Archives: Past-workshops

Wild Colour – Turning Earth into Paint

This workshop is a celebration of geology and place through the medium of watercolour; where you will be creating our own paints from earth pigments foraged from the land, and learning to work with them in your artistic practice.

The workshop has both an indoor and outdoor component. The outdoor will focus on how to identify and test dirt and stone for promising pigment in the field. The indoor component will be where we transform our found earth into pigment, then into watercolour paints.

We will then engage with the long and rich history of earth pigments through painting, learning various techniques to bring your colours to life. This course will also cover some history, the basic geology of B.C., and skills such as using maps to find pigments.

Abstracting the Landscape: Cold Wax & Oil Paint

Explore the ethereal qualities of cold wax and oil paint and learn the possibilities of this medium.

Working from photographs, imagination, and intuition you will paint loose expressive landscapes. Utilizing paint brushes, catalyst wedges, and unorthodox tools to build up layers of texture and depth you will create emotive works of art.

You will gain a better understanding of the principles and elements of design, how to mix colours with ease, apply glazes, and use additional media to create cohesive compositions.

From basics and beyond come and learn the possibilities of this medium.

STUDENTS: Please bring along Galkyd Gel with your other student supplies.

Creative Textile Explorations

In this workshop, participants are invited to embark on an engaging exploration of textile techniques. The workshop offers a hands-on journey into the fascinating world of textile design, covering a spectrum of skills such as color mixing, resist methods, printing, stencils, Lino, and hand applications using water-based pigments.  Meticulously crafted for accessibility and feasibility in home environments or studios with minimal equipment, the course is designed to accommodate all skill levels.

Throughout the workshop, participants will learn techniques and explore methods that can be applied to create fabrics suitable for various purposes, including wall hangings, sarongs, cushions, scarves, pillows, and more. The course is tailored for individuals who enjoy experimentation and the creative process, drawing inspiration from the surroundings at the college or personal source imagery.

People in Places in Pastels

Delve into the world of soft (chalk) pastel in this exciting class that combines people in various places, gardening, urban, cafes and more!

Learn how to create captivating compositions that use viewpoint, cropping, focal point, value contrasts, colour harmony and other invaluable visual tools to maximize the expressive potential in an impressionistic approach.

Pastel can be subtle and contemplative as well as dynamic with lots of movement. Study some master works to see how they used colour and light in a bold manner. Focus will be less on individual faces and more on capturing the essence of the figures in the landscape. Instructor will supply photos, but you are encouraged to bring photos you might want to work from as well.

Embroidery and the Face

This course comprises many important artistic and expressive skills. From facial anatomy details and how to interpret in an original way, to colour ranges for facial representation that comes from eons of visual history both painterly and in terms of stitching. The course has been broken up into facial features for ease of practice. All kinds of example are shared with participants. A detailed manual has been prepared for continuing study and personal mastering.

You will be inventing stitches that texture and tone and create depth. The faces may be more expressive than literal, but a literal or more realistic approach forms the basis of the course. Skin colour mixing will be an essential part of the creative enjoyment of capturing the essence of the face in embroidery.

You will practice techniques both for spontaneous stitching and adapt methods for transferring personal images both ‘found’ and drawn that you wish to serve as a base. The 5 days will focus on many studies, one main project and several related, intentional deviations and if for example you become possessed/obsessed by eyes or mouths in embroidery.

Working with the background and its impact on the face is another aspect of the course, the creation of depth of space and flatness in embroidery.

This course presents a literal/ interpretive approach as well as capturing in stitch gesture, shape, shadow.

You don’t have to be good at drawing portraits to take the course; the faces will simply and complexly emerge as they are meant to.

Creative Journalling

Many of us keep journals as ways of chronicling our days and experiences. Some of us may even take part in journaling exercises such as Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, designed to get us engaged with, and in charge of, the unfolding of our days. But how many of us really allow ourselves to cut loose with our creativity in our journals? These are safe spaces designed to allow us to explore, but do we really push that envelope?

This course will support students in pushing beyond the boundaries of their current journaling practice. Instead of just writing down the day’s events and reflecting on them, we’ll explore the idea of the journal as a pre-production space, one that can serve as both a reflective space and as an incubation space for the ideas for future projects.

Through engaging and structured daily exercises in both writing and art, we’ll map, sketch, and collage our creative ideas, incorporating found materials from our everyday lives and from the natural world. Together, we’ll look at ways to make our journaling process even more rich and generative, the pages reflective of both writing and art, and full of concepts to expand upon in our writing practice.

Initial materials will be provided by the instructor, but all participants are encouraged to bring with them magazines,fabric swatches, photos, stickers, maps, coloured pens, stamps, natural materials – any materials that feel inspirational and generative. This course welcomes participants of all skill levels.

Expressive Clay Sculpture

Clay is an ideal material to create work of the heart. It is both elemental and versatile. It also challenges, entertains, frustrates and presents us with endless possibilities for relaying the maker’s message. Clay rewards the artist who takes time to understand what it can do.

There is a thrill when a lump of mud that the artist has been manipulating begins to “talk” back; the look in an eye, the tilt of a head, a gesture that resonates. This is when clay comes alive. This is when magic is made.

In this Expressive Clay workshop we will seek to understand the material in a way that frees up the creative flow. Participants will explore the benefits of both solid and hollow methods of construction without an armature and how to prepare pieces for the kiln. With the use of simple hand tools and an emphasis on understanding form, we will learn how to create expressive figurative sculptures.

Whether the subject is human or animal, an overview of relevant anatomy will guide us in understanding how subtle adjustments to gestures and facial expressions allow us to convey relatable, poetic messages.

The workshop will include an overview of layered finishing techniques that add subtlety and depth to the sculptures. This will include both traditional fired surface treatments and “cold” finishes.

CLAY SUGGESTION:  Plainsman M332G burns a warm red up to cone 5, shifts quickly to brown by cone 6, and holds this color through cone 7. By cone 8 it takes on a slight greenish color and begins to fail at cone 9. At cone 6, M332G is quite vitrified compared to some other sculptural bodies. This means that overhangs and exaggerated forms will tend to warp or sag during firing at this temperature. To achieve the red color and provide resistance to warping, it is recommended you fire to cone 5 or lower.

Expressionism and the Figure

This workshop explores the human figure as an aesthetic design, as a symbol, or as feeling.

Drawing with the model, the artists may examine mother-shapes, blocking, plasticity, distortions, tensions, rhythms and lyrical techniques to see how they inspire fresh ideas and evoke intense viewers’ reaction. Open for intermediate level. The class time would be open season for free sketching and studies, all in personal and atelier mode.  Experiments, inventiveness and questions are the overall theme.

This workshop will be using live models (male and female) for four of the five days. A modeling fee will be collected from students once the workshop has been confirmed to be running.