Catherine Beale

Atmospheric watercolour landscapes

Light up your watercolours and embrace running pigment using The Blackdowns Retreat’s stunning meadow landscape as your inspiration. At the heart of the retreat are Catherine’s loose “gravity painting” techniques which will help free your painting style. Create subtle shifts in colour and tone by painting with water on a tilted surface. Contrast loose washes with the deep tones of solid tube paint and work with the ‘white’ paper to add glow to paintings filled with silhouettes and atmosphere. 

Saturday will begin gently with a look at Catherine’s paintings before she demonstrates the core to her approach. Then explore ‘freeing’  watercolours yourself using her atmospheric landscapes as inspiration. Watch short demos and experiment with washes, ‘disrupting' washes and 'lifting off' before developing a longer composition.

On Sunday discover how Catherine approaches composition before heading outside to explore our surroundings using sketch books, pens/pencils and camera phones (weather permitting). Return to the studio to plan a larger composition that excites you and paint confidently with one-to-one advice from Catherine along the way. 

The weekend will close with an explanation of how to review your paintings, trouble-shooting strategies and a final look at the group’s wonderful body of work.

A detailed list of suggested materials will be given before this course in watercolours.