Course details:
Join Textile Artist Anne Ward for a day of mindful, collage stitching. Bringing nothing more than a supermarket size bag of fabric scraps,threads, trims buttons and beads, sewers will create a personal fabric collage suitable for the front of a special greetings card or as a piece of textile art. Stitches will be taught and trims used to embellish.
This is intended as a mindful process bringing people into the present moment with a project that is small enough to pick up and work on in a spare 5 minutes once the class is over.Try not to buy fabric scraps, beg from friends and family if you don’t sew, the results will be worth it and will be good.
Materials and additional costs:
Materials
- A Supermarket size bag of fabric scraps, less upholstery weight, more cotton weight.
- A basic sewing kit – pair of scissors, any needle, any ordinary sewing cotton.
- Notebook and pen.
- No ideas necessary but bring some if you want. They normally emerge as we go.
The tutor will provide the following for £7 (cash).
- A selection of embroidery threads.
- A card each
- Backing fabric
- Some trims
- handout
Suitability:
Suitable for all
Spaces:
12
Price: £62 / £79
PLEASE NOTE THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING
Course details:
During this course we’ll investigate the possibilities of this fascinating medium.
Traditionally scraperboard has been used to achieve exquisitely detailed artwork by scratching through black India ink to expose the white chalk layer beneath.
Day 1: We’ll review and try out the different types of scraperboard available and then use the many tools available for making textural marks to achieve a beautiful piece of black and white art. We’ll also look at how this may then be coloured to achieve another effect.
Day 2: Using a white chalk surface, we’ll use black ink in specific areas to then create our next piece of work. Lastly we’ll investigate the ways we can cover the white surface with coloured inks and use our scratching out skills to achieve a different, but still detailed piece of scraperboard art.
Materials and additional costs:
Supplied by tutor for £12 (cash)
Suitability:
Suitable for all
Spaces:
12
Price: £124 / £158
Course details:
Paint your own beautiful,colourful flowers using water based paints.
Learn and get inspired by Folk art.
Learn how to use different shaped brushes to make the marks, lines and dots.
Mixing colours
Create a card , label, coaster to take home using learnt techniques.
Materials and additional costs:
I will supply the use of brushes and paints and will have extra coasters, decorations etc that you can paint at a small extra cost.
Suitability:
Suitable for all
Spaces:
12
Price: £62 / £79
Course details:
Join Artist-Gardener Holly Foskett-Barnes to expand your creativity and nourish your wellbeing this Spring.
In this course we’ll enjoy learning a range of watercolour painting techniques alongside mindful activities throughout the creative process. Studies will be inspired by beautiful Spring shoots and wild flowers around the Nature in Art gardens and local surroundings.
Please note this course will run until 4pm.
Materials and additional costs:
- A4 pad of thick cold-pressed watercolour paper, minimum 300gsm. Recommendation: Daler-Rowney Aquafine Texture.
- Quality watercolour paint set with at least 12 half-pans. Recommendation: Winsor & Newton, Cotman Watercolour, Sketchers Pocket Set of 12.
- Set of round watercolour brushes, size 2, 4, 8 and 10, with pointed ends. Recommendation: Pro Arte Academy Brush Wallet Set of 5.
- A ceramic paint palette or side plate from the kitchen for mixing colours, preferably white, plain and as flat as possible.
- A clean, empty jam jar for a water pot.
- A pencil, whatever your preference for drawing.
- Plain white A4 copy printer paper for sketching.
OR
Borrow equipment from Holly for £10 (cash)
Suitability:
Suitable for beginners and improvers
Spaces:
12
Price: £62 / £79
Valerie Dugan
GSBI Annual Exhibition
Founded in 1993, the Gloucestershire Society for Botanical Illustration (GSBI) grew out of botanical art classes held in Cheltenham and Stroud with Michael Hickey, botanist, writer and illustrator for The Cambridge University Press.
For many years the GSBI has held its annual show at Nature in Art. As usual, exhibits this year are varied in style and mediums. All members, whether new or experienced, are exhibiting up to three pieces of their work.
Originals, prints and cards are for sale and visitors are encouraged to vote for a ‘People’s Favourite’.
A number of the Society’s more experienced members have won The Royal Horticultural Society’s Gold, Silver Gilt and Silver Medals or have gained distinctions with the Society of Botanical Artists.
Free to enter, in the Education Centre
This is the first time that we have shown a collection of work drawn and painted with raw earth and rock pigments prepared and transformed into paint and inks by the artist.
They are the latest pictures by Fiona McIntyre, whose work has been deeply influenced by living in Scotland, Scandinavia and Spain. She is a founding member of the Arborealists art movement and an elected associate member of the Royal Society of Painter-printmakers (ARE) and an RE councillor.
Recent years have been a revelation for Fiona who has changed her way of working, largely through research and experimentation. So, before committing ideas to paper or canvas Fiona says, ‘I now make my own paints from mineral pigments, some of which I forage, and I gather plants to make natural inks. Having largely rejected synthetically made media, my eyes have been opened to the extraordinary beauty and resonance of nature’s bounty when transformed into media for the artist’.
