summer painting classes

🗓 Starts 9 August 2025
📆 Course duration: 4 weeks
⏰ One session per week – 3 hours each
📍 Choose your preferred day from the available options

All levels
All materials provided – just bring yourself and a readiness to explore.

Tutor Tanja

Choose your days/time

Saturday 10.00 – 13.00
Tuesday 10.00 – 13.00
Wednesday 10.00 – 13.00
Wednesday 18.00 – 21.00

Total course price £188

Course Description

The Bones of Painting
Understanding the underlying structure of your art practice 

Welcome!
This course is designed to strengthen your painting practice by focusing on the underlying structure behind confident, intentional artwork. Whether transitioning from drawing to painting, returning after a break, or looking to deepen your skills, this course will help you understand how to build up a painting from the ground up. 

Each week includes a mix of demonstrations, hands-on exercises, and reflective discussion. You’ll explore how materials behave, how to translate structure and value into paint, and how to guide the viewer’s eye through thoughtful composition and light. The aim is to build both your technical foundation and your creative intuition. 

Week 1 – Tools, Surfaces & Paint Behaviour 

Focus: Familiarising with brushes, paints, surfaces, and how acrylic behaves 

• Introduction to different brush types and shapes
• Understanding the role of water, medium, and layering in acrylic 
• Exploring surfaces: paper, canvas board, priming 
• Warm-up: brush marks sampler (round, flat, filbert, fan) 
• Opacity vs transparency: swatching and layering 
• Quick exercises: gradient blend, dry brushing, impasto textures 
• Brush care and how to store acrylic paint so it doesn’t dry out 

 

Week 2 – From Drawing to Painting 

Focus: Translating structural drawing skills into a painted sketch 

• Understanding relationships, proportions, plains and angle breaks 
• Blocking in shapes with a brush (mass drawing in paint) 
• Using value (light and dark) instead of line 
• Tonal underpainting (grisaille or value sketch) 
• Introduction to using coloured grounds 
• Painting a simple object using 3–5 values 
• Exploring direct vs indirect painting starts 

 

Week 3 – Composition, Light & Depth 

Focus: Building visual hierarchy and atmosphere 

• Revisiting fall of light and cast shadow in paint 
• Creating depth through value contrast, edges, and colour temperature 
• Composition exercises: thumbnails and focal point control 
• Painting exercise: group still life with intentional light direction 
• Line weight equivalents in painting: edge softness and contrast 

 

Week 4 – Integration & Intuition 

Focus: Putting it all together and finding your approach 

• Guided personal painting session using the prior weeks’ concepts 
• Individual support and troubleshooting 
• Strategies for working in layers and resolving paintings 
• Group sharing and feedback 
• Reflection on personal direction and studio habits