First week of Distance Learning: Castle Garden week 4/6-4/10

Every Medieval Castle had beautifully cared for gardens and grounds. Many included fruit trees, ponds with water flowers, climbing twisting vines, and hedge labyrinths. Some of these gardens are still being cared for today! This time of year is when we can expect to see all the beautiful flowers beginning to bloom. Take a look at some of these castle gardens. Aren't they Beautiful!

These are just a few of the gardens that are out there. Maybe you have noticed flowers growing around your house or apartment. Before we can draw a garden we need to spend some time drawing different flowers so we can add them to our garden.

Your challenge/assignment this week is to try and draw as many different flowers as you can. Look at them in real life while you are drawing them if possible. If you can't draw them from real life then draw them from the pictures you find online. Google image searches for different flowers can give you lots of flowers to draw from. Try to draw at least four different types of flowers and make sure you give them lots of color. You can use crayons, or markers, or anything you have to add color but please start your drawings with pencil and then color them in after you finish drawing them.

How to draw 25 different flower doodles : this video can help if you get stuck and need help coming up with some types of flowers to draw. She draws hers with a pen but you can use a pencil instead just in case you need to erase.

Do the best you can and remember that flowers grow all different ways and almost never exactly the same so if yours doesn't look perfectly like the one you are looking at it probably looks perfectly like some other flower that is really growing somewhere out there!

Once we have some practice we can follow in the footsteps of many famous artists like Vincent Van gogh, or Claude Monet who spent many hours drawing and painting gardens. Monet loved gardens so much that he spent a great deal of his later life caring for the amazing gardens he grew himself in Giverny France where he lived. He loved growing flowers and painting them after they grew!

Next week we will take a look at some of Monet's work and draw our own garden. We can add all the different types of flowers that you practice drawing this week.

Second Week of Distance learning: Castle Garden Continued

week 4/13-4/17

Now that you have spent some time looking at flowers and practiced drawing them it is time to follow in the footsteps of some master artists whose work drawing and painting gardens has been collected and kept safe through till today. One of those artists is Claude Monet. He was one of a group of artists who lived in the 1800's that decided to break from the traditional techniques of painting. Instead of hiding their brushstrokes and painting super realistically they made noticeable marks with their brushes and tried to capture the light and feeling of what they were looking at. They also spent more time painting nature than most artists who worked before them.

Claude Monet and the other impressionist artists could not get their work shown and often their paintings were looked down on and made fun of when they first starting painting this way. They decided that they would open their own gallery and show their own work in the gallery! Other artists didn't know what to call their style of painting and saw the title of one of Claude Monet's artworks. It was called "Impression, Sunrise" and was painted in 1874. The name of the painting stuck in the minds of the other artists and people who studied art and is why the group of artists working in the same style as Claude Monet began to be called The Impressionists.

Here you can find a reading of a book about Claude Monet and can see some photos of some of his most famous paintings: The Magical Garden Of Claude Monet. After you follow along with the story, you can start to draw your own magical castle garden. Use the flowers that you practiced from last week to fill up your paper with many beautiful flowers.

This week I would like for you to just focus on drawing the garden with pencil. Spend your time carefully adding more and more flowers. Are there ponds with water lilies like in the story? Trees with flowers? A japanese bridge? Any animals visiting? Butterflies? Lady Bugs? Birds? People? How many different types of flowers are growing? It can be however you imagine!