4 week course | In-person & online

“Finding the Magic” - Foundations of Oil Painting

Dates: 22nd January 2024 —19th February (skips 5th February)

Location: Online & In-Person at the Schoolhouse for Art in Enniskerry, Ireland

I’m delighting to be joining the Schoolhouse for Art again to teach this Foundations of Oil painting workshop starting in January 2024.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the unending possibility and beauty of oil paint. Get inspired by objects and scenes around your house, learn how to take a messy bedroom and turn it into something that gets the butterflies going in your stomach. You’ll learn about the building blocks of solid paintings, how to tackle the “start” of a painting from different angles and find what suits you, learn how to set yourself up for success by finding a constant rhythm in your practice, and most importantly, we’ll focus on removing any obstacle between you and the canvas. Because, the most important part about painting is not whether you’re doing it “right” but that you’re taking that first step to put paint on a canvas. Learn to love your practice, the failures, the successes, and the process.

We’ll also be covering a lot of technical aspects of painting which help us achieve more success and get that real painting “rush”, such as: object modelling (spheres, cylinders, cubes), complementary colour mixing, how to mix blacks, whites, glass, metal, understanding how to “see” colour (value, chroma, hue), how to simply compositions using Notan studies, drawing when we paint, priming canvases, translucency of paint, different brush variety and why you might choose one over another, and mediums — the good, the bad, the ugly.

We'll be working through a number of exercises as well as our own paintings, including: black and white studies, colour swatch matching, medium testing, coloured sphere modelling, colour wheels, and others. Painters will get feedback on their homework over the last week during a portion of the class.