Painting the Great Outdoors: Day One

In day one of our summer painting course with artist Matthew Krishanu we had great fun learning skills for painting out of doors.

We set up camp in our local park South Park Gardens

We started by thinking about painting tools, and what we could forage to make our own.

We looked at the different marks found objects could make in paint.

We  foraged for natural objects that we could make into our own painting tools.

Then set to work making them – they became little sculptures all of their own.

We then made a collaborative painting on large sheets of heavyweight fabriano paper rolls

We flicked, dragged and scratched with gloopy and runny paint.

Look at the beautiful effects we came up with.

The painting tools looked even more beautiful smeared with acrylic paint!

We then learnt how to prime a board using primer mixed with found materials, paint and sand to create a textured ground for our painting. We used cut up cardboard boxes as our surface cut to different scales.

Here bits of twig and grass were mixed into the primer.

We left our primed boards to dry over lunch ready to create a final piece.

Can you tell how much fun we were having!

After lunch Matthew showed us lots of artists’ work like Anselm Kiefer and Tal R. He also showed us  different techniques from mixing to layering and adding different media like oil pastels.

We then chose our paints and went off into the park to paint onto our prepared ground.

We drew onto the surface with pencil

The sand mixed into the primer gave a lovely texture to this tree trunk.

We used viewfinders to select a scene to focus on

Some beautiful paintings were made – we were very proud of ourselves.

We worked together and separately 

Even the helicopter that flew overhead was captured in this masterpiece.

Can you see the grass mixed into the primer showing through the green paint?

In the final hour we concentrated on some quick exercises to use up all our paint!

Using dripping paint and painting the sky!

We did a final show and tell and discussed our work as a group.

Click here to see what happened on day 2