Workshops and plans for 2021

Welcome to 2021.

As we won't be allowed to travel from Australia for some time, I am expecting to be doing local workshops this year, and have set up a number so far.

I am doing a series of 5 watercolour workshops for Gallery 11:11, a lovely suburban gallery and art space with a wonderful 'stable' of artists and teachers. These workshops will all be held on a Thursday and Friday to enable travellers to have the weekend in Sydney if they wish. They are intended to be completed as a series or individually. Numbers are limited for these workshops as it is not a large teaching space, so you will get plenty of attention :-)

We start with Watercolour for Beginners  on the 11th and 12th February.

Colour Mixing in Watercolour is the 8th and 9th of April.

Sketching Florals and Botanicals in Watercolour is June 24th and 25th.

Travel Sketching with Watercolour is 26th and 27th August.

And finally Special Effects in Watercolour is the 28th and 29th October.

If you would like to do a residential workshop near Nowra, consider a Watercolour Landscape workshop for two days 1st and 2nd March. We were to have been teaching in Italy, but have relocated to the lovely Merribee Gardens, Number, NSW for this year. Learn the skills to paint the landscape from life.

In July the Art Scene Winter School of Arts is planned to go ahead in Bathurst. This is a week-long workshop at the university campus.

All these workshops are on my website, which is kept up to date with new workshops or changes.

For many of you, workshops in Australia are not a possibility but I am still teaching my online courses Mastering Watercolours  and Travel Sketching. These are both huge 12-lesson courses with loads of detailed lessons, extra challenges and wonderful interaction with an international community. You can join any time. 

While not teaching workshops or checking into my courses, I am working an a companion book to go with The Ultimate Mixing Palette: a World of Colours. It is called Working with Triads, and will contain dozens of primary triads with a huge range of the tertiary colours they can produce, along with some interesting non-primary triads. Working with triads is a great way to create harmonious paintings.

I'll also be adding three colour-focused courses to my website this year. These are intended for artists, especially watercolour artists, who know how to paint with watercolour but want to build their colour knowledge. At this stage I expect that 'Colour Mixing' will be 5 lessons, Working with Triads will be 6 lessons and 'Working with Opposites' will be 9 lessons. 

Later in the year I hope to add two extension courses to the website - a watercolour extension to follow Mastering Watercolours and a drawing course to extend from Travel Sketching. 

I'll continue to run an in-person weekly workshop form my home studio, and two Zoom classes that others can join. One is on Tuesday mornings  and the other Thursday afternoons. These are fun classes, where we focus on a different challenge each week, often with a limited palette or based around a theme.

So I have plenty to keep me busy as I mostly work from home. I hope you are able to stay safe and busy for 2021.

Happy painting!

The Greek Islands Sketching Tour and other adventures

It's been a busy year with some wonderful trips including Japan, London, Amsterdam for the Urban Sketchers Symposium and Lord How Island, where I hope to run a week-long workshop in a couple of years. If you follow me on Instagram you'll have seen a number of sketches and paintings from all these places. (Janeblundellart)

Fabulous colours to paint and enjoy :-)

I've recently returned from teaching a wonderful sketching tour of the Greek Islands. We had three weeks and travelled to six quite different islands, with optional day trips to Turkey and another lovely small island. Our task was to document them in our sketchbooks using pen, pencil, watercolour, ink, gouache, watercolour pencil and some other fun tools.

Sketching in Vathy, Kalymnos. Watercolour.

It was a wonderful group of people and a fabulous itinerary organised by Artemisarttours.com.

I'll have enough photos to paint from for years!

I set different challenges for the various subjects we were painting.

Sometimes we painted first then drew onto the wash, sometimes we left the white of the page, sometimes we just drew in ink. That's the joy of a sketchbook - you are free to do what you want :-)

Looking across from Kalymnos to Telendos Island. Watercolour pencil and watercolour.

Some of the group sketching the ancient olive trees.

Demonstrating a study of an olive sprig in an ancient olive grove. Ink and watercolour.

I will be teaching another three-week tour next September, going to a few different islands. Details are on my website here - I keep this updated with all upcoming workshops and demonstrations.

Coming up in Australia is a one day travel sketching workshop at Art Est on the 1 December; a 5-day workshop in Mittagong as part of the Sturt Summer School. Full information is here. And another 5-day workshop in Bathurst teaching Mastering Watercolour. Details here.

Happy Painting!

10 years x 10 classes Urban Sketching world wide workshops

For the first time, the Urban Sketchers organisation is offering long term workshops, all over the world. We'll have a series of 10 workshop classes created in a range of cities to celebrate 10 years of the Urban Sketchers organisation. While each series of classes is different and will be taught by different people, they all follow the same idea of little stories, medium stories and great stories and are each designed around the city in which they will be held.

Some will be taught by a number of instructors, some by just one.

Here's the detail - check them out and get them booked into your diary :-)

http://www.urbansketchers.org/p/10-years-x-10-classes.html