Highhill Homeschool: Drawing Flowers like Georgia O'Keeffe

We used oil pastels to create flowers in the style of Georgia O'Keefe.

Georgia O'Keefe was an American artist who lived during the early 20th century. Many of her images were inspired by nature and contained lots of shading. Natural objects were often simplified and drawn very close up.

The book Georgia O'Keefe (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists) provides a good overview of Georgia O'Keefe for young children.

To create flowers we began with one of our lightest color oil pastels by drawing one five petal flower.

Parts of additional flowers were added behind our main flower.

Next a main color was chosen for the flowers. (Red in the above example.) The lightest oil pastel in the finished flower was used to create shading around the edges of the flowers.

The process was continued by choosing a slightly darker shade and coloring inside the first color.

After adding several more colors of increasing darkness, the flowers were filled.

Using fingers, the colors were smeared to blend them together.

At the center of the flower, a dark color was used to create the male and female parts of the flowers. Then a contrasting set of colors was chosen for the background. Beginning with the lightest color, the background was filled in the same way as the flowers.