Botanical Art Courses

These courses are designed for artists who already have experience with painting botanical subjects and are now looking to fine tune their skills. With this in mind then, what you will gain is the opportunity to critically assess your strengths and weaknesses, to think more about planning your painting than merely looking for the next flower to draw, and to experiment with new ways of seeing and portraying plants.

As a teacher I give lots of encouragement; I tend to find most botanical artists paint a lot better when they stop being so hard on themselves and relax.

Each course includes an illustrated talk, a class exercise, and the opportunity of putting the new information into practice in your own painting.

For groups of between 10 to 15 people, the cost would be £35 per person per day.

Two Day Courses

Mastering light on leaves.

Painting realistic leaves, demonstrating the best lighting conditions for your leaves, what to observe, and how best to translate that into paint on paper.

Techniques from the 'Seeing Potential' exhibition.

Particularly the 'out-of-focus' effect, but also more depth on choosing images to paint and using photographs.

White and Pale Flowers.

A review of the tricky issue of how to portray white flowers on a white paper and then putting it into practice.

Using photography to make painting plants easier.

Living busy lives, we don't always have time to sit down and paint all day when our plant material is at its peak. This course includes tips and ideas on what notes and digital photographs to take to complete your painting when you have time.

Illusion and reality: creating a three-dimensional painting.

Some artists manage to make their paintings look more real than others. This three-day,  or four-day, course looks at how to analyse why this occurs and how to incorporate this information into your own art.

Moving your art to the next level.

Sometimes we reach a point when we feel we are not progressing and the paintings we are producing are not what we intended but don't quite know why. This four-day, intensive course shows you how to objectively assess your art, followed by ideas to inspire you and the techniques to put these into practice.

If you belong to a group of painters interested in one of the courses, or as an individual, please e-mail teaching@martinjallen.com and we can discuss something suitable.