£100.00
Including VAT
Explore the enchanting world of botany, exploring flowers, foliage and fungi!
Join us for a captivating 4-part virtual workshop series that takes you deep into the enchanting world of botany, exploring flowers, foliage and fungi. We will take on botanicals in a loose and painterly way, always enjoying the depths of colour, the perfections of form, and the imperfections of nature, occasionally dwelling on the life cycles of different plants.
Express yourself with plants! Botanical illustration has long held an important place in science, history and art, so join us to make botanicals part of your own portfolio – in a painterly way. In loose style you can learn to record our natural world in its most beautiful form.
Each session, Karen Pearson will focus on new topics during this intriguing art workshop series. Karen will work in pencil, ink, charcoal and watercolour. Each session contains intensive tutorials and demos where Karen aims to enthuse and sharpen your sketching and painting skills!
Places Available
Each session, Karen Pearson will focus on new topics during this intriguing art workshop series. Karen will work in pencil, ink, charcoal and watercolour. Each session contains intensive tutorials and demos where Karen aims to enthuse and sharpen your sketching and painting skills.
When you purchase this virtual workshop, you will automatically be sent a series of emails, each containing each session pre-recorded on YouTube, along with course notes from Karen and plenty of reference images to work from.
Workshop content:
Flowers have long held deep symbolism for painters, seen in iconic works like Monet’s Water Lilies, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and the evocative references in Georgia O’Keeffe’s art.
In this session, we’ll enrich our understanding by delving into a bit of art history, exploring the Dutch Golden Age of flower painting—a journey filled with beauty and intriguing secrets. In demos, Karen explores flower forms and how to sketch them. From petal formations to diverse flower heads, our pages will soon be bursting with colour and life.
We also look at colours and how to make a flower painting sing. Shadows and backgrounds are useful to explore as they can throw more attention on to the subject. By the end, you’ll have improved your sketching skills and hopefully have gained a deeper appreciation for the language of flowers.
Trees are the ultimate green machines! This week, we’ll explore the magnificent leaves that provide us with the air we breathe. We’ll have a fun session of colour mixing to achieve a whole canopy of green hues to play with.
Karen helps you study leaf structures, using live examples and encouraging you to find your own subjects too. She may even want to take a closer look under the microscope to appreciate the intricate patterns and pathways.
By examining the diverse shapes and forms of foliage, we’ll create beautiful pages filled with vibrant leaves, branches and berries. Light and sunlight is part of today’s session as Karen explores the effects of backlight and direct light. Each of Karen’s demos informs not only on the subject matter in hand, but also on watercolour and sketching techniques.
Have you got mush room for any more sketches? We hope so, because this week we’re delving into the fascinating world of fungi! These extraordinary organisms, with their dazzling shapes, ranging colours, shapes and sizes, are vital to our ecosystem. You may find yourself sketching the contents of your fridge, the forest floor, or working from photos that we have collected – this is a fun session where your style can develop as you use new techniques.
Mushrooms give us opportunities to think about subtle colour mixing and colour glazing. Finding and exploring form, delineating and describing the delicacy of edges you find you have fascinating paintings. Finding imperfections and uneven shapes will also add to your understanding and quality of your paintings.
Let’s get ready to sketch their otherworldly forms and uncover the magic of mushrooms together!
For our final session, we’re taking it a step further by exploring seeds heads! Dried seed heads boast intricate and delicate structures that are simply begging to be sketched. They are a brilliant food source for many creatures from the sweetest field mice to migrating birds that are attracted to their food source.
From the intricate pinecones to the elegant poppy heads, we’ll explore these complex forms and create beautiful tonal sketches. Karen will go through a variety of demos to show a range of tools (from sticks to paintbrushes) aimed to make your painting livelier and more lifelike.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
In her demonstrations, Karen will pick a subject to develop on camera while she talks you through her process. Please note that these sessions are all pre-recorded and there is no live feedback.
After or during each session, you will have the option to paint from a variety of images to suit your taste from a library of photos you will receive as part of the course package, or you can choose from your own images. You might find that you prefer to use botanical subjects from life.
You have time in between sessions to complete your work and submit images of your paintings for feedback on our private Facebook group or by email.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED:
Karen will work in pencil and watercolour but you may use any medium. This course isn’t specifically about one media or about colour, so just use colours you are familiar with and those you already have.