Connect with both nature and your artistic self, learning to build lusciously layered oil paintings in a single sitting, with the Autumnal seascapes of St Ives as inspiration.

Working both outside and in our historic Porthmeor Studios, you’ll spend time at the beginning of the course building sketches in charcoal, enhancing your focus on your subject and discovering the hidden glimpses that reveal themselves the longer you look.  Learn to capture the tones of Autumn in these preliminary charcoal sketches, capturing subtle flickers of light, strong lines and vibrant tone.  You’ll find that unlike a photograph, these sketches become a piece of the place and process, and will help to inform the oil paintings that follow.

Discover how the shades and tones of Autumn can be captured in oil, and observe how the rich palettes of this season can create a distinctive atmosphere.

You’ll gain insight into oil painting techniques that enable you to work faster, more instinctively and bring hidden depth to your paintings. One of these is working alla prima, or wet-on-wet. It can be a tricky technique to master, Andrew shows you how to approach it with confidence and control, teaching you strategies for how to create impasto layers without your colours becoming muddy. 

Experience a transformative few days at this tranquil time of year, engaging with the landscape to infuse vibrancy and focus into your practice, creating captivating drawings and paintings that resonate with emotion and artistry.

What you will learn

• How to establish and capture a subject using observational skills
• Charcoal drawing techniques, to use as resources in the studio in place of photographs
• Drawing and painting techniques for working en plein air
• How to work quickly in oils using the alla prima technique
• How to create atmosphere in your work using colour and marks

Who would this course suit?

Whatever your skill or experience in oils, this course offers an instinctive and atmospheric way to engage with landscape. We will be working both in the studio and outside so be prepared for changes in weather and wrap up warm!

What to Bring

Timings and Breaks