This course is designed to deepen your understanding of visual language and enhance your proficiency in oil painting. Through a structured series of exercises and projects, you will develop technical skills, explore different painting techniques, and refine your artistic expression.

Key Learning Areas:

•      Advanced colour mixing and blending techniques

•      Still life compositions with focus on form, edges, and lighting

•      Impasto texture using palette knives

•      Limited palette challenges for tonal and atmospheric effects

•      Chiaroscuro and monochrome underpainting, inspired by Renaissance masters

•      Alla prima (wet-on-wet) painting

•      Master copy studies from Impressionist painters

•      Animal painting techniques

•      Student-led projects, including plein air or interior painting

•      Abstract landscape experimentation

Course Programme

1. Continue learning colour mixing and blending. Smooth sunset sky or a foggy landscape.

2. Still life with cast and drapes. Clear, balanced compositions, subtle use of colour. J. S. Chardin.

3.. Second session on still life with cast and drapes. Working on the differing edges of the objects.

4. Impasto texture practice: use a palette knife to apply thick layers of paint. A textured floral field, tree bark, or waves crashing on rock. F. Auerbach, Richard Musgrave-Evans, Van Gogh.

5. Limited palette challenge using ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and titanium white. Moody portrait or mountain scene, forest in mist.

6. Still life with dramatic lighting. Books and vessels. Use of monochrome underpainting. Looking into practice of Renaissance artists. Chiaoscuro.

7. Second session of the still life with dramatic lighting. Working on details.

8. Alla prima (wet-on-wet) painting. Magnolia flowers and others.

9. Paint from a master copy. Learning from Pissarro and Monet

10. Painting animals. How to draw and paint animals: Franz Marc, Picasso, Francis Bacon

11. Students’ own projects. Possible plain air painting or interior. Matisse, David, Ilya Repin.

12. Abstract oil experiment: landscape. Play with bold shapes and thick brushstrokes