ve been incorporating art lessons in our homeschool since they were little. As they’ve tried many of the major art programs available to homeschoolers, we were excited to try a new one, Beyond the Stick Figure Art School.
About Beyond the Stick Figure Art School
About the Instructor
This course was created by a homeschool mom of 8, Sally. (Side note–Sally moved from England to the U.S. when she was in her 20s, so she still has her British accent, which was fun to listen to.) She is a trained artist who studied at the Loughborough College of Art and Design in England. Her goal is to teach art incrementally.
About the Course
Sally designed the course so that the whole family can participate. The program should last a family for one year if they do one lesson a day. Most lessons are very short, usually three to eight minutes.
One feature I loved about the lessons is that my kids could do them independently with no help from me. I imagine that would be quite a selling feature for busy parents.
The course contains the following units that we received to review:
- Complete Drawing Course
- Pen and Ink
- Watercolor
- Acrylic
- 3D Design
Because there were so many lessons, we were only able to go through a few of the units.
Complete Drawing Course
This part has 17 topics in part one including a note to mom, which was helpful, as well as instructions on the basic shapes of circle, dot, straight line and curved line. She also discusses the primary and secondary colors.
Part two has 33 topics and part three has five topics. Most of the drawing here was based on basic shapes.
Watercolor
The watercolor lessons that we worked on ended with a pretty mountain scene. To give you an idea of the pacing of this course, we ended up with this final picture after nine lessons.
Our Experience
Beyond the Stick Figure Art School was unlike any other art class my kids had taken. I think the drawing section of the course would be perfect for absolute beginners and younger children. Since my daughters were neither of those two, they were often bored drawing only shapes. I think for older kids, the course might be more educational if Sally made those shapes as part of a larger project.
What We’d Like to See Improved
There were some things we’d like to see improved in this course. For instance, especially in the early lessons of the drawing unit, when words are written on paper, they show up backwards on the screen. That didn’t impede my understanding, but it could get confusing for younger viewers.
Second, this course must be followed in order. There is no way to bypass the drawing lessons and get to the pen and ink lessons unless you complete all of the drawing lessons. I understand the reasoning for this as the assumption is that each skill builds upon the next.
However, since there are several different types of mediums studied, I’d prefer that we have the ability to start at the beginning of ANY of the mediums and work our way through. This is especially handy if you already have the art supplies for one of the mediums. You can get started in a later medium, such as water color, while you wait for the ink supplies to come in for the pen and ink unit. As it is now, you have to follow ALL the lessons in order, so if you have pen and ink supplies, too bad, you must start with drawing first.
Finally, sometimes the video is larger vertically than the computer screen, so you can’t see all of the video at once.
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