My Dutch Art Project Turned Into An Informational Cultural Lesson
I got some practice with my Dutch and got to draw a few things with my art supplies
I was just looking to do some fun artwork considering that I have been focusing on Dutch as the primary language that I’ve been studying now over the last couple of months after finding myself overwhelmed trying to learn all six new languages all at once. Focusing on one, particularly one as easy and as similar to English as Dutch was a great move in my language-learning journey.
It’s funny, I’ve been finding myself speaking to Mike in the language sometimes in random conversations. I even caught myself doing it in a Discord group today while I was talking to monolingual friends. Dutch is starting to become a bigger and bigger part of my life daily.
I am primarily learning the language through Duolingo, which I highly recommend. I also recommend supplementing that learning with some online tools and also with videos. Ideally, you’d want to have someone to speak with. I don’t and I’d love to practice it with someone but I know that’s not an easy thing to accomplish, especially considering not many people speak Dutch in the United States. According to Babbel, there are only about 140,000 speakers here.
My quick artwork was something fun I wanted to do and figured that I’d learn some stuff doing it today too. Well, I did learn some things. A combination of more things about the Netherlands, things about my artistic ability, and some interesting facts about the country itself going through this.
As you can see, my artwork has a lot left to be desired. I wouldn’t say a kid drew that. That’d be mean to some kids. If you don’t have a translator in front of you to decipher what I’m saying in Dutch, I’ll break it down for you. I’m practicing some basic phrases and I’m using primarily Dutch on the actual art to highlight what I’ve done.
First off, I drew the Netherlands’ flag at the top. It was on orange paper which is definitely a very Dutch color. The men’s national team wears orange (oranje) in competition. I found out that the orange is actually the national color and is historically significant in Dutch culture. There was something about a prince and I didn’t really want to spiral into a whole thing so I linked my reference here.
Since I didn’t have a white (wit) marker, I used the orange as a substitute but it is less noticeable with the orange paper being held to light and brightened up. It almost looks passable. In fact, where the white is supposed to be between the red (rood) and blue (blauw), I wrote “Doe alsof dat wit is,” meaning “Pretend that’s white.”
I did something similar to what was supposed to be a tulip in the bottom right corner. The funny thing is when I was done drawing the tulip, knowing that the Netherlands is the world’s most abundant land for tulips, the citizens actually chose the national flower recently as the daisy. Like, what, how could you do a bait-and-switch on me like that?
Well, anyway, my tulip drawing wasn’t that good anyway and I had to use purple (paars) instead of pink (roze). The stem and leaves are green but because of the lighting and the angle, you really can’t tell from this picture. The caption actually says, “Een tulp. Doe alsof het roze is. Ik heb geen roze marker,” which translates to “A tulip. Pretend that it is pink. I have no pink marker.” It was a cop-out again to go that route but I wanted to finish it and not make it completely accurate.
In the middle of the drawing and for most of the map, I drew a very rough sketch of the small country (mijn schets van Nederland). I wanted to make it big enough to look halfway noticeable which I think that I did. I also included main cities such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, and Groningen. I didn’t include Utrecht but I should’ve since it’s the 4th largest city in the country, but I also wanted to spread the map out geographically a bit.
By the way, don’t call The Netherlands Holland. Holland has only two provinces in the country, North and South Holland. The Netherlands has some very strange land borders, especially with its neighbors to the south in Belgium (België) and also with its neighbors to the east in Germany. The whole border (grens) is a tad squiggly and I could’ve spent hours trying to perfect it but again, I wanted to get it done.
I even got some of the islands that jut out and distinctly form that stretch of coastline along the North Sea. Technically, the country has a maritime border with the United Kingdom and France but I don’t think that should count for anything considering that the North Sea basically traps them right there to the north and west of the country.
This was a fun art project even though it was a bit rough. I learned a lot about the Netherlands that I got to share with you and I also got to practice and show off my Dutch skills today. I thought about writing part of this entirely in Dutch instead of showing the translations but I opted for English instead since most of my readers understand that as a universal language.
I hope that you learned as much as I did about basic Dutch culture today in my short exploration into the Netherlands and drew a few things to highlight that. Are you learning a language and about its culture? Do you understand any Dutch as a foreigner or are you a fluent Dutch speaker? Let me know in the comments and feel free to tell me how my art is, honestly.
I’ll conclude with a famous Dutch proverb.
Wie goed doet, goed ontmoet.
It literally translates to “Who does good, meets well.” This means that if you do good, good will also be done to you. I like this phrase and I think it fits well with our shared Dutch culture lesson. Hope you were helped a little by my good deed for both of us.
