Exploring Textures in the Garden

The world is full of textures, tastes, sights, sounds and smells and we’re starting to explore them in more detail – looking at the language that we use to describe and explain them and one of our first explorations is through touch whilst it still feels like Summer we decided to explore textures in the garden by representing them on paper.

Using wax crayons we set out with some paper and looked at different objects in the garden. With J and T we’ve talked about rough and smooth before but bringing them out on paper allowed us to look in more detail.

As a child I loved doing rubbings – things like leaf rubbings in the autumn to show up the veins and fine details as well as brass rubbings and also on a trip to a local church from gravestones over 200 years old bringing out the names of the deceased on paper to discover history in our village.

By removing the paper from some wax crayons J and his friend N started to look at objects in the garden – things like Bark on the trees, brick work on the house, the decking, stones and rocks were rubbed with different coloured crayons.

We then sat and discussed the different textures – apart from rough and smooth, we talked about grains, how fine or coarse the texture was, whether it was gritty, deeply indented or raised. At points we talked about what things could be – the veins on the leaves transporting water from the roots, the grains on some stones coming from how they were formed.