Get creative in the Parks this summer

Are you a budding landscape artist? The Parks, trees and natural scenery are the perfect opportunity for you to get creative and paint your very own landscape scene. This summer award winning artist Henrietta Simson is running some landscape art classes here in Hyde Park.

To get you feeling creative Henrietta has shared her top tips for getting the most out of your landscape artwork:

1. Snap out of the habit - I have a few brushes that I feel most at home with and tend to pick up instinctively, whatever it is I am painting. I have recently been re-examining my relationship with these brushes, taking a step back and exploring how and why I use them in a certain way. By making myself paint with them in a completely different way, I have been able to develop new marks and gestures. This has enabled me to express different things about the relationship between what I am doing and what I am looking at. By reconfiguring these behaviours I have been able to articulate more clearly exactly what it is I want from my paintings. 
2. Use simple colour theory - Don't think about colour in terms of light and dark but instead how they relate to other colours. By applying some simple colour theory to your paintings they will come alive. For example don't think of light and shade in terms of black and white tones, but rather think about them in terms of colour variations. Shadows that contain the opposite colour to that of their corresponding object are more vibrant than shadows that are simply considered 'dark'.
3. Get to know your materials! Thinking about and exploring the experience of a material you have chosen to paint or draw with may sound obvious but developing a sensitivity to its behaviour will enable you to discover a wider range of possibilities. Don't automatically go for that blue that you always choose for a certain sky, instead use it in a way that you would never automatically decide such as to paint grass or trees. You will produce some interesting results!
4. How does it make you feel? Thinking about material in terms of mood and atmosphere helps to locate an emotional pitch and communicate more precisely in your landscapes. Don't worry about getting the colour 'just right' in terms of what you think it looks like, but rather in terms of how it makes you feel. 

Join Henrietta for her 6 week course ‘Painting the Landscape’ starting Tuesday 2 June at 6pm and let her experience and knowledge give you the confidence you need to be able to go out into the landscape and capture the perfect scene!