Woodland Diaries

Course Dates: 14^th - 16^th April  2027 ( Wednesday - Friday )

3 days of meandering and drawing with natural materials in the landscape.

Come and walk in the woods when the bluebells are out and the ground is burgeoning with colour and new life. Feel more alive, engage with your natural surroundings, wake up your senses and create! Spend 3 days exploring the nearby woods in this fully immersive, practical and tactile workshop. Drawing with mud, puddle water, leaves and twigs, this will be a very hands on experience!

Since cave people made the first marks on cave walls and drew lines in the sand, humans have been drawn to leave a visual trace of themselves. In this workshop, you will be reminded how drawing is a truly tactile, instinctive, primal experience, using the body and natural materials to make marks.

You will respond to the sights, sounds, smells and feel of the woods, filling a concertina sketchbook with your findings, and making other small scale experimental studies alongside it. Using found materials, as well as your usual drawing materials, you will be making studies in the landscape, about the landscape, with the landscape. Let the landscape be your canvas, leave ephemeral marks, create mini installations, take photographs, write down your observations.

Each day there will be some studio time to take stock, pause for reflective writing, view work and discuss our findings. We can share our collective knowledge of working with natural materials, making inks (eg. alder ink from local trees), mixing earth pigments etc. We can experiment with combining processes and different surfaces, to develop ideas for taking back out on site or continue in the studio. We can decide how much time to spend outside, depending on weather conditions and individual needs.

You will come away with a sketchbook (or 2) full of observations, drawings, notes, ideas and experiments, a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity, and a deeper connection to the place and the season.

Suitable for all, this will be a fun and experimental course, that could be research for a bigger project, or simply be a way to step outside of your ordinary practice, connect with nature, enjoy a creative a reset.

See Course Details for further information