Light and Atmosphere in

Watercolour Landscape

with Clive Powsey CSPW

 No workshop scheduled yet for 2012-Let me know if you are interested!!!!

This watercolour course will concentrate on suggesting the effects of light and atmosphere in paintings.  We will start painting simple still life and then to landscape and the out of doors. 

During work on the still life, figure, and initial landscapes we will work in studio to distinguish local colour from the effects of light and shadow.

Weather permitting; we’ll head to some local scenery to paint landscape plein air. 

Although much of our painting time will be in the out of doors, bring some photo or sketch reference that you would like to paint from in the studio.  This will be useful for the initial landscape exercises, and also in the event of poor weather.

Price: $595 CDN per person includes 5 days semi-private instruction, unlimited studio time and delicious lunches

Clive Powsey paints mainly watercolour landscapes.  Born in Ashford, Kent, U.K., 1958. He studied drawing, painting and printmaking at the Ontario College of Art and was awarded a Nora Vaughan Scholarship in 1978. He graduated in 1980 after spending his fourth and final year in an off-campus program in Florence, Italy. He has exhibited regularly since 1981 in both solo and group shows.

Group exhibitions include International Waters (1991), a joint exhibition of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, the American Watercolour Society, and the Royal Watercolour Society. He received an award for Best Watercolour at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition in 1999 and in 2009 he received a D.L. Stevenson Award for Excellence in Watercolour for a painting submitted to the 84^th Annual Open Water Juried Exhibition at the Leighton Art Centre in Calgary Alberta.  

Clive has also worked in animated film and television from 1985 to 2010 with screen credits as an art director and background artist/stylist. He is a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour. 

Clive has recently resumed instructing workshops and courses on his two main visual interests; drawing from life and painting in watercolour. He lives on Vancouver Island is a keen outdoorsman, with interests in backcountry hiking and mountaineering, rock climbing and skiing.

You can see an inventory of his painting and drawing at www.clivepowsey.com

Price:$595 includes days instruction in a small group, lunches and unlimited studio time.

Materials list 

We will be working out of doors most of the days, so you should bring: 

-Windproof and even shower proof jacket, and if you have them, pants.
-Wool or pile sweaters/jackets

-Sunhat and even a toque for cooler conditions

-Appropriate footwear for the out of doors. This could include rubber boots or hiking boots to keep sand

and mud off the feet.

-A portable easel if you like to use one

-A stool if you don’t want to stand or sit on found objects

-A vacuum flask for tea or coffee and container to put a snack in. You might also want to have a water container to keep hydrated.

-A backpack that will accommodate most of your excursion items. I don’t think we’ll have to go far to find interesting things to paint, but some mobility for yourself and your materials would be useful. 

-Participants should bring all their regularly enjoyed watercolour paints, brushes, papers and drawing materials.  

*As well, please bring one or two sticks of sanguine and or brown conte crayon for some initial exercises. 

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If you need a clear guideline of watercolour materials the following will be helpful: 

-A sketch book and drawing materials; graphite pencils, conte crayons, carbon

pencils, erasers

-A portable water container. A large ice cream bucket with a handle works well. You can also buy smaller chambered containers which allow you to segregate cleaner water from used water.

-Palette; The large 11”x15 light plastic ones with a lid are particularly useful.

-Brushes; sable, or the more affordable synthetic sable, watercolour brushes #8, #10, #12, #14, up to #18 Chinese brushes are also useful. A 2” flat sable brush is useful; a house painting brush will suffice and be cheaper.

-Graphite pencils to sketch a drawing for your  watercolours.

-Watercolour paints: If you are fairly new to watercolour the list below should be helpful. (*indicates non essential. All artists have their own preferences; please bring yours and share with us why you like them!)

-Cerulean Blue

-Cobalt Blue

-Ultramarine blue

-Cobalt Green*

- Windsor Green

-Olive green

-Oxide of Chromium (green)*.

-Cadmium yellow medium

-Lemon yellow

-Cadmium yellow deep (orange)*

-Cadmium red light

-Alizarin crimson

-Yellow ochre

-Raw sienna*

-Burnt sienna

-Sepia*

-Burnt umber

-Payne’s grey*

-Lamp black* 

Winsor and Newton, DaVinci, Holbein, and Stevenson all make excellent paints.

Bring plenty of your favorite watercolour paper. All the large manufacturers make superb products. If you are at a loss as to what to bring, a 140lb Cold Press (medium) paper would probably be most versatile, and Arches Bright White 140lb Cold Press is both reasonably priced and very flexible. The bright white surface helps intensify colour and the effects of glazes. The ‘back’’ has some tooth on it, and the ‘front’ is smoother and also makes an excellent drawing surface. Bring more than enough materials to supply yourself for 5 full days. Anything extra can be used after the course. Buy your papers in packs if you can. It would also be exciting to bring some other papers to experiment with; perhaps a heavier weight (although 140lb is very versatile) but definitely a different surface; a few extra sheets of Rough or of Hot Press (smooth) might be useful or interesting to try out if you don’t use them regularly. Bring a couple of drawing/painting boards that will accommodate half sheets and quarter sheets of paper.

Many watercolourists use the traditional soaking and stretching to affix watercolour paper to a drawing or painting board. This prevents wrinkling and buckling while painting and drying. This can be done with brown ‘butcher’ tape, also known as ‘packing’ tape, and is available at art supply shops that cover watercolour materials. A stapler is also a useful tool to have in the event there is slippage as your paper and tape dries and stretches. You can also stretch the paper after soaking it by stapling it to the board. Remember you will need a tool, for example a Swiss army knife, to carefully remove the staples after. If you use this method of securing your paper to the board bring the required materials.

If you don’t soak and stretch (I don’t and it makes life much much easier…) you must still bring some method of securing your paper to the board in breezy conditions. Bulldog clips, push pins, masking tape all work for different people, so bring some of these items as well.

A roll of paper towel might be useful for the painting process and also for stretching. It should be soft and not abrasive to avoid damage to the surface of wet paper.

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