Four brand new workshops in Alice’s Atmospheric Watercolour series continuing to share the excitement and thrill of this fluid, versatile and inspiring medium and help you gain confidence to enjoy the spontaneity and expressiveness of watercolour.

Over four exciting and packed sessions you will explore how to use the unique qualities of watercolour to bring light, luminosity, dimension and excitement to your work. Alice will help you to confidently work with water and pigment and enjoy the wonderful unpredictable accidents and surprises that watercolour brings. She will work with a range of water based media including watercolour, ink, soluble graphite and carbon pencils and blocks, water soluble crayons and pencils and soft pastels with water, as well as collage and paper.

Over the four weeks you will learn how to perfect and elevate your work to new dimensions. The weekly session will be as follows:

Week 1 -The Dance of Brushmarks – 20th March
This week we will be exploring the magic and mystery of brush strokes. We will do a range of experiments and exercises to understand how the unique relationship between the brush and water can create many surprising and beautiful shapes, movements and gestures. We will build on this to discover how to create strokes for petals, leaves, grasses, lines, flowers, mountains, buildings, factories, birds, people and abstract shapes. Alice will show you how watercolour is at its best when you gain skill at brush handling, making complex visuals through simple simple shapes, changing the the position, speed, direction and movement of the brush as it dances across the paper.

Week 2 – The Ephemeral Beauty of Light – 27th March

This session will explore the special luminous quality of watercolour and how to maintain a lightness and energy in your work. Alice will show you methods to work in harmony water, brush and pigment rather than fight with them. She will help you understand how to maintain transparency, avoid muddiness, use granulation, and create washes and glazes that convey light, shadow and reflections.

Week 3 – Excitement in everyday details – 03rd April

This week will look at how to use shapes, lost and found edges and colour to create 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.

Week 4 – Narrative and drama – 10th April

In our final week we will bring together some of the things we have learned to look at the role of narrative and drama into your work, how to bring in the elements that inspire you and find your personal style.