Tapping Into Your Subconscious (Online Course) Fall 2024 w/ Barbara Peirson

September 23 to October 21 (Mondays), 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM, Eastern Time

**All sessions are live and will be recorded, students do not have to be present. All recordings will be available to students for 3 months after the final session, after 3 months the recording will be deleted.

Please check your email spam/junk folder for your Zoom invite.

Course Description

Where do ideas come from? How do we unlock the door to inspiration? The subconscious mind is a well-spring of inspiration for artists. Following on from her successful course Imagination, ‘Memory and a Sense of Place’ which she ran for Penn Studio in 2023, Barbara will develop further some of the ideas and practices begun there, to unearth the treasures of image, memory and feeling that lie just beneath the surface of the mind.

The sessions will be playful, experimental and fun. Through a variety of exercises, we will explore how to unlock ideas from the subconscious mind with a view to creating work that is free, surprising in content and form and which would not otherwise be unearthed. We will delve into our imaginations, memories and dreams to gather ideas that can be used as the basis for a painting or series of paintings. We will also draw and paint from nature and allow the world we see on the outside to interact and fuse with the world we see from the inside.

We will work mainly in acrylics and other water-based ingredients and explore how ideas and inspiration can also come from the medium itself and our physical interaction with it. We will play with different painting and drawing materials and techniques, exploring them via inspiring tasks. It will be fun!

Each week we will also look at the work of other artists and

The course is suitable for beginners, as well as for painters with experience who want to loosen up and adopt a ‘beginners mind’ again.

Course Outline

Week 1

Introductions, overview of the course, looking at the work of other artists, starting a sketchbook, doodling.

Home work: Sketching and photographing out of doors.

Week 2

Collaging and developing our own sketches in class with paint, scissors and paper.

Homework: Developing the sketches, sourcing memorabilia, finding old books.

Week 3

Making a new picture book out of an old one.

Homework: TBA

Week 4

Exploring how emotion and physicality impact upon mark making. Mining the memory and imagination through drawing and painting tasks. Drawing together elements of memory, imagination and landscape.

Homework: TBA

Week 5

Exploring the palette and playing with acrylics.

Bringing all the elements together towards a final project.

Reviewing the course and planning next steps.
 

Course Materials List

We will use mainly acrylic paints and other water based materials. But we will also use whatever is available to hand - old house paint, felt pens, children’s markers, discarded cardboard, old books and magazine pages. Gather together ingredients that appeal to you and even ones that you think would be useless!

Recommended:

Pencils - soft ones eg: 5B are good

Pencil sharpener

Sketch book/s - to your liking

Cartridge paper or drawing paper - eg a block of A1 or A2 size (medium or large)

Cardboard from sturdy cardboard boxes

Old magazines and old picture books from second hand stores.

Water based wax crayons - I use Caran d’Ache Neocolour II

Acrylic paints - 5 basic colours of any brand: A good basic set is :System 3 Magenta, Yellow, Cyan, Black and Titanium White. I use White, Paynes Grey, Turquoise, Orange and Yellow Ochre as my go-to.

A selection of brushes ranging in size and quality - acrylic paint can easily ruin brushes, so the cheaper the better. Old and apparently useless brushes can be very good as well as some new finer ones - don’t spend too much at this stage.

Rags

A few pieces of Ply board or MDF cut to useable size eg: 30 x 32 cms

Baking parchment wrapped around board for a palette

Suggested other materials

Masking tape

Charcoal

Fixative

Gloss medium

Pva glue

Glue stick

Old photographs

left over water based house paint

Housepaint Tester pots

Acrylic Ink(s)

cocktail sticks or wooden barbecue skewers

Old tooth brushes

Rags

Sponges

Oil pastels

Acrylic pens

Water spray bottle

Hair dryer

Old books

Magazines

Old pens

Coloured pencils

Fluid acrylic paint eg: Golden : Acrylic Fluid Paint