We have had a wonderful two weeks of school at Lake Forest Elementary! The art room has been a busy place this week. All students have created a personal sketchbook to keep inside the art room all year long. A sketchbook is a book or pad of paper using for drawing! All artists keep sketchbooks. Did you know: Leonardo Da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance artist who lived from 1452 to 1519. Da Vinci is probably best known for his painting, "Mona Lisa" or "La Gioconda" which was a portrait of the wife of a Florentine official. Da Vinci always kept a sketchbook handy, so he could write down his good ideas or draw things that caught his eye. In fact, when he died, he left more than 8,000 pages of sketchbooks containing scientific projects, inventions, architectural designs and sketches. Many of the notes Da Vinci made in his sketchbooks were written backwards, so they could only be read if held up to a mirror.