Young Artists Summer Holiday | Creating Fantasy Landscapes (10 - 14 years)

From Mountains to Molehills: Creating Fantasy Landscapes

Picture this: the sight of an ice-filled plain gives you a shiver, or the burnt orange of an arid desert makes you feel alone. It’s easy to see, the importance of landscapes to narrative is palpable. Fantasy environments transport and envelop us, setting the stage for incredible dramas.

Combining an awe for the natural world with a sense of storytelling, this course centres on creating our own personal dreamscapes. Young Artists will focus on drawing from parks, plants, animals, and our own crafted landscapes and the clothed life model.

The course will look to art history for reference. Specifically, the impossible coastlines of Ithell Colquhoun, the lush forests of Henri Rousseau, and the sharp observations of Caspar David Friedrich. Young artists will contextualise their drawings with inspiration from contemporary artists who champion landscape in their works, such as Sanam Khatibi, Peter Doig, and Wangechi Mutu.

Young artists will then  look to writer Italo Calvino for narrative inspiration, from his work Invisible Cities. “…Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock’s calcareous sky.”

At the beginning of the course, Young Artist’s will create their own miniature living landscapes from quickly sprouting seeds to draw from. In addition, students will draw outdoors in the park, from animals, and in the studio from natural forms.

Towards the end of the week, young artists  will focus on narrative, creating original characters inspired by the mythology of the living landscape - sleeping giants in mountains, tree nymphs and water spirits. All of this work will cumulate with group drawing activity, combining our stories into one huge immersive drawing that will become a life drawing set for our model.

This course is for you if you are interested in:

• Imaginative landscapes .
• World building.
• Plants and animals.
• Fantasy narratives.
• Character creation.
• Storytelling.
• Drawing from observation.
• Transforming observational drawings.

Students will gain:

• Knowledge of historic and contemporary artists who have imbued significance and storytelling in landscapes beyond pure observation.
• Confidence in drawing from the imagination and transforming studies into fantastical works.
• Strengthened observational drawing skills, through experience of working outdoors and in the studio.
• Experience of model making on a miniature and immersive scale, and how this can help with creating art.
• A new appreciation for the importance of ‘setting’ in artworks, and confidence in talking about it critically.

To attend this course students must have a good level of spoken English.

Please note we do not take group bookings for our courses.

This course may include at out of house trip in zones 1 or 2. A full schedule will be provided in advance.