Drawing & painting - intensive - all levels

Course Content:
What will the course cover?

DAY 1: Learn to Draw with Accuracy
The first session is a practical introduction to drawing, covering basic observational methods giving you the opportunity to experiment with a range of exciting drawing materials. Depending on your personal preference you can either learn to become more disciplined in your approach to drawing (learn to recognise and apply measuring techniques) and spend more time looking and discovering your drawing skills at your own pace or if you prefer you may wish to refresh and develop your drawing style through expressive, bold and loose mark making for example. You will discover and experiment with the shapes, proportions, textures and tonal values of an array of simple everyday but visually exciting objects.

DAY 2: Introduction to Colour – colour theory
You will discover the colours in an array of objects and still life arrangements from the natural world. You will work through a series of exercises using coloured pastels (beginners - intermediate) or oil or acrylic paints (intermediate - experienced). You will cover the following:

• Colour wheel
• Mixing complementary colour to produce muddy, dirty colours, crucial colours on any artist’s palette.

DAY 3 & 4: Two-day still life:
Your tutor will set up two to three exciting still life re-creations inspired by artists of today; each with its own colour range and specific character. You can work from the same still life for two sessions or you can work from one still life in one session and the other still life the following session (you can decide depending on how fast you work). You will cover the following:

• Composition and design (preliminary studies, thumbnails)
• Palette management for painting
• Discovering different painting techniques

DAY 5: One-day still life
You will work from a still life installation incorporating the whole studio. You will cover the following:

• Composition and design (preliminary studies, thumbnails)
• Painting techniques best suited to still life

What will I achieve?

At the end of the course you will have gained a good insight into various drawing and painting methods and techniques and how they can be used. You will develop a working methodology and be able to develop your own interpretation of still life arrangements. You will be able to adapt methods used in class in your future works.