Landscapes: drawing what's close by.

Landscapes can be confusing for younger students. There is so much information out there to organize into a picture, they can feel overwhelmed. Yet learning to create an illusion of space using foreground, middle ground, and background as well as spatial perspective is a valuable part of elementary art education.

In my experience as an artist, I know that some of my best work is inspired by the familiar. I designed this landscape unit so that students could work with something close to them: the unique plants and animals in our own rural mountain valley landscape. Dividing the unit into several lessons helped them organize the information and made creating landscapes less confusing.

Since I was working with younger students who have not had an education in art, my basic lessons were sketching animals realistically, drawing trees expressively, composing landscapes using spatial perspective, and using oil pastels as a medium.

Look Out Windows and in Books

The best reference material was right outside the classroom windows. Students could see the color of the mountains as well as the structure of the oak trees in our valley. For more reference material, I brought in art reproductions and pictures of landscapes and animals.

Drawing Animals

Armed with children's books with animal illustrations and fine-art reproductions, I was ready for the first lesson: teaching students how to draw animals using basic shapes. As we talked about which shapes are most often used in sketching (ovals, rectangles, trapezoids, teardrops, semicircles), I found that placing transparent sheets over art reproductions and tracing around the main shapes of the animals clarified the concept. Students had a rewarding class session drawing a variety of animals, surprising themselves with how much easier it was to get things in proportion by first sketching the basic shapes of the body, neck, head, etc., then progressing to details like ears, tails, feet, and eyes.

Trees without Rules

What's a landscape without trees? A quick lesson on drawing was valuable. After students had mastered the "Y" method, I showed them drawings I'd done of real trees, and they saw that most of these did not divide into the neatly predictable "Y" patterns they'd just completed. Now that they understood how trunks divide into branches which get progressively thinner as they divide further, I encouraged them to practice drawing trees that break the rules, are uneven, have character, and really look tree-like.

Space with Divisions

For the third lesson, we moved on to landscape. Students identified the horizon line in several fine-art reproductions, noticing that sometimes it was almost at the top of the picture, and in other pictures it was very low. In most landscapes, the foreground, middle ground, and background are fairly easy to identify. I pointed out the obvious: the foreground is at the bottom of the page and the background is further up.

I explained that when drawing or painting a landscape, artists have a basic problem: They have to make it seem like the flat surface of the paper or canvas goes back in space. I asked students if they noticed any tricks artists use to make their pictures look three-dimensional. With prompting and hints, students noted overlapping, and that things appeared bigger, sharper, and more detailed in the foreground and smaller, lighter, and hazier in the background.

Before lightly sketching lines across their 12 x 18" (31 x 46 cm) paper to define the foreground, middle ground, and background, they had to make some creative decisions. Should the horizon be high or low? Should the paper be horizontal or vertical? Organizing the landscape helps lessen the overwhelming feeling young artists can get when they look at the confusing jumble of information that's outside the window.

Color Controlled

Students practiced using oil pastels before creating their final landscape, I explained that we were going to get out of the coloring-book mentality. Rather than filling in one shape with a solid color and then moving on to the next, they were to sketch in the colors, working lightly on all parts of the picture. That way, if color changes needed to be made, it could be done easily. I encouraged them to find out how much richer green looks if it's made with layers of yellow, blue, dark green, and gold, rather than the solid bright green right out of the box. Students tried to make their oil pastels look like paint by applying heavily and completely covering the paper. They used their brightest, most vivid colors in the foreground, and mixed colors with white and gray for the background.

Landscapes with Limits

Now they were ready to put everything they'd learned together. I gave the following simple parameters for the culmination of the unit. They were to draw one large object, such as an animal, plant, or tree, that overlapped the middle ground and optionally the background as well (providing a point of focus). Then they were to draw additional objects in the middle ground and back ground, proportionally smaller in size, to give the illusion of depth.

The time taken with preliminary drawing and color lessons paid off. It was rewarding to see that students did inspired work when given the opportunity to make art about their everyday world. In this case, they created a landscape based on what they are fortunate enough to see out their classroom windows.

WEB LINKS

www.artcyclopedia.com/subjects/ Landscapes.html

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students use visual structures and functions of art to communicate ideas.

Carol Horst is an artist in residence for various elementary schools in Kern County, California.