Botanical Art Class ~ Magnolias ~ Lake Macquarie
COMPLETED
‘Can you please come and teach us how to paint Magnolias?’ Its music to my ears really. Spending time with a flock of people who share my love of Magnolias inspires my enthusiasm enough, let alone the idea of being with a group who also share my love of painting, watercolour, and botanical illustration, its too fabulous for words… And what a great bunch of people it was too, a pleasure to be with each and every one of you.
This botanical art class consisted of a delicious mix of returning students and new starters, who all came into my class with light hearts and spirits, open minds and a willingness to learn. Botanical Illustration is certainly a challenging genre, but it is such a beautiful challenge to undertake. For two days we painted together, exploring the watercolour techniques of washes, glazing and dry brushing to achieve rich, realistic results in our paintings. Working from photographic references, we deconstructed watercolour techniques, colour, our subject and indeed the personal struggles we face learning to harness watercolour’s wonderful potential.
Of course there is always the natural rise and fall students experience as they are faced with the challenges at hand (there’d be no learning if there wasn’t) but with our focus quickly returning to the learning process, frustrations soon give way to the next level of learning and new perspective is gained. Pennies drop, light bulb moments come… and despite that one battle we had over painting botanical illustration with a sock (you know who you are!) progress is made.
So as the workshop drew to a close our paintings started to come together, our direction become clearer, some new clarity is found and the hand begins to mirror the knowledge of the mind, and with such a lovely positive engaged energy in the room, our weekend was a really wonderful experience. I am definitely looking forward to seeing you again for the next Lake Macquarie botanical art class in November!
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We have just a couple of places available in this workshop. Please let us know if you’d like to join us 🙂