Found and Ground 5-day course June 2025 update - new venue
You are invited to join me and Flora for 5 days delving into earth arts in Dartmoor
Bring the centre to the edge
Hi there, as promised, here’s the news of the cancelled course from Schumacher College 23-27 June 2025 now relocated to another wonderful venue in Devon, thanks to my friend and colleague, Flora Arbuthnott of Plants and Colour. There is a great village hall near her home, full of light, packed with good tables and chairs, a lovely kitchen and plenty of parking. Driving there is probably easiest, but the train goes to Okehampton, nearby, and there are buses every hour to the hall from there. Dartmoor surrounds us, the landscape will inform us, and you’ll have the benefit of Flora on hand while I teach too. She has a wealth of knowledge in so many aspects of natural art materials.
I’ll be expanding the syllabus a little to include more experimentation time, which was taken up with kitchen duty at Schumacher. Also, we will run 10am-4pm each day, rather than starting and finishing with half days, so I am very happy. We have kept the price down and still managed to offer vegetarian lunches and refreshments included with a local caterer. It is a great pleasure to bring art and craft to such rural venues, and not have all our ‘culture’ only available in big towns and cities. When I ran art and music events in rural Aberdeenshire in the early 2000s, my housemate artist Patrick Semple described it as ‘bringing the centre to the edge’. I liked that.
Accommodation is not scarce in this part of Devon, with camping, hotels, B&Bs, AirBnBs, and inns to suit all budgets. Flora has provided some links to get you started on the booking page.
If the course fills up, we have provisionally put aside 29th September- 3rd October 2025 to run it again.
Here’s all the info from the booking page.
Found and Ground: Making Natural Art Materials Level One - 5 Days With Caroline Ross
Dates: 23rd – 27th June 2025 Times: 10:00 am – 4:00 pm, Monday to Friday
Location: Brentor Village Hall, Brentor, Tavistock, Devon PL19 0LW
Course Fee: £495 (includes all raw materials, lunches, and refreshments)
Capacity: 16 participants
Join Caroline's signature five-day workshop, Found and Ground, nestled in the scenic surroundings of Dartmoor. This course, that has been running successfully for over three years in Devon, UK has found a new venue after the sudden closure of Schumacher College. This immersive course will teach you the essential skills to create your own art materials from natural resources. You'll leave equipped with a personal art kit and the confidence to gather and process pigments, make paints, pastels, inks, and more—anywhere your creative journey may take you.
What You Will Learn
Ethical earth pigment gathering and preparation techniques
How to forage for natural materials such as gums, fibres, and fixatives
Creating your own paints: watercolour, gouache, egg tempera, and veglair
Making pastels and natural fixatives
Crafting charcoal and sketchbooks from scratch
Simple techniques like reverse-wrap cordage (making string)
Insights from Caroline’s books, Found and Ground and her upcoming release Drawn From the Wild
This course offers hands-on experience, with each day dedicated to a different aspect of natural art materials. Caroline will guide you through each step of the process, encouraging creativity and experimentation. By the end of the week, you will be able to confidently source and make your own art materials from natural and urban environments.
New Course news
‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ - Simone Weil
We are also keen to offer ‘Found and Ground Level 2’ - Drawn From the Wild, open to anyone who has studied with me in person before, which will involve more in-depth topics such as metal point drawing and grounds, natural graphite based drawing tools, semi-precious stone pigments and monoprinting inks, amongst other topics. In this second course we’ll also look at drawing projects together, including landscape sketchbooking and creative still life. I am excited about this as my background was originally in observational drawing, and I love to teach this, alongside the wild materials. If it sounds up your street please reply to this newsletter and let me know. I will book a date if there is enough interest. Likely dates are late July or early October 2025. Drawn From the Wild is also the name of my next book, due to be published June 2025, full of some of these methods and materials.
You can still join me in Vermont for two days of earth arts in October at In Situ Polyculture Commons.
More news from me in October, with a little film about oak galls, where to find them, how to collect them and get them ready for making ink.
Thanks for reading. I am wishing you a fruitful autumn, warmly, Caro.