Local artist, Victoria Gillow, shares new ways of working to inspire your creative process and help you paint the places you love. Discover techniques to create vibrant and expressive paintings.

Focusing on the beauty of the dunes and expansive three miles of shoreline within the bay of St Ives, create your own seascape with Victoria and learn processes to help you to paint the landscapes close to you. Explore the balance between realism and abstraction, infusing colour with imagination and emotion rather than simple representation.

The first part of this self-paced course leads you through several sketching and colour exercises on location. Tune into the auditory environment and translate sounds into visual forms; explore marks of the tide, rhythms of the ocean sounds, the feeling of objects combed from the beach and in your own time, capture the essence of a scene through small studies.

The second part of the course comprises a 2.5hr studio session working alongside Victoria. She will help us re-engage with our surroundings through warm-up exercises involving words and drawing. Using the various notes, sketches and colour studies made on location, work with graphite and acrylics, to create larger format paintings alongside a body of smaller work.

Scale up your studies and put the techniques to practice in this valuable session, to produce a vibrant and expressive seascape painting.

Don’t worry if you can’t get out into the landscape immediately, there are photographic and video resources included in the course that you can use as a starting point for your studies.

How does an online session work?

You will have 60 days access to the course so plenty of time, to re-watch and re-do the exercises should you wish to in your own familiar surroundings.

You will be invited to join our Facebook Alumni group so you can share your discoveries with fellow students from around the world. You can also share your work live with others on social media using the #schoolofpainting and tagging us @stives painting

You can watch on a PC, laptop or tablet and if you have chromecast or miracast you could even cast to your SmartTV from your phone.

What’s included:

Practical lessons, filmed on location. Observe and learn from Victoria, as she introduces Hayle beach and dunes and shares her techniques for working in the landscape. The idea is that you can work through these preparatory exercises over a few days or a week (depending on your time commitments).

Reference images of the unique Cornish landscape that our tutors will be visiting. You can revisit these time and time again, to practice the techniques learned in the session.

A 2.5 hour studio session.  You can watch or work along with Victoria, who will be bringing together the preliminary ideas from the pre-recorded footage, in a practical session.