Painting landscapes at LOLPS

Julie Druker | Nov 25, 2015

Young artists had a chance to try their hand at painting landscapes at this year's annual installment of the Land O' Lakes Art Club. Eighteen students aged 8-13 took part in the classes under the tutelage of grade 7/8 teacher Lee Hull, himself an accomplished and talented artist.

The students spent seven weeks painting the fall landscape surrounding the school. They took their easels, canvases and paints into the great outdoors and chose a section of landscape behind the school that they wanted to paint. Part of the challenge for the students was dealing with the ever-changing fall colours and Hull said that the students, who painted just once a week, were forced to remember the scenes in their mind's eye since the colours in the scenery were constantly changing.

The students also focused their talents on painting exactly what they saw rather than just the idea of it. Mr. Hull explained that, “Rather than painting the idea of a tree, the students had to paint a particular tree if that was their focus in the work.”

Other scenes included a wooden gazebo, and one student chose to focus on a bush with bright red leaves at the far end of the school yard. The students learned about scale, how to make objects in the foreground come to the front while keeping the other background elements towards the back of the canvas. The students learned how to mix colours and were also given the challenge of not using the colour black in the process.

The students began by painting a canvas with a neutral toned background and then used the colour green to sketch in with their brushes a drawing of the scene, paying close attention to detail and scale. The next step was to fill in the neutral section of the background, with the idea that once that had been done, the painting was then finished. The final step was to apply the colour white to hit the highlights in the scene and to bring the lightest parts of the picture forward.

To celebrate their finished works, the students held an art show and vernissage at the school on November 19 where the artists and guests enjoyed a multitude of fancy snacks courtesy of student parent Linda Tremblay, bringing to a close a successful exploration in landscape painting for students at the school.