This was a fabulous workshop from Micheal Herron.  It was obvious that he had a wealth of knowledge and experience imparting information to students.  We learnt the best way to mix colours and also the best way to hold our brushes, and how to make our own mediums, which was a revelation even to those of us who have been painting for many years.  

He showed us many examples of his plein air painting as well as those done, afterwards, in the studio.  If we didn’t have a reference to go by, we could use one of these paintings for inspiration for our own workshop painting. The principles he explained could be used with both oil and acrylic mediums, so it didn’t matter which we had chosen to use.  We started our own paintings by getting rid of the ‘white’, by using a colour of our choice to thinly cover the whole area,using paint thinned, with either solvent for oils or acrylic medium.  This layer was allowed to dry, while we had our morning tea.

Following our beverages, cake and bickies, we began to draw our landscape using a small brush, keeping details to a minimum.  Then we started to paint, for our under-paintings, using thin paint.  After this layer had dried, we then began painting the next layer, starting with the sky and continuing from the back to the front. Our aim was to produce a work with more details nearer the front of the image, giving depth and interest to our work.

It was such an informative workshop and a great variety of work was produced.  We all enjoyed it and came away with newly found knowledge to use in our future paintings.