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5 Day Complete Watercolour Bird Course 9th-13th April 2025
"Painting Birds, Expressive Watercolour Techniques"
Dates: 9th-13th April
Times: 9.30-5pm each day (plus dinner is included on day 1 and day 4)
Cost: £625 per person, excluding accommodation. All lunches included, plus an evening meal on day 1 & day 4 of the course. A payment plan is available on booking so you can spread the cost out, if you wish.
Suitable for: This course is suitable for beginners and the more advanced. No experience is necessary for the course and all materials will be provided.
Over the years of delivering courses, I've found that many of my weekend students have often wanted to stay for longer than 2 days to create an even more beautiful artwork and take their work to the next stage. With this in mind, I am now offering 5 day workshops as well.
The course is ostensibly about painting birds in watercolour. However in many respects this is a course of 2 parts. The first part gives you the nuts and bolts of how to see and draw any subject, looking at line, perspective, tone, shape, edge, composition. It moves quickly on to the fundamental qualities of watercolour paint; its translucency, its relationship to water and paper; how it works and moves on the surface.
Traditional methods in layering up paint as well as blending and lifting out colour are demonstrated together with a contemporary take on colour theory using the Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/black model as the basis for colour mixing. However, the second underlying theme of the course covers exploration when you will be encouraged to embrace a childlike inquisitiveness about “what if”, without the fear of ‘making mistakes’ or ‘wasting resources’. You’ll be given an array of ideas about how to experiment and explore watercolour using brushes, twigs, masking fluid, feathers, spatulas, salt, cling film… in fact anything that might make interesting marks on the page.
You’ll be shown ways to splash, scrawl and scribble with abandon. These techniques will enable you to describe feathers, markings, branches, rocks or foliage in a loose, interpretative style. This two pronged approach will help you get the most out of the unique qualities that watercolour has to offer, whilst finding your unique rhythm, flow and style with dynamic brush stokes, experimental techniques and calligraphic mark marking.
