The idea
This lesson is a shape hunt disguised as a landscape painting. Students draw a world where a house and the trees around it come together in a playful dance of shapes: the round, leafy canopies of trees like big green umbrellas, a house with a triangular roof shaped like the letter A, a friendly chimney puffing cozy smoke, and tree trunks that stretch and divide into the letter Y. Nature is the greatest teacher — once you start seeing its shapes, you can’t stop. The next time students are out on a hike, they’ll pause and look around differently.
How it begins
The class walks through the scene together shape by shape — circles for canopies, the big A of the roof, the branching Ys of the trunks — sketching lightly in pencil so the whole woodland composition is standing before the first wash of watercolor goes down.