watercolours at the pond

We had a wonderful first afternoon with our Painted Turtles Art Club this past weekend! This is a group of keen, and keenly observant, children who love to blend nature and art.

Our first lesson looked a few of Georgia O'Keeffe's flower portraits - how she magnified the flowers so that they filled the whole page. The petals of her flowers touched all four sides of the page, and showed the detail and beauty of one single flower. Like this:

Red Poppy by Georgia O'Keeffe

With that in mind, we hiked through the meadow, looking for some worthy subjects to sketch. It's a great time of year to find wildflowers in a whole range of rainbow shades. We started collecting, being mindful to only collect something when we could see that there was an abundance of it around. Golden rod, wild asters, chicory, milkweed leaves, daisy fleabane, sweet wild clover, crown vetch, Queen Anne's lace... it was so hard to decide!

Then we made our way down to the pond, where we set up our art studio for the afternoon. We sketched a rough draft, then sketched with pencil onto our good copy. We outlined with a sharpie marker, then filled in the colour with watercolour paints.

All too soon, our time was over. Here are some of our works of art, set up in our pond gallery. 

On our way back to see our parents, our Painted Turtle Art Club even spotted some painted turtles!