Interpret Your Garden As a Painting – 3 Artist’s Tools For Developing Contrast and Imagination

Interpret Your Garden As a Painting – 3 Artist’s Tools For Developing Contrast and Imagination
By Dorothy Fagan

Contrast is the most important element in designing a painting or a garden. Without contrast ~ everything appears flat and lifeless. Here are three things you can do to see contrast and use it in your garden.

Activate Your Imagination

1. Identify areas of light and shade in your garden. Close your eyes and imagine your Self flying through your garden as if you are a bird. Feel the cool shadiness of the dark areas. Feel the bright sunshine of the light areas. Where will you perch? In the shade? Or in the sun? Where will you eat? In the shade? or in the sun? Where will you sing? Write down your answers and any thoughts which pop to mind along the way.

Make a Simple Drawing

2. Map out shade and light areas and look for ways to connect them together.With a crayon or charcoal, make a rectangle to represent the shape of your garden. Use the broad side of the crayon (take the paper off!) to ’shade in’ the cool dark areas of your garden. Leave the warm light areas the color of your paper. Are the shady areas connected? If not, how could you connect them? Are the bright areas connected? If not, how could you connect them? Try different ways of connecting them in your drawing. Try them even if you think they are not realistic. We are just playing with light and shade in the drawing ~ anything goes!

Learn to Listen Like an Artist

3. Listen to the Muse! Ask your garden for ways to contrast and connect areas of light and shade. Go for a walk in your garden. Don’t take your drawing. Just take your imagination. Let your garden speak to you. Let your imagination loose, walking through your garden as if you are a bird. Feel the contrast of the cool shady areas and warm light areas with your body. Find a place where you are comfortable and sit down to rest. Let your mind wander while you walk and sit. Notice where you are most comfortable in your garden. Is there a place to sit? to play? to eat? What can you see from your comfortable spot? When you go back inside, take a few moments to write down the thoughts which came to you in the garden. Use them to continue developing contrast in your garden.

Dorothy Fagan, Artist, Speaker, Author; paints en plein air, gardens and writes dreams and interpretations of life and art in her Daily Painting Journal. Gardens, she believes, are a mirror of our own inner landscape. http://www.dorothyfagan.com

Fagan earned her B. F. A. in Printmaking and Painting from East Carolina University and completed a ten-year Painting Mentorshipwith Robert B. Mayo, Valentine Museum, Richmond, VA. Her work has been featured in two PBS specials and is included in over two hundred private collections in the U. S., England, Lebanon and Canada. She has written six books.

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Originally posted 2009-07-10 09:47:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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