Explore the stunning St Ives landscape and develop your artistic skills in a supportive environment, whilst exploring mixed media paintings.

This immersive course is designed to guide you through the process of creating preparatory drawings, which will serve as a foundation for your expressive landscape paintings, crafted in the studio.  Throughout the course, Steven will introduce you to a rich array of artistic materials and techniques, as well as showcase the works of influential landscape painters.

Delve into the concept of “composition” and explore the key elements that contribute to creating a successful image, discussing principles such as balance, focal points, and the use of negative space to enhance your visuals.  Engage in sketching activities and making observations of your surroundings near the studio.  This hands-on experience will allow you to connect with your environment and practice applying compositional techniques in real-time, using a blend of materials.

Using your observational sketches, experiment with mixing different media, such as pencil, charcoal, ink, paint, and collage, to create your own compositions and ultimately art work to take home with you.  Explore tones, textures and colours and discover which media can be combined and which ones cannot, along with techniques to facilitate this process. This exploration will challenge your preconceived notions of what is “right” in art and encourage you to adopt a creative and experimental mindset. It will not only help you “loosen up your painting” but also “loosen up your thinking.”

Steven will teach you techniques to help you capture something of the feeling of a landscape or place in an expressive composition.  He will also look at how other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth, Peter Doig and Jock McFadyen have taken inspiration from their own surroundings to portray a sense of place.  Try your hand at different mark making, flexing your creative muscles to help you to produce a variety of mixed media outcomes. This course will teach fundamental skills that will help to build your artistic confidence.

What to Bring

Our studios are fully equipped and we provide you with all the materials you need for your course. However, if you have a favourite set of brushes or any specialist materials that you would prefer to use, please bring them with you.

Timings and Breaks

The workshop will run from 10:00am until 16:30pm. Please arrive 10-15 minutes before the start time so you can check in at reception and get settled in. We will serve tea and coffee at break times during the morning and afternoon.