Watercolour Fungi Workshop (18 May 2024)
Watercolour Fungi Workshop with Ingrid Bartkowiak: 10–1pm Saturday 18 May 2024.
Join artist Ingrid Bartkowiak for this 3-hour introductory workshop to learn how to bring fungi to life using watercolour.
To start, Ingrid will guide you through the basics of using watercolour paints, paper and brushes. You will learn how to activate your colours using water and how to mix colours, and how to layer colours to change tones and intensity.
Ingrid will demonstrate how to bring these elements together to achieve different results, with a focus on the particular techniques that you'll be using in this workshop. You'll be shown how to create key fungi characteristics, such as the shine on a smooth mushroom or the gills on its underside. Next, it's your turn to practice your skills by creating gradients, brush strokes and colour mixing.
We'll start work on our first full fungi painting by spending some time discussing composition: how we might position our fungi on the page, and how it looks when we add other colours/shapes/forms to our design. You will have the choice of working on flat A5 watercolour paper, or on folded watercolour paper to use as a card. Then we can start painting a basic cap-shaped mushroom (such as Protostropharia semiglobata) by first breaking down the shapes, then putting them back together.
Finally, we will practice our watercolour skills by painting different botanical elements to our artwork, such as leaves, flowers, lichen or other plants of your choice. You can choose whether you'd like to add these elements as background on your existing bottle brush painting, or if you'd like to start a second artwork.
Ingrid Bartkowiak is a Brisbane-based artist and illustrator who paints Australian native flora, fauna and fungi using watercolour. Ingrid's work celebrates all things small and intricate, from tufts of moss on a footpath to the fungi sprouting from a wombat dropping. Her distinctive style is inspired by botanical illustration and the Arts & Crafts movement through its use of tiny patterns, exquisite detail, and vivid blocks of colour.
This workshop is suitable for beginners with little or no experience, and all materials required for the workshop are supplied. Please note that we don't send workshop reminders, so please be sure to add this event to your calendar as soon as you've registered.
Cost: $100 / $90 (Multi-pass)
Multi-pass discount: Sign up for 2 or more Plant Empire events, or register 2 or more people for the same event, to receive 10% off the ticket price (discount will appear at checkout).