A fast track into painting with acrylics. Learn to guide your own way through colour, composition and critique to paint from the heart with confidence.

Experiment with acrylic paint using a variety of tools and expressive approaches, complete a series of compositions, becoming more playful and abstract as you go to draw out your unique take on a subject.

You’ll work in acrylics, a forgiving and fun medium that gives you a solid foundation for painting in other media. Using principles of colour theory, texture and tone, you’ll be able to decode paintings, understanding what makes a composition ‘work’.

Ilker’s uplifting presence in the studio helps you listen more closely to your instincts while you paint. He shows you how to stop the mimicry, to cast aside the need to copy what you see around you and instead listen to yourself as an artist. Choosing your own subject from the landscape outside or the studios within, you’ll work in a series to develop its character. Ilker will show you how to develop motif in your paintings in the style of Matisse or Hockney, rather than fixating on rendering exactly what you see.

This permission to be bold, loose and abstract in your work is invaluable, whether you’re a beginner or a slightly more experienced painter looking to liberate your approach. You’ll learn to reflect on and react to your own work, finding your ‘colour voice’, your sense of scale and the character of your shapes. Refining and reworking at pace helps you be less precious about your work and surprise yourself – and it’s here that you’ll truly discover painting.

What will I learn?

1. A technical understanding of working with acrylic paint.
2. An understanding of colour, tone and texture.
3. Approaches for refining a composition such as framing and scaling.
4. Confidence in your own emerging style as a painter.
5. Tips for critiquing and reworking your own paintings.

Who would this course suit?

This course is invaluable whether you’re a beginner or a slightly more experienced painter. It helps you discover the beauty of process in the studio, refining and bringing identity to your paintings.

What to Bring

Timings and Breaks