With Open Eyes offers several ways for children to explore and interact with the art. Clicking on the clock icon presents the artworks in a timeline. Or by clicking on the globe, kids can take a geographical tour, continent by continent. Kids can snap pictures of their favorite pieces and create a slide show focused on a theme. This option makes With Open Eyes an excellent complement to classroom studies: If your child is studying ancient civilization or African cultures, for example, consider suggesting that she create a scrapbook of art from that time period or continent.
The images in With Open Eyes can inspire creative projects off the computer as well. Encourage kids to choose a work of art they like and write a story about it. See what happens when they try to imitate the piece with their own art materials. Or for older kids, try this activity.
The challenge is to recreate a famous work of art, using only the tools found in whichever kids' art program you happen to own. (Sounds straightforward, but try it yourself first and you'll see it's incredibly challenging!) Once they've selected a painting, kids can set about discovering the effects created by each tool in their program and how to combine them to replicate the artist's colors, brush strokes and other techniques. (Can they duplicate a Van Gogh brush stroke with the Kid Pix Wacky brush? The spattered dots of Seurat with Flying Color's airbrush tool?)
Try setting a time limit for friends who are competing with each other to see who comes closest to the original. Then have them print and compare the results, exchange disks in school or e-mail their files. Variations on this creative venture for older kids include:
Unlike my kids, I wanted more of a context for viewing the art in the CD-ROM. With 200,000 works of art, how did The Art Institute choose the 200 for this program? The Institute missed an opportunity for a bit of subtle publicity: a short introduction to the Museum, its history and its collection would have been a nice option for adults and older kids.
