The next step: Making your nature drawings come alive

This workshop will be taught by the wonderful nature journaler and teacher Laurie Wigham. You’ve been working hard to make sense of the underlying structures: why a bird’s leg seems to bend backward in the middle or how to get the proportions right when you foreshorten those flower petals. It’s time to set aside all the careful measuring and scientific description and go for capturing the joy: the way the flick of a bird’s tail or a tree’s branches reaching for the sun can break your heart open.

We’ll be exploring those semi-mystical artist’s concepts of Gesture and The Mark: how the way your arm moves when stroking a pencil over smooth paper will tell a different story than an ink pen skipping and catching on rough paper. We’ll be looking at ways different artists have done this and then will run through a series of exercises so fast there won’t be time to think or get nervous.

Bring a soft pencil and some rough paper if you’ve got them, but I will also bring materials for everyone to use. Don’t worry about taking notes: I’ll be posting a link to online Flickr galleries of artwork from the presentation so you can take your time looking through it all later