Dates: Saturday, October 1st & Sunday October 2nd 2022
Fee: $280
Location: Dene Croft Studios, 118 Pemberton Ave, North Van
To register: 604-250-5562
Times: 10am – 4pm (with ½ hour lunch)
Instructor: Lalita Hamill www.lalitahamill.com
Course description:
“Eloquent” means to be able to express oneself clearly and well. Whether you want your paintings to have a soft, blended feel, or be full of energetic strokes and texture, or anything in between, there are key techniques to master. The way you move and use a brush contributes substantially to your artistic ‘style’ or ‘voice’. If your marks are heavy-handed, tentative, sloppy, unintentional, uninteresting, and/or overworked, you are not living up to your full artistic potential.
Those of you ready to take your brushwork and mark-making to the next level of expressiveness, Lalita will guide participants through a series of step by step demos and exercises, to be applied to small studies.
Main topics will include the following:
⦁ Choosing the right tool and grip for the look you want
⦁ Ensuring your paint is the appropriate consistency, and what to do when it isn’t
⦁ The benefits of using a light ‘touch’ and variety of strokes
⦁ Creating effective edges, including hard, soft, and lost
⦁ Mixing colour on the palette vs on the canvas
⦁ When to leave strokes alone
⦁ How to move the viewer’s eye with mark-making
⦁ Techniques such as dry brushing, blending and glazing
⦁ What to do when things go ‘sideways’
Supplies:
Regular oil or acrylic supplies (water soluble oils and open acrylics too)
Substrate: Canvas is preferable, and enough canvas to complete two small (8” x 10” or 11”x14”) studies, and a few exercises, which could be in the form of:
⦁ Loose gessoed canvas (cut into roughly 12”x16” pieces), or
⦁ Stretched canvas
⦁ Canvas boards (please add another 2 coats of gesso to be dry before class)
Colours: please have available 1 white, 3 yellow, 2 red, 2 blue, 1 umber (raw or burnt) & 1 black
Palette: if your palette is smaller than 12”x16”, you may need two – one for laying out paints and the other for mixing colour.
Brushes: the more, the better. Please use what you have, and ensure some are new enough that they will leave a clear mark.
Several photo reference images, or you can opt to use photos provided by Lalita, which will be provided upon registration.
Small palette knife for mixing paint.
Recommended:
That participants have 2 line drawings prepared on canvas (around 8x10 or 11x14) in advance so we can focus on brushwork rather than drawing accuracy. Watch Lalita’s video on how to transfer an image at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyd0ejTCLuE and subscribe for more free videos. *Please do not paint anything onto the canvas (other than gesso) before class.
Acrylic painters are recommended to have a small bottle of Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid (see image below - matte, satin or gloss) because it has retarder in it and enhances viscosity and the creation of soft edges and long gestures.
Some kind of a ‘blender’ brush is recommended, especially for oil painters. Lalita prefers the series 444 1” blender brush from Rosemary & Co in the UK. https://www.rosemaryandco.com/oil-brushes/blender-brushes