Summer Workshop 2016

We’re looking at small, speedy painting in this block of lessons. We’re concentrating on getting an idea of the subject across with minimum fuss, learning to paint what we see plus practice colour finding. Whether we like to paint in detail or loosely, this is a good exercise to do as it requires little time…

For the next 4 weeks we’re going to be painting quickly – getting used to the feel of the paint, enjoying colour, not taking ourselves too seriously and seeing what we can produce. It’s often surprising what you end up with if you choose to paint quickly – some will work out, some won’t. Those…

After a week of portraits, some students fancied trying a still life subject so we chose Cezanne as a reference for his bold colours and brushwork. These were painted in a similar manner to the portraits – in oils, around an hour per painting. I think they’ve come up with some great paintings. These little…

During classes running through April we looked at colour theory. There’s so much to learn about colour – we could have endlessly experimented with different colour schemes. These lessons only scratched the surface but the results were very interesting. After taking a look at the colour wheel and trying a wide variety of colour mixes, we chose…

This spring we’ve painted on a larger canvas – a (nearly) full figure oil painting over the course of 4 weeks. Starting with preparing the background with graded colour in acrylics, we then used a grid to get our image onto paper. This was transferred to the canvas and the figure was painted in oils. Finally, the whole…

What fun we had with these impressionist portraits. After getting over the initial nerves at painting a couple of portraits in a 2.5 hour session, let alone portraits from the great impressionists, the paint was flowing and faces started to appear. This was a great exercise in a number of things. Firstly, practicing portraits without…