During the 2024 edition of Margaret River Region Open Studios, I hosted two small group beginner's level workshops of budding artists in my home
This is the first time I've hosted workshops during an Open Studios event and the very first time I've run workshops for adults, although it's something I've been thinking about doing for some time, having had a little taster of teaching watercolour painting to the youngsters in Manjimup and surrounds during my Moments Made in Italy exhibition their last year.
It's one thing to share my artwork with the world, but sharing my processes and techniques with an appreciative, interested audience is a whole new level of interaction!
My workshops brought some returning Friends of Shion Art Loyals and some new faces, some with all the tools of the trade, and others without so much as an apron. It mattered not! My budding artists were all there to learn a little about the delicate, complicated and magical world of watercolour, to enjoy an evening in good company, with good wine and food, and to create their very own masterpiece!
After delving into the nitty gritty of materials, knowing what to focus on when starting out in the black hole of art supplies, we moved onto some technical exercises - learning to use, dilute, and blend colour, as well as the various processes we were going to use in our final painting.
From there, it was all in, step by step, making use of newly learned techniques to fill out a pre-sketched drawing. As the evening drew on, one thing became obvious. Each person saw the subject in a different light, used the watercolours in different (or even the same) ways but achieved very different outcomes. While the base drawings were all very similar, each participant's final painting was unique, yet all lovely expressions of the subject and the artist!
Overall, the results were fabulous, the feedback was incredibly valuable, and the result is that I will be working on developing further workshops in the coming months!
My heartfelt thanks go out to all the participants for their patience, as I muddled through in English and went well overtime and I learned to paint their own masterpieces!
Here are a couple of the comments:
"That was the best short workshop I've ever been too. You went above and beyond my expectations" R.H.
"It was such a fun evening - thank you for sharing your watercolour expertise with us!" J.R.
If you'd like to get involved in future workshops or experiences, please consider joining my mailing list Friends of Shion Art and you'll be among the first to gain access my future projects.
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