Garden Party

"A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy."    Rumer Godden

This weekend I taught my long anticipated (at least for me and I hope for my students) class on tangling an organic garden. All those flowing, rippling tangles that remind me of nature, and are not normally included in my beginning classes. I was also very excited to debut my new document camera set up for my presentations. It was wonderful to able to work on a small piece of paper and have it projected on the screen, as well as being able to zoom in and out to focus on the details. Luckily no problems arose with the technology and all went smoothly.

The real creative part of this class comes from using your imagination to design your garden based on what appeals to your senses. Since each person's garden looks quite different in their mind than the next person's, the resulting tangled gardens each have their own distinct look. Especially after using white pencils to add highlights in addition to the regular pencil shading. Unfortunately some of the white highlighting doesn't show up as well as I'd like in these pictures. Some of the students' gardens are not completely finished (because no matter how much time I allow for a class, I always feel like we could use more), but I think they did an amazing job!

I'm including here a couple of examples of my own work that I shared with them for inspiration.

We used Strathmore toned tan and toned gray paper for the gardens. I enjoy this process so much that I bought one gray and one tan journal that I can use to house all my gardens in one place. So many pages to fill with gardens! I'd better get started.