Into the Driver's Seat

Check out this collection featuring some of the best YouTube art channels for teachers and students.

Around this time five years ago I discovered that the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts free online art history texts. A recent Tweet from Open Culture reminded me of that collection. Today, I revisited that collection and discovered that it has expanded to 569 volumes. All of the books can be read online or downloaded as PDFs (warning, some of them are massive files). You can search through the catalog of books by thematic category, format, and publication type. And, of course, you can search through the books by title, author, and keyword.

How do you paint with watercolors without showing the brush strokes? How do you make gradient colors? What kind of paper should you use? In this helpful video, watercolor illustrator and YouTuber Kasey Golden shares seven of the most commonly asked questions that she gets about painting with watercolors. Her answers are also great tips for beginners. She adds:

The biggest tip I can give anyone wanting to get into watercolor is to JUST START! Pick up a cheap set and see how you like them, play around, and see what works!

Find the visual content you need with our complete list of free image sources, offering high-quality images for your blog posts and social media updates.

"Nature and humankind are both great artists, and when they join forces, amazing masterpieces can be produced. Today Bright Side has collected for you works in which the combined efforts of mother nature and photographic artists have captured magic moments showing the wondrous diversity of modern life and the natural world. Pictured above is the Westerdok District in Amsterdam."

Tags: images, art, landscape, worldwide.

Earlier this week, Oxford's Bodleian Library announced that it had digitized a 550 year old copy of the Gutenberg Bible along with a number of other ancient bibles, some of them quite beautiful. Not to be outdone, the British Library came out with its own announcement on Thursday:

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

 Art Teachers: This was made for y'all. Depending on where you are in your curriculum, pen-and-ink might not be the kind of exercise you'd do as a formal classroom assignment, but it could still be a great way to stretch your students. I know some artists who design a character (an alien? a pumpkin?) or pick a character to draw doing all of the #Inktober prompts. How would you have your alien doing "Swift?" "Squeak?" "Cloud?" "Mysterious?" ...or have them pick a favorite universe to draw in. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Adventure Time -- and have them still do the #Inktober prompts

 Not-Art-Teachers: First of all, you should be. I should be. Finding ways to bring art into the classroom is a great way to engage kids who aren't engaged with some of our other go-to tools. But if you're so hooked on your curriculum that the #Inktober list of prompts seems like it would be inappropriate for what you're doing, come up with a list of 31 prompts that are within your curriculum. Connect it to the Bill of Rights. States of Matter. Digestive System. I don't know. Maybe look at the #Inktober list for inspiration, and then find a side door from those prompts into your own content. If 31 days seems excessive, just do it for one week -- see what your students come up with.

Jim Lerman's insight:

These prompts are excellent for writing as well.

"Colored printed sections showing the map of the world are cut to shape then pasted onto the surface of the globes and a protective coat of varnish is added. Narrator recounts the fact that lots of the workers have been there for over 30 years and quips: 'While the rest of the mankind does its best to blow the world up, they like building a new one.'"

"Nature and humankind are both great artists, and when they join forces, amazing masterpieces can be produced. Today Bright Side has collected for you works in which the combined efforts of mother nature and photographic artists have captured magic moments showing the wondrous diversity of modern life and the natural world. Pictured above is the Westerdok District in Amsterdam."

Tags: images, art, landscape, worldwide.