Floral Harmonies: Composing with Flowers

This workshop is focused on making compositions with floral subjects.

It will be a little different in one, important way: I'll be encouraging you to take - and paint from - your own reference photos.

Of course beautiful reference photos will be supplied for you to paint from too. But rather than just shooting and supplying them, in this workshop I'm going to take you through the process of setting up, shooting and cropping them.

Because it's at this stage that most of the decisions about a composition are made.

I'll also be demonstrating simple but very effective composition exericses that you can use to develop your sense of harmony, spacing and design.

Forget the rules. Actually, there are no "rules" about composition. There is just good design.

And like all other aspects of painting, that's a skill that you can - and should - develop.

As well as helping you to develop flower compositions that are more your own, I'll also be taking one composition to a finish with you, step by step (possibly two, depending on time).

So we'll be covering the whole process: conception, choosing the elements of the painting, arranging, shooting and cropping them, and then turning that reference into a beautiful and atmospheric flower painting.

You'll develop your sensitivity to design, and learn how to take a reference photo of a personal subject and make it even more your own by interpreting it expressively.

You'll feel more confident in creating your own flower still life compositions and turning them into paintings that have more of you in them - paintings that feel more originally your own.