Learning about landscape painting opens up a whole range of artistic activities for children. Even unknown artists can be used to demonstrate different styles of landscape work.
There is a useful section on Welsh Art Landscapes created by the Clwyd Fine Art Trust and the Joint Area Museum Education Service. Even though children will not have heard of these artists, the presentation demonstrates a vast range of landscape painting styles. There are questions for children to think about related to the various images and some exploration of the drawing styles used. They offer a free PowerPoint presentation, teacher notes and worksheets to be downloaded.
Interactive whiteboard art lessons are provided by the Welsh Education Service; these use Flash, they are quite old but still very useful resources, teachers will need to enable Flash on a desktop or laptop to run them: Landscape Van Gogh Style introduces children to landscape painting in the style of Van Gogh. Children have an activity sheet and are encouraged to do a painting using a similar technique. Part one is useful for looking at composition, light shade, brush strokes, etc within the picture, with the whole class. Part two is not much use in schools unless every child has a laptop – it is a pallet and a set of brushes for children to use in order to create a picture in the style of… This is okay on a one to one basis but in most classrooms most children would need to be using paints and paper.
Landscape Painting is another free, excellent teaching resource shared by GailNaden through the TES. The presentation contains a great set of different styles of landscapes for children to talk about and there are also questions on form, light, shade, etc to discuss.
Primary Resources has an 8 week plan for learning about landscape painting as part of a geography project shared as a doc file by Miss Tanner. It may well be a useful starting point.
