Basic Techniques
Our Basic Techniques courses are an introduction to painting for our Plein-Air, Naturescapes outings and are taught either outside or in the Espace Bellefontaine . They are highly recommended if you have no previous experience or are rusty and in need of a refresh to give you a taste of what to expect on our hiking trips.
These courses are arranged in a progressive order that will help you to advance in an organic way of learning that’s fun and instructive. These five, core courses will be taught in a rotating order monthly and can be started at any point.
It is suggested to start with these courses if you are a complete beginner and want to learn the fundamentals to get comfortable. However you are completely free to pick and choose as you like and can go on any of the excursions without prior training if you want to dive in head-first. We use oil paint as our medium of choice as it’s the most lively, textural, and forgiving to use.
- Basic Techniques and Wandering in Nature are covered in the price for the Wandering in Nature product allowing you to do as many of either as you wish.
Check our Upcoming Events page for info.
Colour Training
CT 1 - In this introductory colour training course, we will focus on understanding what are the essential materials needed to get started, how to set up, which brushes and palette knives to use and how, introductory colour theory and paint mixing, as well as how to be safe using certain materials.
Using a limited palette of colours, you will learn how to obtain secondary colours from the primaries, and from there create tertiary gradients. You will also learn how to create blacks, greys, and browns from the primaries which is probably the most useful thing to learn in painting as desaturating colours to represent the colours you see in everyday life are the most prevalent.
CT 2 - This course builds on your knowledge of CT 1 and focuses primarily on how to mix colours directly from nature.
Composition
In this course, you will be able to go out and look at a scene and know the techniques of how to set up a composition that works with satisfying results. Knowing how to choose a subject matter that interests you and transform it into a painting that works technically as well as emotionally will be the major component for this course.
Paint Sketching
In this course you will learn as its name suggests to sketch with paint. This is a great way to start using paint that is loose and open-ended. By quickly blocking in colour, you will have a general view of where you need to go. By boldly sketching in colour, you will surprise yourself as to what you can achieve in little time. You will learn which brushes you need to create specific effects, usually we start with large brushes to lay in the general composition and slowly go to medium then smaller brushes.
Perspective Essentials
Learning the essential principles of perspective are crucial in translating what you see on the three dimensional plane to creating with paint the illusion on a two dimensional plane. We will cover the necessary practical skills involved in creating believable perspectival scenes.
We will cover the basics such as one and two point perspective categories that most landscapes fall into and how to place objects in two dimensional space that appear realistic in terms of size and shape. We will also cover atmospheric perspective which is very important in landscape painting as we observe how colours, sharpness and size change depending on the foreground, middle-ground, and distant horizon and what paint mixtures are needed to obtain these effects.
Object Focus
This module focuses on learning to paint specific objects to help you simplify the learning process. Knowing which colours and brushes to choose to paint a tree as opposed to a sky and clouds will be explained and examples shown so you can quickly master how to integrate these elements into the big picture. The main objects we will learn to paint are trees, skies/clouds, water, land, mountains, and animals.