Art in the landscape

You will need:

  • pencil
  • wax crayon
  • paper or sketch pad
  • tracing paper
  • felt pen
  • scissors
  • glue stick or double sided tape
  • digital camera or phone camera

 

Instructions

  1. During a walk look at details in the landscape, for example collect leaves, feathers or seed heads of different shapes and colours.
  2. Take some your leaves, lay them out in a pattern on the ground and photograph your leaf collage.
  3. As well as drawing take some photographs during your walk, but try some different angles … get close up to plants, flowers and textures to notice the fine details.
  4. Try drawing around your leaves, feathers, seed heads to create a page of overlapping shapes in your sketch book.
  5. Using a wax crayon take rubbings of different textures on your walk, for example bark, back of leaves, stonework.
  6. If you are lucky to be out on a sunny day take a shadow photograph, or trace a shadow into your sketchbook.

 

fiery orange leaf amongst shrivelled brown autumn leaves
yellow autumn leaf amongst brown shriveled leaves
close up of fern, pale brown
red maple leaf
sketch of leaf shape outlines
paper with wax rubbing of textures
sketchbook with shadow of grasses on it
overlapping leaf outlines, some spaces shaded to create abstract design
seed head outline shapes cut out and collaged together

 

Other tips and ideas

  • Try creating an abstract pattern from your leaf outlines. We used tracing paper to copy our sketchbook drawings and coloured in the alternate overlapping shapes.
  • Inspired by a wallpaper design from the V&A collection we cut out some of our bark rubbings and made them into seed head and plant shape collage.
  • TIP: don’t stick down your shapes until you are happy with the overall composition. Try shuffling the pieces around for different designs. We finished off with the addition of some simple geometric pen details.

 

Download

Download ‘Art in the landscape’ instruction sheet (pdf)