Live Oak Drawing Classes

Drawing seems to be the perfect way to end the day.

At Live Oak Education, each form has a drawing class once a week at the last hour of the day.

Form 1 sees their daily nature discoveries come to life on their paper through guided drawings. Following step by step instructions from Brittany Riedel, they have created bugs, birds, and toads.

Brittany Riedel taking Form 1 through drawing a monarch butterfly

Form 2 is learning the elements of art. Brittany takes the students through the use of lines, shading, and cross hatching to create dimension in their drawings.

Form 1 drawing an Acorn Woodpecker, a bird often seen where we gather Tuesdays and Thursdays

Learning the shapes needed to draw a toad, an animal they have been finding and catching every morning!

“A notebook is the single most important piece of equipment a naturalist takes into the field. It is useful for recording daily observations, sketching plants and animals for later reference, taking notes on behavior and habitat, and assisting in identification by recording field marks that otherwise might be forgotten. The naturalist’s notebook only increases in value as time goes by and observations accumulate. Soon, patterns begin to emerge from what initially may have been chance encounters with various plants or animals. A well-kept notebook that preserves a record of their activities at a particular place over an extended period of time can contribute information valuable to our understanding of nature.”
—From the preface to the Audubon Society Nature Guide to Western Forests, by Stephen Whitney (Knopf/Borzoi, 1985)

Through lessons on drawing, Live Oak students are becoming fully equipped and confident in their skills to record what they see while discovering life in the world around them.