Pastel Landscapes

A quick little drawing that I had students do.  Working from other artists' paintings they had to imitate the painted brush strokes and colour palette using either chalk or oil pastels.  They could alter the colour palette entirely but most just made some adjustments as they were limited by the colour selection of pastels.  They also had the option to just copy a section of painting.  While this may not be the most creative approach to landscape drawing/painting I do find it helpful for students to spend that much time paying very close attention at someone else's work.  All of these students have a career in forgery!

LANDSCAPES

I tried something different this year with my Level 1 art students.  After looking over many examples of the different styles and approaches artists use to paint landscapes, I asked the students to choose one element from three different paintings (e.g. how an artist portrayed clouds from one painting, trees from another, mountains from another etc.) and incorporate those elements into their original landscape composition.  For the most part this pretty well addressed the default compositions and stylized representations of sun, trees, mountains etc. and also avoided doing a direct copy of someone else's painting.  After their compositions were completed then they were to choose a colour scheme (monochromatic, analogous, complementary, warm, etc.) that dominated their painting.

Painting