Hilary Beattie course at Art Van Go

Just before Easter I spent a couple of highly enjoyable days at Art Van Go on a course all about creating art from Gelli to Canvas with Hilary Beattie.  I went with my mother-in-law and good friend Paula Watkins, more of whom you will be hearing about as we start to talk about the book we are writing with Maggie Grey coming out soon!

I have used the Gelli plate before and love it, but this was a completely new approach for me.  The way we printed with leaves and anything with texture was really interesting to learn about and I felt that I got a huge amount from it.

Hilary is full of life and it made for a really fun time.  She had a huge collection of dye pots and we spent a lot of time dyeing papers and pages from our sketchbooks.  I think the promise of all those pots of dyes made us all a bit demob-happy and we were frantically trying to find surfaces to dye (mainly my hands as it turned out).

I came away with a huge amount of beautifully coloured and decorated pages.  It has given me real food for thought about how to take my Gelli plate printing further.  I won't give all the processes away, as they are all in Hilary's book Make It Personal: Book 1 Preparing Your Palette, but we used modelling paste to create textured surfaces on our canvas, and the dyes to colour our printed papers.  The collage aspect of the printed papers onto the canvas is something I didn't get to finish, and I think it needs a bit more thought and work before I'm happy with it, but using some different materials and trying out the Neocolour 1 crayons was great as I wouldn't have thought of using them before.

Also, being at Art Van Go, there were plenty of shopping opportunities, and I picked up some dyes, which I have always been too scared to attempt.  But having used them for painting papers, and having an idea of how to now paint fabric, I am starting with a few colours and see how I go.  I have bought some screw cap tubs to put the dyes in

A selection of surfaces that the class created prior to adding colour

This work was by Christine Parsons and turned out brilliantly (see later picture)

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These are pieces of work by everyone in the group. Hilary is putting some photos on her blog, which may have names on, but I can't remember whose is whose.

My canvas before anything was collaged onto it.

This is wonderful.  It's by Jill Packer.

Christine Parson's wonderful finished piece

Another fab piece by Christine Parsons

I don't know who did this!

I think this was Karen's

Don't know who did this one either, but I love it.

Sorry, I don't have a name for this one either.

I love the colours in this one

 I would highly recommend a course with Hilary.  She has a wonderfully free attitude to her sketchbooks and doesn't treat them like precious objects to be revered.  She experiments, paints bits on them, uses up paint from her brush before washing and is incredibly relaxed about how they look.  Looking through them, there are some wonderful pages with fantastic mixed-media work so it obviously works well for her.  And I think it is a good way to free yourself up and not set yourself unrealistic goals of producing fantastic pages.