How to be Creative

This 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 session is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum 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 movements and briefly exploring the social, political and historical context that may have influenced them at the time. We will then select up to 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 design. We look at the garden designers pencil case and what tools you need for good sketching. We also explore different ways to produce attractive sketches that can sell gardens in record breaking time. This can become the basis for some great online content as well.

We will also visit 3 galleries. The first is the 20th Century gallery, the remaining two will be chosen by the students on the day. In the 20th Century 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. We then present our favourite concept to the rest of the group and offer forward constructive critique as how well ideas are presented and communicated orally and visually. All work is documented and archived and we encourage you to develop it into useable content for portfolio and web-based projects. 

For: Buds and Blooms - Garden design professionals aimed at students who want to explore ways to nurture and inspire their creativity.

What you will need: Notebook and selection of drawing pens.

What you get: Worksheets to complete prior to attendance.  Lunch also included. 

What our past students say:

'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 artist within me that had lain dormant for a few years.' 
Janet, 2016 

'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, 2016