Expressive Watercolour Landscapes with Louisa Boyd

This course will encourage you to approach watercolours in an alternative way, accepting the beauty of the medium when it is outside of your control. Expect big brush strokes, splashes and for not every piece to be a success, and bring along an open mind. You will be starting the course with gestural, abstract mark-making in wet media and then you will use dry materials to refine and develop the pieces as the course progresses.

From initial mark-making explorations, you will be asked to take an intuitive approach to painting, considering how you can find imagery in abstract starting points and allowing the paint to guide you in compositional decisions. You will be looking for natural forms and landscape-like imagery within these initial explorations and creating landscape paintings from the most successful ones.

Throughout the course, you will develop an understanding of washes, wet-on-wet techniques and how to encourage and use back runs to your advantage to create blooms and expressive outcomes full of movement. You will also learn how to combine drawing materials within your watercolour paintings.

By the end of the course, you will have completed a series of landscape paintings to take away with you. You will also have developed your confidence and skills in exploring and experimenting with media.