The home-school art class had a drawing session outdoors to explore viewing the environment around the Art Junction and capturing it in a drawing.
This was a new experience for the students and a great way to learn how to really look at the world around us that we tend to take for granted.
Drawing outside is known as “Plein Air” drawing. Literally translated, this French term means “in the open air”.
Drawing and painting outside is a common thing for artists to do today, but as writer Marion Boddy Evans explains, “…in the late 1800s when the Impressionists ventured out of their studios into nature to investigate and capture the effects of sunlight and different times of days on a subject, it was quite revolutionary.”
French Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir advocated en plein air painting, and much of their work was done outdoors, in the diffuse light provided by a large white umbrella. The popularity of outdoor painting has endured throughout the 20th century and continues today at the Art Junction!
Everyone had fun in this great creative exercise on a warm spring afternoon in north-central Ohio.
The Art Junction 