Wednesday Evenings - Still Life Painting and Drawing
Wednesday Evenings
6:00pm to 9:00pm
Term 2, 2024: April 24 - June 26 (10 Weeks)
The Wednesday evening painting and drawing class is a great place to start or progress your journey in realistic art-making. Participants will create studies of still life objects and classical busts, and can work with oil paint or any drawing medium of their choice (we recommend graphite for beginners). The class will cover topics such as proportion, form, tone and shading, and painters will also look at introductory colour concepts.
If you’re an absolute beginner, we recommend that you start with drawing before getting into painting.
The class is taught by Sandra Brand who has studied extensively in traditional art schools in Australia and overseas, including the Academy of Fine Art Germany and the Jerusalem Studio School. She has also worked in commercial digital painting, and spends every spare minute sketching the world around her.
MATERIALS
Part of learning to draw and paint is learning which materials do what for you. So if you’re a beginner don’t feel like you have rush out and buy everything all at once. We recommend starting with the drawing materials below and working up from there. We also outline our general painting materials below.
For drawing:
- Cartridge paper – A2 size preferred
- HB or 2B graphite pencil
- Kneadable eraser
For painting:
- Brushes – we recommend bringing brushes in a range of shapes and sizes. It’s good to have a few bristly brushes as well as some softer ones. It is useful to have a few flat brushes, as well as some small round brushes for details. All brushes have their use, but we mostly use flats, filberts and rounds.
- Board/canvas(16x14 inch approx. or a bit larger – square shape is ok too)You can work on canvas (stretched or loose sheet) or gesso board.
- Canvas sheet can be taped/pinned to board if not stretched.
- Palette Knife – Metal, not plastic
- Paper towel
- Rags (old T-shirts etc. are good)
- Odourless Mineral Spirits- must be odourless and kept in a container with a lid
- Linseed oil
The studio supplies easels and palettes and we have a brush washing station you can use. We also have a limited selection of materials available for purchase.
Paints/Colours:
We recommend using artist-quality paints. Winsor and Newton is a good starting point. If you are new to painting it’s also a good idea to spend some time working in black and white, to get used to using paint and thinking only about dark and light. Our general list of colours are below:
- Titanium White
- Cadmium Yellow or equivalent
- Yellow Ochre
- Cadmium Red or Vermillion or equivalent
- Alizarin Crimson or Alizarin Claret
- Transparent Red Oxide (or Burnt Sienna, Venetian Red or similar earth red colour)
- Raw Umber
- Ultramarine Blue
- Ivory Black
NB: Other paint colours may be useful or necessary when painting still life so other paint colours you own can be brought along.