Watercolour Fun Day

Next date: to be announced

Come and join us for a day of light-hearted watercolour paintting, aimed at warming a chilly day with painting and laughter! Something for everyone, no expertise required. Maximum number of participants is 25. First in, first served!

To book email bookings@watercolournewzealand.nz

Review: Fun day on Sunday

by Rob James

For anyone who wants to have a go at fun new ways of working with watercolour, enjoy stimulating company, eat gorgeous food and take home beautiful work, the Winter Fun Day is for you!

Pavithra Devadatta lead the day with enthusiasm and a wonderful sense of humour, working through several activities, to open our creative minds and build connections with our materials, our work and each other.

We started with an exercise called Conversations, each starting a painting that was passed on to the next person in the group to embellish, change or augment, using as many different techniques and perspectives as the individual wanted to try before passing it on at the tinkle of Pavithras bell!

What a lovely freeing experience, allowing you to all see or feel something different in each painting, but finish with some beautiful results. We moved on to designing and painting a series of wonderful pop-up cards and handmade envelopes. Colourful cupcakes, springy snakes, snappy-mouthed sharks, all leapt off the page with slogans and lettering to match. The perfect handmade art to share with someone special. Go on, give it a try we all loved this day and cant wait till next year. Thank you.

Review: Sunday is Watercolour FUNDAY

by Rob James

Just when we thought the Fun Day couldnt get any better, Charlotte and Sue brought together a brand new range of incredible activities to stimulate our senses and engage our creative juices!

Sue started us off with a winter visualization exercise to warm our minds eye, seeing and appreciating the colour, sounds and feel of an open fire and moved into painting wild, crackling flames, smokey hearths and spattering sparks of white paint.

Charlotte moved us further into the sensory experience of feeling the wind, the waves and the open skies of a day of sailing and we tried using wax crayons to resist the watercolour paint on white sails, crests of foamy waves boat hulls, amidst the dramatic blues and greens of the sea and sky. A slower pace ensued after a grand shared lunch, laying down rich underpaintings, followed by negative and positive washes to form the shapes and veins of a range of leaves and plants, complete with reflective water droplets and a wet-in-wet cat!

We all left with a new set of ideas, skills and techniques to warm our souls and brighten the darker days! Thank you!

REVIEW: Amazing day! Please can we do it again?

by Rob James

"Amazing day! So enjoyable! Please can we do it again?" - were comments made after this incredible day, stepping out of the cold, grey weather and immersing ourselves in a variety of deliciously colourful and stimulating activities.

Sue and Charlotte expertly taught a host of contrasting techniques, art forms and exercises, making us observe, experiment, be brave and courageous, to develop our skills and produce some beautiful pieces to take home and treasure.

Sue started by demonstrating a stunning wet-in-wet autumnal tree reflection painting, which we tried, using all the rich hues of gold, yellow and crimson that we could muster in our collections. We let Mistress Watercolour do her glorious thing of running and blending to mimic reflections, randomly making new colours, giving us a sense of freedom, being bold and appreciating the unpredictable nature of watercolour, to achieve exciting results.

Charlotte guided us through painting a colour wheel, mixing colours on the paper itself and talking through the use of primary and complementary colours. Her passion for astronomy led to the creation of a spectacular, celestial sky painting with exploding supernovas, intense glowing sunsets and finished with exquisitely sprayed white stars, using a rigid bristle brush. Absolutely inspiring! A gentler pace followed our lunch, working on a winter flower study, taking our learnings from the morning into a more complex structural work, painting backgrounds and grading our washes, to create delicate striated petals on camellias, hebes and impatiens. We were given heaps of encouragement and support and increased both our confidence and ability, while moving between tasks in a relaxed and interesting way and having fun. I would love to do this day again and recommend it to everyone!