SUNDAY WORKSHOP October 25th 2026. Still-Life. Painting a still-life from sketches and drawings made in the previous workshop - influenced by Picasso and Shirley Trevena.
You can use acrylics, oils, watercolours or gouache. You can add soft pastel to the mix. You can work entirely in a mixed media such as pen, wash, pencil, colour pencil, pastels, collage etc., but whatever you decide to use, it needs to be a medium (or collection of media) that you can negotiate with. Negotiation is the power to correct, change and evolve your work as you go along.
In September’s workshop you made ‘working’ drawings in preparation for this workshop.
(There will be some of you who are following last month’s workshop if you weren’t with us in September's workshop)
We looked for practical methods to ‘dismantle’ our drawings and to find ‘enigmatic edges’ running through them.
We looked at examples by Shirley Trevena who extends edges through her watercolours to create ‘enigmatic’ structure in her paintings.
We also noted that Shirley Trevena makes working drawings to help her understand what she might do in the painting, but that the paintings don’t exactly follow the working drawing.
This gives you freedom to use your drawing as a starting point but allow it to develop beyond the drawing.
This time we’ll also look at Picasso’s paintings to see how he ‘dismantles’ a still-life when he creates the painting. You can work in acrylics or oils (like Picasso) or watercolours (like Shirley Trevena) or both, or the various other talked about above.
In this painting (above) Picasso has really broken up the main elements of his still-life and put them back together, not randomly – he’s done it in a way that re-connects the elements but creates a feeling of movement and dynamism by deciding how he’ll put the bits back together.
For a long time Picasso included collage into his mixed media still-lifes. In this painting, what looks like collaged paper is actually painted – he’s painted the look of collage, like a tromp l’oeil.
Notice how he makes a continuation of certain edges through the painting. An edge might begin as one thing but be picked up somewhere else in the painting and continue on as another thing.
In this painting (above) you can see that Shirley Trevena has really shaken up the elements! Look for her vertical enigmatic edges, see how one of them separates the white from the red flowers for instance.
Less obvious, look for some horizontal edges.
Note that Shirley Trevena doesn’t finish everything – some elements remain un-finished. She hasn’t been afraid to work onto a wet page.
If you choose to use watercolour, you’ll begin working onto a wet (or damp) page and i) Let your paints run on the wet page ii) Be prepared to find some hard-edged shapes at a later stage.
Once this first wet layer has dried, you'll look for some shapes which have a hard edge and a soft edge.
With our edge softening technique, you'll soften some edges.
You’ll need your still life (or a new one of you prefer) and the media you choose to work with. I have lots of acrylics for those wishing to try. You can paint in acrylic on board, cartridge paper, mixed media paper, canvas etc. You’ll need your working sketches from the last workshop!
Comments