SUNDAY WORKSHOP: September 8th, Pimperne Village Hall

In this workshop we'll be looking at the work of Braque, his still-lifes in particular, and creating our own work in the same/similar style. Above you can see the progression of my version for which I had set up front of me two bottles, my old wooden recorder from school days and a newspaper. I shall be asking my students to bring a portable musical instrument (if they have one) and anything they'd like to put with it. They'll need scissors and glue stick, pencils, charcoal etc., as set out below. All workshops are open, meaning that no-one has to follow the lesson - if they have a plan they want to bring from home, that's fine, I can help them with it.

Sunday Workshop - September 8th, Pimperne Village Hall – Still-life in the style of Braque.

10am – 4pm £35 for the day.

Bring watercolour paper, pencils, charcoal, acrylics, watercolours, inks, white paint (emulsion, acrylic) a glue stick and scissors. I’ll have all of the above for those who don’t! For your still life, bring a musical instrument if you have a portable one. Bring a bottle/s, jug, newspaper, ornament, coloured cloth – again I’ll have bottles and objects for those who don’t.

·         Set your still-life up in front of you with a nice newspaper headline in a prominent position.

·         Use good large cartridge paper or large watercolour paper.

·         I used some plain flock wallpaper with some colour smudged onto it, I stuck a strip down the left side of my page and then began my drawing.

·         Either divide up your page with some lightly drawn verticals, horizontals and diagonals before making a simple line drawing on your page OR go directly into the simple line drawing, keeping the line fluid and not particularly correct. The diagonals and verticals will provide a way of ‘dismantling’ your subject. You can use pencil or charcoal.

·         Move objects slightly and re-draw your drawing on top letting all the lines mingle.

·         Your objective is to dismantle the subject and to include two or three views of the same object onto the surface of the page and find a way to keep some of that information and lose other of that information.

·         See if you can divide an object into two and allow one half to slide along a vertical, horizontal or diagonal. This way you’ll have ‘dismantled’ some of our subject. Play with this notion.

·         Using very neutral coloured paint (mix a blue and a brown and have some white available for lightening) begin to paint some of your shapes (including in-between shapes) being very careful of your edges…make your hard edges very crisp and soften any edge you want to reduce.

·         Use your neutral colour in varying balance – sometimes more blue, sometimes more brown and sometimes with white mixed in to lighten the tone. Experiment, build on these ideas, negotiate! There will be NO right answer!

Next workshop (at Pimperne) October 13th. Not sure what we'll be doing yet!