Workshops

August Series

A series of standalone workshops covering various aspects of painting with pastels such as mark making, designing your composition, far reaching views and focus on detail.

Please see the Workshop Calendar for the series of themes.

As these workshops are running throughout August there will be a combination of working indoors and outdoors, weather permitting!

Techniques for Beginners

The idea of these workshops is to develop a student's mark making knowledge and skills with pastels and a variety of papers.

During the course I will cover all techniques, basic to advanced and experimental mark making.

Mark making describes the different lines, dots, marks, patterns, and textures used to create an artwork and the resultant effect is dependent upon the particular medium, paper and tool used to apply.

So a brush will provide a certain mark, while fingers will provide a different mark.

Applying pastels softly will give a light result, whereas applying them with pressure will give a strong mark.

Mark making can be loose and gestural or controlled and neat.

As such, mark making is a fundamental building block in art and it is how you begin to express emotion and movement.

Landscape

For Landscape Workshops I like to focus on a particular theme and explore with you what is involved in developing your observation skills to produce an interesting composition and your use of pastels to paint the textures of that particular landscape.

We will look at gathering research material through sketching and photos and how to improve your concentration and observation skills.

We wil also work on your ability to create compositions, use colour effectively and be expressive in your paintings with your colour choices and mark making skills.

I will do some mini demos and give you specific tasks to help get you started, then provide technique advice throughout the process.

Sea and Sky

We will spend half a day painting clouds and skies and half a day painting seas.

Both are really pleasurable and meditative subjects but with totally different techniques.

Colour Wheel

When you are using paint you can easily mix your primaries and see how they make some secondary colours. Whereas pastels are all powder, so we have our colours made for us already.

But we still need to know what's cool, what's warm, what's light, what's dark & everything else. So really understanding the different emphasis of colour theory for pastels is a vital part of painting with and using them.

Included in the cost of the workshop is a set of 18 pastels. Primary, secondary and tertiary colours I have picked out from the colour wheel. There are 12 colours which make up the colour wheel and I have also included a black, a white and 4 greys to use throughout the course.

The Colour Wheel set is a beautiful selection and will complement any pastels you may already have.

Still Life

The idea of this series of standalone workshops is to focus on the accurate drawing of different still life compositions and your use of pastels to paint these compositions.

You will develop your eye, improving your observational skills by studying groups of objects in terms of lighting and colour.

This will help you learn how to accurately draw a collection of objects and their relation to each other within a composition, and then how to complete the painting using pastels.

We will observe, draw and paint a different grouping of objects each week, covering basic shapes like a bowl of fruit, more complex groups, which may include vases of flowers or glass bottles to introduce textures, shadows and reflections within the composition.

I will do some mini demos to help get you started and provide technique advice throughout the process.

Pastel Session

This is a single 3 hour session intended to give you a taste of pastel techniqiues if you are a beginner or new to this medium, or to focus on a particular subject or techniqiue if you are a more experienced artist.

A Pastel Session is a fun idea for a birthday present or ideal to concentrate on for example learning or improving pastel mark making, landscape or still life.