The latest Workshop Sunday was organised and held by Friends of PSAD on the 20 March 2022.
Read below students’ reviews and photographs from the day !
Review by Emma Hunter Jones on Julia Cassels class – painting
Many thanks to the Friends of PSAD for organising an excellent watercolour workshop on Sunday 20th March with well-known artist Julia Cassells. Julia has spent much of her life living and travelling abroad and her work reflects this. Julia’s focus is on portraying wildlife and also people in their environment. Julia’s technique aims to capture movement , vitality and energy in her subjects. The workshop involved painting watercolour studies of flamingos. We concentrated on using a limited palette and we learnt tips about how to mix those few colours to best effect. We learnt about various pigments and why we were using those specific colours. We also discussed brushes and how to reserve white using masking fluid. We considered how to paint the watery background to achieve depth and shallows, light and shadow and the splashing of the flamingos and the movement of the water and the birds. We learnt how to paint shadow transparently so that the colours beneath the shadow are visible. We considered how to make the reflections enhance the ripples in the water. Julia showed us how to be organised and paint in stages. All this of course couldn’t be perfected in one workshop but we greatly enjoyed practising the techniques and with Julia’s help and advice our studies took shape. The friends of PSAD provided tea and coffee and also sandwiches and fruit for lunch which we ate outside sunning ourselves on the terrace. All in all a very worthwhile and inspiring day appreciated by all who attended and we will be looking out for future PSAD workshops.
Review by Jill Coleman on Barbara Gittings class – pottery
Barbara Gittings says she wants her pots to be ‘meditative, tactile and perfectly imperfect’ so that is what we all aimed for in her fascinating workshop. Her work combines a beautiful smoke-fired, unglazed finish with the Japanese technique of Nerikomi – intricate patterns created with coloured clay. The first step for us was to wedge colour into our clay, using stains and little water – an extremely messy business. We rolled out our newly coloured clay and then created alternate layers of coloured and uncoloured clay as the basic blocks for our pattern building. Then came the really mind-bending business of cutting, slicing and re-forming the clay into different patterns held together with thin layers of coloured slip. Barbara encouraged us to experiment and helped us to produce some beautiful and unusual patterns. Finally, she showed us how to roll slabs from our patterned clay and join them in a variety of moulds, generously sharing the tips and techniques acquired over 20 years of practice. The end of the day arrived all too soon and we left our moulds with Simon (the other star of the day) to look after and unwrap on Monday. I can’t wait to see how they all turn out next week . As a final treat, Barbara had brought some of her beautiful pots for sale and several of them went home with very happy new owners. If you are interested in Barbara’s work and technique you can follow her short masterclass on You Tube
See more details on the workshops Here or click on the images below.
