Art materials feature largely in our home. My kids have watercolor easels, their own sketchbooks, pencil boxes and they are very particular about their pencil sharpeners. You have to know your pencil sharpeners to have a favorite. My husband is an artist and we have his, and his friends' large canvases, his grandparents' oil paintings, and his mothers' watercolors all around our home. We have a painting studio in our house. STEM has turned to STEAM around here. I also prefer to have the kids actually making something when they have screen time. Many people will happily listen to kids talk about art or comic strips that they made, but no one (I've done a survey) wants to listen to kids talk about levels they completed on Skylanders.
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| A comic my son created by using photos and tools. |
Strip Designer
In our house, we are comic-book fanatics. My husband has been collecting comic books since he was a little kid. He grew up in Brooklyn in the 70s, when his parents would give him 35 cents to go to the corner store to buy a comic book with change left over for penny candy. Now we have an entire storage room in our basement dedicated to vintage and new comic books. We watch all the hero movies while my husband whispers each character's backstory into our ears as the film rolls on.
Strip Designer and our kids are a match made in heaven. They have many different templates, styles and tools that you can use to overlay on your own photography. The strip shown here that my son made took him about an hour or so with my help as photographer, but we were learning how the tools worked. Tools are robust, and would appeal to experienced artists as well as kids. There are advanced editing tools like layers and other fancy things that I don't know how to use.
