Learning How to Draw Wildflowers with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I always looked forward to going through the parent packet that my daughter Florence’s Waldorf School sent home every week.
I read that an upcoming field trip for my daughter’s class
would be a wildflower drawing adventure in Big Sur at the Garrapata State Beach
and Park.
“If you know how to draw this will be a fun outing, but if
you don’t, this will be a long rotten field trip,” I thought to myself.
Florence’s drawing skills were okay, because I drilled her
in math constantly and did not want her to spend her time tracing unicorns in
fantasy coloring books. Drawing skills
take just as much time and resources to master at home as math skills. I knew drawing was important for making story
boards for film directors, which Florence wanted to do as a career, so I was
going to show Florence some drawing skills that I had learned in school.
I took out some Renaissance art history books and told Florence,
“Shapes are in the background of many paintings.” I showed her works by Raphael, in particular,
and pointed out how triangles were used to position figures and help viewers
read the painting. We went through art
books and figured out what geometric figures were in the background of the
paintings.
Then, I took out the National
Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers: Western Region that
I used myself for hiking and walking by the ocean. This book was not a drawing book, but it was
what I had on hand to teach drawing.
“When you draw a flower, there are two main parts to draw:
the flower and the leaves. The leaves
are the hardest part to draw. Do them
last,” said to Florence.
To start I showed Florence a drawing of a daisy in the book.
“When you draw a flower, decide what shapes to use and count
the number of petals,” I said.
I went through the rest of the field guide, asking Florence
to identify shapes to use to draw the flowers we looked at and explained
symmetry as well. We counted numbers of
petals and I told her to draw them opposite each other, so the flower would
look even. After doing this for awhile,
I had her draw basic flower shapes.
“Sometimes you have to draw in pistils and stamens in the
inside of the flower,” I said. She
practiced those words for spelling tests and knew what they were.
“Okay, let’s identify basic leave shapes,” I said. We went through the book and did that, too.
“This is easy,” Florence said.
“The basic shape is easy,” I said. “However, the detail on the shape takes a
long time to draw. Take one half of the
leaf at a time and count how many shapes you have to make in the basic shape to
make it realistic. Do this in light
pencil and then fill in the other half,” I said.
“I’m getting this,” Florence said.
“Color comes last and covers everything up, especially the
light lines you put in to get the leaves right,” I said.
Florence was intrigued now and began drawing flowers from
photographs and coloring them.
I could just hear my art history professors at the
University of Chicago say to me, “You favor Renaissance Florentine artists who
thought line prevailed over the Venetian colorists.”
When I picked Florence up from school on field trip day, she
was all smiles and showed me her wildflower drawings.
“We hiked on the cliffs and looked at the ocean. Then, we ate lunch and drew wildflowers,”
Florence said.
The wildflower drawings were nice, but I knew the real
lesson in drawing them was teaching Florence to analyze work to be done and
creating a finished product based on analysis.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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