This 3 day workshop will help you loosen up and create expressive and bold landscapes using the beautiful surroundings of Stanton Guildhouse as inspiration working with landscape artist Rachel Cronin.

The aim of this course is to help you free yourselves from the need to create representational work in order to create work that expresses how you feel instead. If you have been wanting to let go of accuracy and loosen up then this is for you. Rachel will show you how to work across multiple pieces so that if you get stuck on one painting, you can move on to the next. This will help you to view your work with more objectivity and less judgement as you return to it multiple times across the weekend. The focus will less on creating finished paintings and more on helping you build a toolkit of techniques and approaches so that you can add these to your own creative practice.

There will be plenty of demonstrations so that you can see how to mix paint of the right consistency and colour for your work, and you will also have the opportunity to experiment with creating texture by scraping and sanding back paint, using glaze mediums and texture paste, as well as using thick and thin paint. You will spend time exploring both soft and hard edges by pushing and dragging paint, using cloths to smudge out colour and masking off with tape to create strong contrast. All students will receive help and guidance throughout the workshop, with individual tuition throughout to help you establish your personal creative motivations.

We will use the Art Room at Stanton Guildhouse as our base but you can expect to be outside in the beautiful grounds at Stanton Guildhouse with it’s far reaching views from the Cotswold escarpment.

Please note that the Art Room is not wheelchair accessible and is up a series of steep, external steps. For more information about access please email workshops@broadwayartsfestival.com

This workshop is for those with some experience of painting.

Light lunch will be provided on day 2 & 3, please bring a lunch with you for the first day.

Tickets £390 (12 Places)

Tickets go on sale through the website at 10am on 17th March.

NOTE: There is beautiful onsite accommodation available to book at Stanton Guildhouse – email info@broadwayartsfestival.com to enquire/book.

You can become a Benefactor for as little as £60 to qualify for priority booking and support our Outreach Projects in doing so, applications are now open

Day One:

On day one we will gather Information from our surroundings whilst using expressive drawing techniques like blind contour and non-dominant hand drawing. You will also be encouraged to stay present to whatever the landscape is showing you and explore how these responses inform your marks and lines. After some initial warm up sketches, we will move onto using viewfinders to create thumbnails sketches. This will help you to observe and understand the underlying structure of the landscape and see how different elements like fields, hedgerows, trees and houses are arranged on the picture plane. We will then take these sketches and create several slightly bigger painted versions that allow us to begin to explore brush marks and a limited colour palette. We will work with only a selected number of actual marks so you will be able to work towards looseness and observe that even a small scale up will change the way you make marks. 

Day Two:

On day two we will scale up further still and begin to look at paint application, transitions, and the principles of contrast. We will take a couple of our sketches and use them as inspiration for some larger pieces of work where we explore brush-craft and paint application in more detail. We will experiment with a selection of tools to create texture and variation within our painted surface such as wire brushes, soft rags, masking tape, palette knives, silicone scrapers and cut up credit cards. As the day progresses, we will begin to introduce different acrylic paint mediums such as texture paste and glaze medium. 

Day Three:

Having spent two days using a limited colour palette, day three will be spent exploring different types of colour groupings. We will explore bright, saturated colours as well as desaturated, neutral colours and you will be able to create new work using a different type of colour story. We will also explore composition in more detail, referring back to our thumbnail sketches to help us create focus and contrast. The last day will draw to a close with a celebration of your work and a chance to share your experiences.

Stanton Guildhouse