Centrepieces Mental Health Arts Project: March 2017

Centrepieces Painting Workshop by Christie Cassisa

This new year, Centrepieces has allocated Tuesdays for a series of three part workshops. The first one, was a painting workshop, run by me. We started our painting workshop on the 10th January, the second day back from our Christmas and New Year Holidays.

Our first lesson concentrated on very basic brush use and techniques. In our first lesson, we learnt to prepare hardboard for acrylic painting. (Hardboard is a very cheap and easy to find resource for painting, and can be cut to any size quite easily) I had also bought a selection of different canvasses and canvas board, as an example of the different choices there are to paint on.

The first painting project was to choose a 'twilight' colour and to use only this one colour for the background. We also painted a source of light, the favourite choice was the moon.

Once our background colour was dry, (with the help of the radiator in the room) we used marker pens to draw on our chosen silhouettes. Marker pens are excellent for creating a fine line when drawing detail, or to have more control in your line drawings, then if you want to you can go over the ink with paint.

Here are some of the results after our first painting session.

James

Denise Tarant

Karen Larkin

In our second lesson a week later, we moved onto graded colours for our background, using two or three colours to blend for a 'sky' background effect. And again, once our background paintings were dry, we used the silhouette effect for our foreground images.

Here are some of the paintings from our second lesson.

Louise Sydawney Henderson

Duncan Wilson

Paul Gadsdon

For our third and final lesson, we learned to use glazes among other techniques, and our theme was 'Outer Space'. By this time, we had used all of the different sized and shaped brushes that Centrepieces had bought for the course. Of course the one that gets the most flack about care of brushes is the teacher, when she forgets to practice what she preaches and leaves her brushes in the water, but at the end of our lessons, all of our brushes were lovingly cared for and stored away for our next painting workshop.

Here are some of the results for our last lesson in this course.

Paul Gadsdon

Duncan Wilson

Louise Sydawney Henderson

Duncan Wilson

Paul Gadsdon

After each lesson, I was delighted to see what our group's artists had created from what they had learnt during the week. It seemed as if they had made huge leaps in their progress, and I was so inspired by their excitement and motivation. Each one of them made the workshops a pleasure to teach, and carried on with that enthusiasm right through the week. Here are some of the paintings that the artists from this workshop have created since. Many of which will be framed and some of which may be on sale at Centrepieces very soon!