20th July Fun Day at Wellington Art Club 27 Chelsea Street, Miramar, Wellington
Come and join us for a day of light-hearted watercolour painting,
aimed at warming a chilly day with painting and laughter!
Something for everyone,
no expertise required. Enjoy a shared lunch and endless tea and coffee.
$15 in advance or $20 at the door, maximum number of participants is 25.
First in, first served!
To book email
bookings@watercolournewzealand.nz
Review: Fun Day
by Rob James
Alyson and Charlotte enjoyed dreaming up fun exercises.
If you're looking for a way to brighten up a dreary winter day with learning new techniques,
doing a series of different exercises, sharing fun ideas and a laugh in a lovely warm setting
with fabulous food, then this was it!
Alyson and Charlotte led us through a progressive range of activities, starting with a warm up
name game, and moving into a creative wet-on-wet background painting to be used later in the day.
We focused on using granulating pigments on different papers to get the vibrant colours flowing
and mixing and observed the qualities and beauty we created.
A shared experience followed, with the group painting beautiful vases of branches and plants, in
a collective timed way, and passing on the painting to the next person to add, enhance or change
the look of the work. The results were stunning, with the finished paintings having a remarkably
coherent look even though we had all contributed in our individual ways. After a scrumptious shared
lunch, we settled down to our dried backgrounds from the morning to use negative painting techniques
to add flowers and foliage. We painted from live material, selecting complementary colours and
mastering placement within the painting to achieve balance and eye-catching images.
Throughout the day, we discussed challenges with of our wonderful hosts so we could resolve them at
home. We all felt we had learned and gained a great deal in a short time.
I look forward to this each year and can thoroughly recommend it to everyone whatever your
level of experience or expertise. Come and join in!
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!
