Just when I thought I’d managed to tell you everything you needed to know so that I could relax, knowing you had all the up to date information… I was told today that due to a last minute cancellation, the sold-out 5 day course at Schumacher College next week now has one space available. It’s my flagship annual Found and Ground course, where you learn hands on in the most incredible environment how to gather and prepare pigment, make paints, inks, sketchbooks, pens, brushes, charcoal, pastels, mediums, fixatives, and so much more. We have a guest session from Ava Osbiston and hopefully Rima Staines will be back to paint with us and show her work. You will go home with a wonderful natural art materials set, but more importantly, the knowledge of how to make everything, wherever you are in future. The food and accommodation is wonderful, full details and booking are here.
Landscapes of Making is booking up, we’d love you to join us at Embercombe in Devon, UK this August. Baskets, ceremony, weaving, inks, cordage, song, community, land, reciprocity… we’ll be weaving all these together with each other. All details and booking here.
Drawn From Our Ancestors is online right now, with a Zoom Q&A session live with me when it ends. If you’d like to learn how ecologically sound, ancient, methods and materials are just as relevant to an art practice now as they ever were, then you can click the link here.
Flora of Plants and Colour has put together this amazing year long Natural Colour Making for Artists online course starting in October and I am honoured to be part of the faculty. Almost every aspect of natural colour making will be covered, mineral, plant, lake and mushroom pigments, paints, dyes, inks, pastels, study groups, Q&As… I am in awe of Flora’s organisational prowess and always love teaching on her platform. Details, to register your interest for signing up, and prices, are all to be found here.
From the course web page:
This year-long programme of online classes will be sharing techniques for making natural art materials for drawing, painting, and printmaking from earths, plants, and fungi. Bringing together a unique faculty of teachers who will work together to share the foundational best practices for working with plant and earth based colour. Starting with the raw materials and creating a tool kit of watercolours, and traditional paints, inks, pastels, and crayons in a rainbow of colours.
This course is designed to be accessible to beginners, as well as those who have already started making natural art materials. We will start from the basics, and then go into more depth with these processes, building skills & knowledge over the year. Whether you are as established artist looking to transition your practice, or a complete beginner just starting out on your creative journey, or somewhere in between, all are welcome to join the group.
Through these classes, you will learn how to make a whole spectrum of colours to add to your artist tool kit. From indigo blues, to charcoal blacks, red earths of Devon, and purple mushrooms and more. You might have clear intentions to make natural colours for a particular project, or you might enjoy more open ended experimentation; it is really up to you what you make from this course and what you feel inspired to create in response to the course material.
Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! I hope you have a great summer ahead, or if you are Down Under, then a beautiful winter. I am offline a great deal these days, attending to craft, writing my next book, and my beloved. My website is still out of date, so here is always where the latest news will surface, and then on my Instagram.
I plan to send the next newsletter in August. In the meantime, best wishes to you from me, the woods, the shore, the mulling slab and my editing red pen!
Warmly, Caro.