Workshop sketching flowers
I love sketching flowers with children. This morning I gave a workshop to 6-8 year olds in a 17th century style atelier. We sketched after a flower still life. Look how gorgeous their drawings are!
Flower still life
The school was working with a theme about the Dutch Golden Age and asked me to do a workshop sketching flowers with the children. Our workspace: a classroom that was turned into a gorgeous workshop that could easily have been Rembrandt’s, filled with paint, brushes, easels and portraits… And ofcourse a huge flower bouquet to be drawn. After telling some stories about painting flowers in that time, the children started with a shape sketching exercise and then each sketched their own daffodil, which is a perfect flower to start with. Just like 17th century painters did, the children included some snails and insects in their flower stil life.
Exquisite flowers
The Dutch Rijksmuseum has a large collection of beautifull paintings, such as this one by Jan Brueghel, one of my favorites. And have a look at this one by Rachel Ruys, one of the famous female bouquet painters. The flowers they portrayed were exquisite in that time, brought to our country by overseas travels and captured by 16th century botanists.
