Today I had the pleasure of working with seven lovely ladies, in a colour-filled half-day 'Intro to Mixed Media' workshop at Viroga Yoga studio.

After a bit of colour theory and delicious fingerpainting, I led the group through a range of techniques I use to create my mixed media artworks, from collage ...

To emotive image representation ...

Creating backgrounds ...

Layering, scumbling, texture creating and more. It was a lot to fit into just one half-day, but the idea of my workshops is not to use a rigid formula to produce a structured finished piece, in fact it's quite the opposite.

My workshops are all about playfulness, self-nurture, risk taking, and teaching a wide range of skills to enable workshopees to continue exploring ideas at their leisure, outside of my classes. I paint with my students as I teach, too - people learn best when they can SEE and HEAR and DO. It gives people space and makes my day more wonderful too. What more could I wish for?!

Below you will see some delicious, rich, courageous break-throughs in our artworks, as we stepped beyond what we thought our artworks 'should be', and just let the process unfold, using the process oriented techniques. This is a wild way of working for many people, as we're all taught in school to set goals and execute them. We're so used to planning for outcomes, yet painting without knowing is incredibly powerful, as newness emerges and we meet parts of ourselves we never knew existed.

In the process of this delicious journey, we'd all made a hefty start to our canvasses by the end of the three hour course.

I look forward to keeping in touch with these beautiful women and seeing how their artworks unfold in their own time. Yum yum, juicy stuff! What a gorgeous, playful day.

Love C x