Portraiture in Oils

Oil Panting Portraiture workshop with Liverpool Independent Art School tutor Siobhan Carmichael Friday 8th November 10 – 12 noon is the next in the series of Portraiture classes at 1 Rose Lane Allerton.

“We usually meet the first Friday of each month but this week we have postponed until the 8th, sorry to the regular students for any inconvenience”

Siobhan Carmichael

 

The work shop will be the first of two exploring the traditional and impressionistic applications of oil paint and focusing on producing an under painting which will be complete in the following session. All materials included in the £10 fee.

“Oil is a lovely material to work with and often thought of as harder to use than water colour but this simply isn’t true, it allows you to build up and rework areas so whether its fine detail or impressionist emotion you are after its very forgiving.”

All are welcome to join so if you have an interest and would like to know more contact Siobhan directly on:

carmichaelsiobhan@googlrmail,com.

Super Furry Animals

Super Furry Animals in colour will be the focus of Novembers much loved animal art class.

Mixed media will be explored to depict a range of wonderful furs which coat natures finest.

The session will concentrate on how to bring life-like furry creatures to the paper. Mark making, blending and building up layers being core to the process. To avoid worrying about line placement and navigating away from the use of dark outlines in favour of showing light coming through hair. Working from light to darker tones then successfully adding fine detail. Ending with the use of highlights to ensure the depiction stands out from the page.

Building on the triumphs of last months hibernation class, in this we saw leaps forward in the use of creating textures. In this, we utilised found ‘Leaves’ as a natural blending tool. A succession of positive drawings, creative creatures we simply didn’t want to allow to go away and sleep for the winter!

Super Furry Animals will be an awe-inspiring art class. For November only this will be held on the third Friday of the month.

Friday 15th November 2019
10-12 noon
Rose Lane Studio’s
1 Rose Lane
Mossley Hill
Liverpool

Contact to book:

info@littlere-makes.com
07891 545144

Coming up……at LIAS

LIAS has a packed program of workshops coming up….

Firstly our planned aquatint workshop on Saturday will be postponed until the 7^th of March. It is a lovely form of etching as printmaking and we have been doing staff experiments with process to get ready for it but in exploring it more we have decided it makes more sense to deliver it after our hard-ground etching day as the processes have some useful links that people will understand more if we run it after that one. Because of this we now have loads of time for bookings. 
Before that we have several other featured workshops and events. Some dates for your diary are as follows

Our first and nearest is the life drawing masterclass looking at expressive and anatomical approaches to the figure – the date for this is 19^th October – booking is essential and the full day course, as always is catered. Led by Paul and Siobhan. After that are the following-

Silver Etching for Jewellery on the 23^rd November led by Paul,

Hard Ground (Safe etching printmaking) 15^th February 2020 with Toc and Paul

Then Aquatint (Safe etching printmaking) 7^th March 2020 with Toc and Paul

All these full day sessions are costed at £55, with food provided by the excellent Arty party and places are generally limited to 10 maximum. 

 

Aside from that our regular weekly classes include sessions of Art from the Start at 10 am Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Monday at 1.

Life drawing sessions at 1 pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Print Club open sessions on Fridays and Sundays at 2 pm.

Our other regular classes are Portrait classes running monthly on the 1^st Friday of the month and “Animal Art” on the 2^nd Friday.

*For November only Animal Art will be held on the third Friday, 15th November.

As well as these things the popular 10 week “Intro to Print” course will begin again embedded into the Sunday 2 pm Print Club sessions starting 12^th January 2020. These sessions are £15 and booking is advised.

 Get in touch for more info and to book.

Liverpool Arty Party

Food and Art …what’s not to like?

LIAS’s sister company: Liverpool Arty Party are taking their culinary skills further and expanding not only their signature dishes but exploring the many influences which make them passionate about creating food.

The company was born out of a mutual passion for cooking by partners Mike Webb and Siobhan Carmichael. We are both trained teachers in the arts, and still working in main stream education, but we also work closely with LIAS delivering specific art workshops and catering the day events. Mike “Yotem Ottemlenghi” is the chef at the moment who inspires me. Fresh, vibrant and healthy food. Even though we love meat, these dishes often put the gorgeous fresh vegetables centre stage. A really creative medley of colours, tastes and textures which is a feast for the eyes as well as the taste buds. Mediterranean cuisine is always referred to now as the healthiest option and you can see why. We work with our own home grown produce for that freshness straight from the garden to the plate.

 I love to paint and whatever the subject matter I enjoy teaching it, talking about it and taking time out from busy lives to sit down and concentrate on it!       Siobhan

So the next step was how do we bring these two elements together? The obvious idea was to work on catering for the day workshops with LIAS. Paul and Toc could not have been more supportive of our venture and we really enjoy contributing to their fantastic artistic endeavours with a little light refreshment. 

