On Line Guided Painting

Little Owl ran as a live class in 2016. In 2016 owl imagery was popping up in homewares and stationery and it seemed like a timely image to use. It was a very popular class and everyone went home happy. I often use imagery from my early career practice as Guided Painting images, giving them a second life. I have many sketchbooks to refer to, many from 30 years ago. I used to paint and draw whimsical animals as my main creative output, however, I never drew owls. I was wondering why.  As a child, I was intrigued by owls. I grew up in a town and had no real experience of owls. I remember a Whitsuntide week family camping trip to Kielder in Northumberland. As usual, we went with several other families and lots of kids. This was to be my family's last trip in a tent. The other families had already upgraded and moved onto caravans. It rained every day and my Dad declared that he was finished with tents. We went on to own caravans and had many much drier and warmer holidays in the...

This painting was inspired by the classic children's nursery rhyme, "Mary Mary". I loved this rhyme as a child, my mother was called Mary and I would wonder if she was Mary of the rhyme. She was always out in the garden so it seemed perfectly plausible. I also thought my Aunt was Princess Margaret, I had a colourful imagination or me was just easily confused. I always thought that the rhyme was about Bloody Mary Tudor. I've checked Wikipedia, so bound to be right, and the rhyme could also be about Mary the mother of Jesus or Mary Queen of Scots. The oldest printed version appeared in 1744. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, And pretty maids all in a row. I added the bees and bugs to the painting as our precious ecosystem just wouldn't work without all their hard work pollinating. When I painted this image the catastrophic drop in work d bee populations was all over the media. Ho...

"Flower Tree" ran as a live Guided Painting class in 2016. I offered two paintings that day, “ Flower Tree” and “ Enid”, a gorgeous violet elephant. It was the first time that I had offered a "double bill", you could choose one or the other. It proved to be a challenging afternoon. I had a couple of students who went completely off-piste. While I was checking on everyone's progress I was confused by their “ interesting” colour mixes, it turned out they weren’t bothering to read the instructions and were "doing their own thing”. They just couldn't work out why their's didn't look like mine. If you want to do your own thing with a guided class that's totally cool, just don’t expect the same result as the original. I write instructions to help you achieve a good approximation of the original. Sometimes I don't have a grand plan for Guided Painting, "Flower Tree" was simply an image I wanted to paint. I love gardens and this remi...

I love hydrangeas, they are such unlikely flowers. I was so surprised I could grow them in Queensland. One of the first drawing assignments I ever did at art college was a pencil and wash drawing of a dead hydrangea head, carefully rescued from an English autumnal garden.  "Hydrangeas" Guided Painting, first ran in May 2014 and proved to be a massive learning curve for me and this fledging style of class. I have learnt so much since the early step by step classes and you get all the benefits of that knowledge when you choose this downloadable class. I have ironed out all the problems my " live" class encountered back in 2014 .  My Guided Painting classes often have quite whimsical imagery and feature animals. My practice was once concerned with narrative and illustration and many of the Guided Painting images I have used over the years are based on paintings from back then.  “Hydrangeas” was my third live Guided Painting class. I wanted to have a more represe...

I rebranded my art teaching business The Art Train in 2019. This was a great opportunity to enable customers to book and pay online for classes and this was a prime goal for my new website.  I have been running Guided Painting classes 2 or 3 times a term since 2014. Students come along to a 3-hour session to paint the same image. I provide fully illustrated instructions plus afternoon tea for extra inspiration. The homemade cake really works to get flagging students over the line. A few years ago a friend had suggested I sell classes online. Of course, I procrastinated... a lot, until I gradually I assessed all the classes I had run as live Guided Painting sessions. I had created 38 individual images for Guided classes over the previous five years. I had quite an IP. The online class benefits massively from having been previously taught live I have been able to see first hand if the instructions don't make sense or I have over complicated the process. During ...