Hello, hello my creative friends!
As I mentioned in my previous blog, since around last April, I have been spending every spare minute I have on developing my pattern design skills. I’d be either learning about Adobe Illustrator, or sketching, or building patterns, or learning some more on Skillshare or building my website… you get the idea.
Yesterday however I took a break from all that and went to Richmond for an oil painting workshop!
I fell in love with oil painting around last year when my uncle gave me my first lesson on how to paint with oils. I then took an online course with Roisin O'Farrell and that was so much fun! Roisin is a lovely lady and has a very distinctive style, check out her website if you are curious https://www.roisinofarrell.com/
The “Love to Paint” course from Roisin was the one that gave me confidence with oil painting. We tried thick painting, fast painting (literally, once we had to time ourselves and paint four apples in something like a minute or so!) , palette knife painting… all sorts; and it was wonderful to interact with such a great FB community. Everyone was very supportive of each other and we all encouraged each other to keep going and ignore that nasty inner critic voice that wanted us to stop painting!
Just above is my very first oil painting, from the lesson with my uncle. Above that a landscape painting of an old watch tower near my home town of Custonaci in Sicily
The course with Roisin was an online one, yesterday on the other hand, it was a face to face workshop, something that I had never done before. The lady that taught the workshop is called Linda Alexander and I think her paintings are absolutely fantastic! The way she plays with light in her paintings is so outstanding I can hardly find the words to describe it. Are you curios yet? Here is a link to her website, have a look for yourself and see if I’m not right :-) http://www.lindaalexander.co.uk/
Now, I have to confess, although I love oil painting, I hadn’t touched oils since early this year so at the beginning of the workshop I thought I was not going to produce anything worth looking at, let alone put on my living room wall!
As the painting progressed, however, and with Linda’s expert guidance, my painting started to take shape and by the end of the workshop I had produced a painting which it is, in fact, now hanging on my wall 😊
My finished poppy painting
It was a really great day, I met four other lovely ladies (who took the workshop with me), and I discovered that Linda is not only an incredibly talented artist but an exceptional cook too! Lunch was colorful (as you’d expect from an artist I suppose) and wonderfully tasty, and the polenta lemon cake was sublime.
I want to stress that Linda is not paying me for this :-) . I just enjoyed the day so much that I thought I’d share the experience with you and make you aware of this workshop in case you’d like to improve your oil painting skills. And by the way you don’t have to be a beginner to enjoy the workshop! We painted from pictures, for logistical reasons, and the range of images to chose from went from easy to advanced.
Unfortunately, this was the last workshop for this year, but I’m sure there will be more next year so if you are interested I’d suggest you keep an eye on her website.
With everything that is going on in my life at the moment I’m not sure when I’ll have time to do another oil painting but I’ll treasure what I’ve learned and do my best to find some time to paint again soon.
Till next time
Create and be happy xxx