How to draw a Forest Background

As I teach children to draw and see the difficulty they have with drawing the forest, so now I will speak from this point of view – how to teach kids to draw a forest. First we should think for what purposew do we need forests in the picture. Artists – landscape painters draw forest to convey their attitude, state of mind, admiration for the beauty of nature. The children are still small for such emotional outbursts. They draw the forest as a backdrop for illustrations or topical compositions. The drawing specifically the forest for them is not the ultimate goal.For this reason, the forests, drawn by children, areusually very simplistic, schematic and stylized – kids usually fill the picture space with something tree-like. Another difficulty is that children want to draw trees in full growth and also the sky and sun and clouds…and so the forest is very small. We have to bring to the understanding of children, that they don’t need to draw trees in full growth – in life we usually see only the trunks and lower branches. The crown is very high and not in our field of vision. Now I‘m going to draw the forest as a background for a drawing of a porcupine. Tree trunks should not look like columns – it is necessary to show that trees are branched. Then the kids don’t know what to draw between the trunks. But the forest is not only trees, but bushes too.

And it is quite difficult for children to realize that the grass in the forest doesn’t look like a lawn,and plants there also have different size and shape of the leaves: This article is one a series of lessons –” landscape drawing”.