Instructor: Alison Watt

Title: Just Add Water

Medium: Mixed water media

Level: All skill levels from confident beginner on

Dates: August 19-22, 2024 (4 days: Monday-Thursday, 9am to 4pm)

Fees:  Early Bird—$550; $600 after February 29

About the workshop

This workshop is designed to expand your painting possibilities by helping you explore different water media. Adding a few new materials and techniques to our toolbox, we’ll loosen up and create elements of drama and surprise in our paintings.

Expect to explore techniques such as using wet-in-wet (washes and flow), mixing media (watercolor, inks, gouache) splattering, spraying, using resist, mark making with oil pastel, watercolor pencil, crayon, and India ink, printing, collaging, and texturing.

Course outline

Day 1: The Way of Water: working with water to create that gorgeous first layer. Subjects will be: plant material (fresh or from photos: leaves, flowers, berries, seeds), still life.

Day 2: Building Dramatic Layers: working back into the paintings we prepared yesterday, we will explore resist, splattering, spraying, and mark making. Final layers will involve adding glazes, dark values and gouache and acrylic to paint out negative spaces.

Day 3: Pushing into Abstraction: from a starter image of your choice we will use all of the techniques of the first two days, as well as printing, collage and texture to move towards abstraction.

Landscape: integrating printing and monoprint and making our own collage papers to enrich texture.

Day 4: Abstraction and the Intuitive Process: we will explore the intuitive process working from a starter image of your choice. We use all of the techniques of the first three days to explore the intuitive process.

Supplies list

Download the supplies list for the workshop.

About the artist

Alison Watt is a painter and writer who lives on Vancouver Island. In her acrylic, water and mixed media paintings she strives for complex surface and luminous colour. She has been teaching for 25 years, offering courses in acrylic and water media, as well as watercolour journalling.

Alison says:

“A painting practice isn’t just about building skills to make good work.

Whether we have a studio or work at our kitchen table, art is there to offer us solace, immersion, the challenge of new subjects, new materials. And connection. In making art we instantly connect to the body of art through time and to other living artists.”

On the web

Visit the artist’s website at: www.alisonwatt.ca

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