The project Sacred Earth: Water, Tree, Stone has been a labour of love. The wild landscapes of Iceland, Scotland and Galicia are the inspiration for this exhibition. These locations continue to need protection from glacial melting and erosion, so this exhibition has three themes running through it, based on basic building blocks of life – water (Iceland), tree (Scotland) and stone (Galicia).
She says ‘I spent time walking sketching and drawing in all of these wild locations, witnessing glaciers, pine forests and petroglyphs. These places were at times difficult to get to and weather was unpredictable. However, this is what inspires me to feel alive and excited. I hope that the experiences of being immersed like this in rain, snow, winds and sunshine will be transmitted to the viewers of my art’.
As well as paintings and drawings, visitors will be able to learn about natural pigments and the process of making paints. Fiona says ‘Mineral pigments have a translucent quality, as if capturing the light and memory of the landscapes from which they were sourced’.
The exhibition coincides with the launch evening (April 18th) of a new book of the same name with contributions from Christiana Payne, Professor Emerita of History of Art at Oxford Brookes University and Nicola Moorby, Curator of Historic British Art, 1790 – 1850 at Tate Britain. Copies will be available in Nature in Art’s shop.
See also: Natural Materials Into Paints & Inks with Fiona McIntyre on May 2nd-3rd
Course Suitability: Suitable for all
Maximum Participants: 12
Course Description:
Join artist Jamie Boots for a two-day exploration into the nuanced world of graphite pencil art. This workshop delves beyond basic sketching, offering insights into the subtle techniques that breathe life into your creations. Participants will discover the art of manipulating pencil sharpness, pressure and tones to convey the fine details such as skin textures and expressive eyes.
Materials Required:
All materials supplied within session.
Course details:
This is a linoprinting course using two to three colours, with a simple reduction method. Students will learn how to use tools safely, simple registration techniques, how to ink the plate correctly, and how to print by hand.
Materials and additional costs:
£5.50 to be paid to tutor in cash, for materials
Please bring sketches/reference photos for inspiration – think bold, graphic shapes rather than small detailed images.
Suitability:
Beginners and improvers
Spaces:
12
Price: £62 / £79
Course details:
I would like to bring the magic of bookbinding at Nature in Art and be inspired by its beautiful surroundings.
We will be creating a Coptic style binding; with our own designed cover.
I will guide individuals through the process of making a book from scratch. The gathering of the materials, the decoration of the book covers, the folding of the papers, the sewing of the sections, will be a lovely way to relax and build a book with its very own identity.
Individuals will leave the workshop with a gorgeous book that they can keep for themselves or gift to someone special.
Materials and additional costs:
Equipment supplied by tutor for £12 (cash)
Suitability:
Suitable for all
Spaces:
10
Price: £62 / £79
Mother of Pearl Butterfly by Phillip Grieve (south Africa. b.1922)
Animal A-Z
Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms, from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems such as forests or coral reefs. Biodiversity forms the web of life that we depend on for so many things, including food, water, medicine, a stable climate and economic growth.
Over half of global GDP is dependent on nature. More than 1 billion people rely on forests for their livelihoods. And land and the ocean absorb more than half of all carbon emissions.
But nature is in crisis. Up to one million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades. Irreplaceable ecosystems like parts of the Amazon rainforest are turning from carbon sinks into carbon sources due to deforestation. And 85 per cent of wetlands, such as salt marshes and mangrove swamps which absorb large amounts of carbon, have disappeared.
The main driver of biodiversity loss remains humans’ use of land – primarily for food production. Human activity has already altered over 70 per cent of all ice-free land. When land is converted for agriculture, some animal and plant species may lose their habitat and face extinction. But climate change is playing an increasingly important role in the decline of biodiversity too. It has altered marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems around the world and has caused the loss of local species, increased diseases, and driven mass mortality of plants and animals, resulting in the first climate-driven extinctions.
climate-driven extinctions.
In response to this, the UN Environment programme has many initiatives, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), adopted by 196 parties at COP15 in December 2022 under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It is a landmark plan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and achieve ‘living in harmony with nature’ by 2050. It includes 4 goals and 23 targets, such as protecting 30% of land/seas by 2030 and mobilizing billions of dollars annually for nature. The framework was unexpectedly encompassing, and provides hopes for building a new relationship between people, the economy and nature.
Just before the framework was agreed in 2022, the WWF Living Planet Report was released. It estimated a 69 percent average decline in wildlife populations since 1970. A frightening statistic.
So, this display has brought together a special selection of works for each year of the 21st century highlighting 26 animals, one for each letter of the alphabet. Together, they remind us of the diversity and wonder of nature and encourage us to not only celebrate the skill of the artist, but be reminded again, through their work, of the fragility of much of nature in the world today.
Rather than place the diverse exhibits together in one room, the 26 items, both 2D and 3D, will be scattered throughout the museum, to be searched out on an ‘art safari’. Younger visitors can follow a trail to help them discover the exhibits.