Clare Shepherd
Artist and Teacher
Artist led Art Classes

In this workshop my students will choose a head-portrait by a well known painter and have the chance to study it closely. They'll make a working sketch and then, in the medium of their choice, create their own version of the painting. There are so many great portrait paintings to be studied. As you can see, I have chosen a painting by Duncan Grant of Vanessa Bell with whom he lived at Charleston (despite her being married to Clive Bell). The Duncan Grant painting is an oil p

My students created wonderful work today, beginning with the Planet and the boiled egg exercises, the task being to create a seamless edge around both but with changing relationships between the subject and its background (ie. light against dark - dark against light). They moved onto drawing the scrunched paper, bringing the notions learned from the exercises to the scrunched paper drawing. As ever, some of my students brough their own projects from home and were able to work

I shall be asking my students to bring a boiled egg for a very good reason - they can eat it afterwards if they like! We're looking at edges, light against dark and dark against light and the good old planet exercise before embarking on a drawing of some scrunched up paper. Drawing with pencil. Pimperne Village Hall, 10am – 4pm. You’ll need good soft pencils, a pencil sharpener, a good eraser and good cartridge paper.  You’ll also need a few watercolours and a watercolour bru

Today was a chance to experiment with wax resist and loose watercolour onto a wet page. Pen or soft pencil was added later to find some definition. Some students did their own thing which is welcomed alongside the class. Wonderful work emerged and it was a great way to spend a drizzly day.

You'll choose your subject - I chose to do a still-life but it could be an image or flowers & stems from which you choose to work. This is a day about mixing very specific media, the initial wax resist allows for a lovely looseness with the watercolour. The black pen brings some precision to the loose watercolour. Sunday workshop, November 9 th  – wax resist, watercolour and black pen – subject of your own choice (I’ve used a still-life). Pimperne Village Hall, 10am – 4pm. Yo

Some followed the lesson and others brought their own projects from home. On a wet and windy day it was great to be in a lovely big, warm hall working on landscape negotiations with charcoal.

In this workshop we'll be working with charcoal and a landscape image. It will be a process of negotiation with the charcoal, starting...

We were looking for structure in the painting of the jam-jar as the stems pass through the surface of the water and lovely loose...

In this workshop we'll be looking at the notion of 'lost edges', that every detail of your chosen subject does not need to appear in...

...what a fabulous three days it's been, with so much fantastic work produced. Many have gone away with work to be continued at home...