Join artist Alice Angus for four vibrant and inspiring weeks of creative exploration, where you’ll discover freedom in mark-making, break away from old drawing habits, and rediscover the excitement and joy of artistic discovery.

Alice will guide you through a lively mix of exercises designed to help you loosen up, experiment, and build confidence with a wide range of materials. Together, we’ll explore watercolour from fresh perspectives, combining it with different media and working across a variety of surfaces. You’ll take creative risks, play with texture and tone, and learn how the simple act of making a mark can bring energy, vitality, and personality to your work.

Each week will offer a balance of quick, spontaneous exercises and longer drawing sessions, helping you develop your own expressive “mark-making toolkit.” You’ll experiment with watercolour, soft and oil pastels, ink, collage, pencils, and even found objects, discovering new ways to draw and paint.

Working from videos, photos, and everyday items found at home, you’ll uncover fresh approaches to materials and process, learning how to see differently, make boldly, and infuse your art with a sense of movement and life.

Come ready to experiment, play, and embrace the unexpected, as you expand your creative boundaries and celebrate the beauty of expressive mark-making.

Week 1 – 11th Feb – Explore – Explore, experiment, and find the qualities of watercolour mixed with other media that bring excitement to our work. We will practise the different ways to mix and how to balance water and dry pigments. We will investigate the magic and mystery of marks using different brushes and homemade tools to achieve atmospheric marks, textures, and beautiful effects. Alice will demonstrate how the actual marks you use, and the tools you use to make them, add interest, focus, and drama to your paintings, changing the position, speed, direction, and movement of the tools or brush as it dances across the paper.

Week 2 – 18th Feb – Layers – We will look at the ways layering, collage, and mixing media can tell evocative stories and create perspective, atmosphere, texture, and pattern. We will explore how layers and glazes develop into areas of focus, dimension, and shadows and light to make things emerge. We will explore ways to create atmosphere and mood through the contrasts in texture and colour.

Week 3 – 25th Feb – Movement – We delve into techniques for creating energy and movement and evoking a sense of life in both representational and abstract work. In Alice’s demos, we see how a range of different expressive qualities and materials can convey the experience of both physical, ephemeral, and imaginary subjects within your work.

Week 4 – 04th Mar – Details – This week will look at composition and colour to create strong shapes, scale, depth, and distance. Alice will show you how to include texture and surface details that bring life to your work using contrasting colours, marks, gestures, and tools that add interest, focus, and life to your work. We will experiment with stencils, masking, and other ways to create texture.

Feedback and advise on your work are available during the workshop via your webcam and after the workshop in the Art Safari Facebook Group.

The workshop will also be recorded so you will be able to watch the video online afterwards.

Each session is approximately 2 hours long with a short comfort break in-between.

What You Will Need

A Laptop, MacBook, PC, iPad or tablet

• About 15 sheets of medium or heavy cartridge AND about 8 sheets of smooth or “not” watercolour paper (or very heavy good quality cartridge) up to A2 size or 16 x 20”.
• Some scrap cartridge paper or a sketch pad for experiments, note taking and fast sketching – up to about 6 sheets
  Collage material – Alice likes to use reject drawings,, lined and graph paper, magazines, old ledgers – anything you like that you can draw on or use for collage.
• Found objects for printing with or using to make drawing tools – such as sticks, feathers, fork, pine cone, sponge, cotton wool, string – anything you like.
• A few paint brushes, suitable for your medium in different shapes and sizes. There is no need to buy any new brushes we will work with what you have. (If you are interested Alice likes to use a cheap synthetic flat brush about 1.5” wide that she has cut up a bit, a medium round synthetic watercolour brush, a bigger mop style brush and a narrow long pointy brush like a rigger or sword liner. If you have Chinese calligraphy brushes bring them as Alice uses them too.)
• Pencils, pastels, ink – Alice uses soft graphite pencils like 4B, 6B and soluble graphite pencils, she also uses charcoal, acrylic ink, Indian or Chinese ink, gouache, soft pastels and watercolour pastels and wax crayons – it is not essential to have all of these.
• Glue stick.
• Water based colour that can be used for transparent washes – this can be anything like watercolour, gouache, ink, inktense, and so on. Alice uses lemon yellow, deep yellow, bright red, dark crimson, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, yellow ochre, burnt umber and burnt sienna. Alice mixes all her greens but you are welcome to use premixed if you it some.
• Eraser.
• Kitchen towel or rags.
• Easel or table easel or other means of holding your paper flat or at a gentle angle.
• Paint palette large jars for water.