3-Day Courses: Secondary Teachers

We will provide all basic materials for your course. More specialist items you can bring or can be purchased locally.

We supply all the necessary equipment you will need but you are welcome to bring your own favourite items, eg brushes, portable easel, palette, if you prefer. It would be useful to have your own digital camera and if possible a portfolio to keep your work together.

Drawing Techniques

This course focuses on teaching the core elements of line, tone and texture in drawing materials that can easily be used in all schools.

Students often shy away from drawing at an early age in secondary schools because they have never really been given confidence in their own abilities. With younger students you can make it fun to get them on your side, it’s remarkable then what you can achieve with them. If they learn to research on their own from an early age it makes GCSE teaching that much easier.

I can show you ways that I have discovered in winning across young students and inspiring them to be independent creative thinkers. Discover putting drawn images into simple annimations. Look at designing their own drawn comic pages and learn about perspective and unusual viewpoints in apractical sense.

Life Drawing and Painting

This is a refresher course for teachers and to help you feel more confident in your teaching. If you have students who are thinking seriously of applying to art college, it will help considerably if they can show that they have had some experience of working from life.

The first day using pencil and charcoal will be spent concentrating on looking at the relationship between the figure and background using both short and long poses. The second day will concentrate on using colour to define form. The third day will give you the opprtunity to work from the model in a mixture of materials. There will be time after dinner in the evenings for you to return to the studio if you like or to browse in our library, or watch a dvd from our collection.

Photographic Silk Screen Printing

You’ve probably tried silk screen printing before but have you tried photographic silk screen printing? It’s not as difficult as you think and the results can be stunning, especially for students who are not necessarily very strong at drawing.

On the first day we will take you out to some of Cornwall’s great sites for you to photograph (or bring your own favourite shots with you on a cd). Back in the studio you will be able to convert your images into high contrast black and white images and print them onto clear acetate. These are then fixed onto a silk screen in our darkroom. The rest of the week will be spent printing in our workshops in a variety of different ways. You can print onto many different surfaces, using subtle changes of tone or bright colourful contrasts. You can experiment with torn surfaces giving an interesting texture or print onto an opaque surface to soften the effect. Like other forms of silk screen printing you can work very effectively in layers. Experience comes through experimentation and the excitement of discovering different methods.

You’ll be surprised at the wonderful results this process will give.