Upcoming Autumn Woodland Watercolour Class

I love the colours in this photograph!

Join us on Thursday 10 October for our Autumn Woodland Watercolour Class.

Claire will be showing you how to mix and create rich, vibrant and seasonal colours and tones.

9:30am - approx 3pm

£75

this includes all materials, a 2 course lunch and refreshments throughout the day

Autumn Watercolour

A vibrant watercolour class full of stunning autumnal colours.

A really bright and brave first wash, followed by some texture paste.

We worked on some negative painting before adding final details to the leaves.

Claire is back on Wednesday 24 October for Beginners & Refreshers Watercolour (places available) and we have one place left on our Poppies class on Thursday 25 October.

Further ahead in November & December, how about coming to try

Pen & Wash Winter Sunshine

Thursday 8 November

A Winter Scene Watercolour

Tuesday 13 November

Oils - Water Lilies

Wednesday 5 December

Autumn Watercolour Class

A beautiful sunny day for our Autumn Watercolour class.

The lunch table was covered with just a selection of the colours and leaves I found in the garden the afternoon before, plus conkers, feathers and fircones.

The paintings were full of rich warm colours

You can hear the leaves crackle

Darker hues needed to be dropped in to make the conkers stand out amongst the leaves

The sun streaming in .....

Lovely smells from the kitchen were coming from this pan full of plums, port, fresh ginger, lemon peel, cardamom pods and sugar.

I used them to make a delicious Spiced Plum Trifle 

Before we know it we will be back for our Winter Scene classes!

An Autumn Watercolour Scene

Claire had some lovely colours last week in the paint palettes for our Autumn Scene class.

Trees are notoriously difficult to paint, but our artists have created some gorgeous scenes. 

A pathway leads you into the painting

Adding shadows really helps pull the painting together

And we even had some artists who braved putting in a deer!

We had a delicious pudding today

Orange and Almond Cake

Autumn Berries Watercolour

We last did Autumn Berries in 2014 and the paintings were great, so we always meant to do it again, I can't believe it's taken 2 years though!

My lovely neighbour had made a great arrangement of autumn colours and berries and Claire had lots of great photographs for us to use.

We started by pencilling our chosen image and then masked the outline of the berries and filled in the smaller berries.

We had a few new people today, so Claire spent some talking about the papers we use here for watercolour classes, Saunders Waterford, in various weights 140lb, 200lb and 300lb.  Paper is so important, these papers are lovely and thick and hold alot of water, so when we create our wet in wet paintings, it holds and absorbs the water and colour brilliantly.

Best of all it's made in Britain, at St Cuthbert's Mill in the Cathedral City of Wells in Somserset.

After the masking was absolutely dry (we use hairdryers to help this process along!) Claire put in the colours for her first wash, creating some loose berry shapes behind the main berries.

Here is her almost finished painting, after she had started to fill in the berries. 

Here are brilliant paintings from the day, I loved the addition of the conkers too! 

They were really lovely to look at and enjoy at the end.  They should all be framed and on the wall for this autumn.  

As a PS, I had a lovely autumn walk yesterday around Kintbury, the colours were stunning

If you're local, look at the link, you can park near the Dundas Arms, which is lovely for lunch either before or after!

Kintbury Canal and Meadow Walk - 5 Miles

Autumn Art with Claire Warner

Claire had two paintings on the go today, a tractor ploughing a field full of Autumn colours and a painting full of cow parsley, teasles and honesty using some new products.

Claire masked the areas she wanted to remain white before applying the first wash.

Once dry and the masking fluid had been removed, Claire then set to work with some metallic relief paints, glue and beads, bleach, tissue and brushes, to create some lovely effects. 

Below is the tractor scene with it's first wash having just been applied. 

Here is the gallery of our tractor paintings:

And our foliage paintings:

A brilliant day with some fantastic paintings.