Last week we read The Magical Garden of Claude Monet by Laurence Anholt. While on a visit to Giverny, the main character, Julie, befriends Claude Monet and explores his beautiful gardens.
We began our project by drawing the Japanese bridge made famous by Monet’s paintings. We used oil pastels to draw the bridge and create our own magical garden. Students used their imaginations to create their garden. We talked about the basic parts of a landscape, foreground, middle ground, and background, and also about how objects appear smaller as they recede in space. We added water lilies to our ponds to show how drawing objects of the same size getting smaller as you move toward the horizon line creates a sense of space.
After the gardens were drawn, we used liquid watercolor to paint them. My goal for this project was for students to learn how to layer watercolor to achieve rich colors and depth.
