Week 1 of Exploring Organic Forms
Saturday was our first session of ‘Exploring Organic Forms Through Drawing’ in association with Adult Learning Shetland. This week, through studying nature’s forms and patterns, we learnt about line and shape in drawing.
Many artists use gardens to study nature. Gardens are inspirational places, where we can find many natural forms in just one place. We can observe both large and small botanical structures, find ideas for further painting or design work, or simply spend time enjoying the calm and beauty of nature. It’s not only highly detailed observational drawings that ‘capture’ nature - a lot can be expressed with just simple economical line sketches, which is what we focused on this week.
The afternoon began indoors with a brief introduction to some basic drawing techniques. Drawing is as much about ‘learning to see’ than creating a likeness, and through a series of quick warm up line and shape activities, working from photographs of flowers and leaves, we got our pencils moving and our eyes focused!
We then headed outside in the glorious sunshine to sketch the beautiful spring displays at Jubilee Flower Park, Lerwick. Outside, there was a lot more to take in, so to help us we used viewfinders to frame our views and start to experiment with composition.
Thank you to all the participants, who made lovely studies of natural forms with flowing lines and interesting shapes, imaginatively arranged on the page.
In Week 2, we’ll work further with our sketches, experimenting with composition, abstraction and collage to make images which explore both the orderly and dynamic in nature!