So you want to be creative?

Garden Design Inspiration Concept Sketch

This 2 day garden design course is aimed at students who want to explore ways to nurture and inspire their creativity. Whether you are a budding garden design student or a practising garden designer, Katrina uses the knowledge she gained from her art degree and years of garden design to teach techniques and strategies for finding inspiration from the world of art and design. The course comprises an introduction, which is completed online, followed by two days visiting some of London’s iconic institutions to learn how to place design styles in

their context and create a scrapbook of ideas. You can view some of our previous garden design presentations by clicking here.

Day One (10am – 6pm) – Meet for coffee at the Tate Modern or other Modern Art Gallery in London to discuss our views on art and gain an understanding of the depth of our knowledge of art. We look at how we can draw inspiration from art pieces even if we don’t like the art piece itself. We walk through the galleries looking at different art movemements and briefly exploring the social, political and historical context that may have influenced them at the time. We will then select 5 pieces of art from different eras/movements, and from these try to find inspiration to transpose into a garden design. We explore shapes, texture, colour, proportion, composition, perspective, context, relationship with viewer and emotional response – basically align modern art techniques with the components that help make for great garden designs.

Day Two (9am – 5pm) – We head to the Victoria and Albert Museum to explore 3 galleries. The first is the 20th Centuary gallery, the remaining two will be chosen by the students on Day One. In the 20th Centuary gallery we will select one object from each 20 year period and use that object as a basis for our garden sketches. In the other two galleries the students will select an object for each other – we then pick a stranger walking round the gallery, make some assumptions about their life and personality, and design a garden as if they were the client.

All work is documented and archived and we encourage you to develop it into usuable content for portfolio and web-based projects.

Some comments from past students:-

“Thanks to our fantastic teacher, Katrina. She is just wonderful!! We have been to her open day, to different drawing courses and her “website course”. The last course we came to was the creative session. We just love her and thanks to her our business is doing great here in Norway.” – Kari Mette

“I have been a garden designer for 5 years, but sometimes get artist’s block. This is a great motivator, to remind myself that I can be creative in my gardens and it helped me to connect to the artisit within me that had lain dormant for a few years.” – Janet, 2010

“Inspirational, Intelligent, Invaluable – if you go to this course you will never be short of ideas. This course is exactly what I was looking for.” – Mike, 2010

The course costs £300 for 2 days, plus half day study at home. 2 students maximum per course. Accomodation is not included.

To see details of the other courses offered at the Earth Designs Garden Design School please click here