We like to keep the lunches vegetarian so it caters to a broader group of people and when we can vegan. What we would like to do in the future is to match the cuisine to the work shop.                                                                                                              Mike

 

At the moment it’s about practicality and eating in a studio space. However, it would be great to have a culinary experience of say Italy, Spain or France while exploring the techniques of Leonardo Di Vinci or Picasso etc.…what would they have eaten.                                                                                                                                                 Siobhan

Researching localised? and historical recipes from these cultures as the so called “peasant food” is at the heart of what now makes up their contemporary cuisine. Britain may not seem to have as strong a connection to food as these other cultures but we disagree and would love exploring or own food heritage.

At the moment we are making sure that in a confined space the food is accessible and fresh. The influences have been mixed and we are quite happy to put different traditional recipes and cultures together, for example, Greek filo parcels and Irish filled potatoes skins. You have to think about how people can eat the food in a practical way and we try to work on versions of a canapé, but of course with at least more than one mouthful.                                                                                                  Mike

The next workshop which Liverpool Arty Party cater for will be the Life drawing 19th October were Paul will take the morning session and Siobhan will be leading an oil painting workshop exploring the techniques of the Impressionists. We will be posting up our ideas on our Facebook page for the food so hope you will join us. Mike & Siobhan

More about Yotem Ottemlenghi

Feel like Hibernating?

Hibernation, its creatures and comforts will be the subject of the next animal art class.

The use of graphite technique to help re-create natures finest as they curl up in a ball for the winter months. Hedgehogs keeping their bristles out of harm’s way, bats out of action. Dormice slopping off and no more crouching for toads!

Fresh approaches to mark-making, arming ourselves with graphite sticks to indulge in the process of putting on and taking off tones to the whites of the sheet. A class which will help you perfect your visualisation process to create the artworks you desire.

Thee next class:
10-12noon
11th October 2019
Rose Lane Studio’s
1 Rose Lane, Allerton, Liverpool.

Contact to book:
info@littlere-makes.com
07891 545144

Life form: a dry point

LIAS Tutor Toc talks about the latest weekend workshop:

Last Saturday we ran the latest in our series of catered day courses. The food was supplied again by our sister company Arty Party and the teachers were Paul and myself. We attracted a group of six artists comprised of regulars from Print Club, new contacts and people who had attended our recent Dry Point from The Life Model course. We started the day with an overview and a few example pieces and then jumped straight into the first practical exercise. Etching is the practice of scratching lines or tone into a flat plate and filling them with ink, wiping the surface to leave only the ink in the grooves created and then running the plate through a high pressure press against softened damp paper to produce an etching print. This can be done with dry point (Scratching with a sharp tool) or through the use of a chemical mordant like an acid. LIAS are in favour of safe processes and being as environmentally friendly as possible. The traditional acids create toxic fumes so we use a much safer ferric chloride solution and water based inks (Which means we don’t need solvents either.) The first exercise was done with a simple drawing process onto a small copper plate no more than two inches square. The type of marker we used blocks the mordant from touching the copper so after a three minute bath in it the plate is cleaned to reveal the initial drawing standing proud of the surface because everything else had been bitten back a fraction of a millimeter. Just that fractional difference in height was enough to collect ink in the grooves and edges and create some remarkable little prints. Then we figured we had deserved a break so we took the big table and our chairs out into the sunshine to feast on the lovely fresh vegetarian food that was delivered by Our Friends from Arty Party. We had a civilized picnic for an hour and then returned to the “soft ground” part of the day. Soft Ground is another way to stop the etching process on the parts of the plate you want to protect and is done by covering the whole plate and drawing, tracing and pressing textures in to it to reveal blank areas where the mordant can corrode the bare metal. It is a hugely flexible process which allows for creativity to run wild and we spent several hours just exploring texture and design. At the end of the day, as is our tradition, we had half an hour to discuss the work produced and what had been learned. The conclusion was that the session had been so successful we will run it again in spring. Before that are several other mordant etching processes such as aquatint and photo etch… watch this space as things develop- literally!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Mary and a little bit of Nature

At the Independent Art School we have run a successful print program over the last few years and within that we have worked with a broad group of artists employing a huge range of traditional and experimental print processes. We hope to further expand that over the following academic year and have though that a way to explain this may be to showcase the work of individual printmakers from time to time.

Recently a conversation arose about the good qualities of a recent print by Mary – who often attends our Sunday Print Club. It seemed useful then to show some of her range of images and draw some common threads together. Mary’s work is often informed by natural shapes like trees, foliage and birds. It also includes broader landscape themes using both relied and intaglio processes, which she uses fluently. She also uses some subtle chine colle- (that is laying in a coloured section of tissue paper into the press which binds to the main paper and forms layers of colour in pint) Her images combine subtlety with strength and graphic immediacy. Her clarity of thinking, decision making and documenting allow her to really come prepared to sessions and take full advantage of her making time.

Here included are her intaglio dry point images of landscape and collagraph gondolas at Venice with chine colle and her Heron with bamboo grass and recent winter tree with sheep using high quality lino.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.