Using Picasa2 for Art Study

One thing I do to facilitate our studies in Art History is create a folder in Picasa2 with the works of art they need to learn that I can then use for a slideshow.

For ex., if we are studying Albrecht Durer and they need to know his "Young Hare" I go online, find a picture of it (here for example) and save it as a picture file to (the correct folder on) my hard drive. Wha-laa it shows up in Picasa2. (I've created a separate folder in Picasa2 entitled "Art & Artists".)

Then I create a caption (in this case "Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Young Hare) for the picture. I am placing my picture files in this folder in chronological order by artist, but you could do it any way you wanted.

When I want to test the girls I run a slideshow in Picasa2 and have the girls tell me who the artist is and what the work of art is called. Or we can just use the picture files to study each painting or work of art more closely.

I was inspired to do this because when my dh and I were going through school we had a lovely & eccentric art teacher named Trudi Rosenberger who impressed upon us the importance of art literacy. We had to be familiar with dozens of artists and hundreds of works of art and to this day I know who painted what and can even sometimes remember what the particular painting is called! All because of Mrs. Rosenberger's slide shows.

With the Internet & Picasa2 I can easily duplicate this for my homeschooled children. (I don't think there's any copyright infringement since I'm doing this just for our personal use and not selling the images or even the idea.)

Let me know if you give this a try!