Sebastian Aplin
Painting courses

Last class we were looking at contemporary still life examples such as these by Andy Warhol and Michael Craig Martin. We used more impacting commercial advertising techniques such as clear outlines and bold backgrounds to redefine our concept of painting a still life. This week our focus turns to office stationery, which has a different aesthetic to the big trainer brands. I'm very much enjoying the challenge of using such an old medium such as paint to portray contemporar

For the Autumm still life course I'm hoping to generate some ideas around subject matter, so this will be where you will be able to post an image that you are thinking of using as a still life reference. You can also post any "Work in Progress" images of your painting to serve as a discussion starting point and group feedback for your work. Course members should have received an invite to become "Blog writers" and so should be able to post and comment on the blog. Please let

I'm excited to be going to see the Wayne Thiebaud exhibition next week and thought that we could base our still life around some of his work on shoes. Although some might say that there isn't much to see, I love his plain backgrounds and neat shadows. He also liked to paint things in series, joined up by shadows with little borders of bright complementary colour. He was drawn to geometric shapes and didn't like working from photos, prefering his memory/imagination or working

I do go on about these, I know! Here's a Sargent landscape that illustrates this idea nicely. I love the way the shapes of the cloud,...

Although I knew that replicating the colours on the photo would lessen the impact of the painting, I was drawn in to using a broader...

In this post I want to go through some of the decisions that I'm making when preparing to paint a landscape, which may resonate with how...

Next Saturday we'll continue exploring how to use the negative space in watercolour by painting some human figures/portraits. We'll do...

Next Wednesday we are going to look at how Lucian Freud painted his portraits. We'll be working on a relatively small scale using hog's...

For our last meeting of this block we will be looking at composition, and if you type in "Still life composition" into the search box you...

There probably hasn't been a more popular fruit for painters over the centuries than lemons. Like all simple spherical forms they are...

On Wednesday we'll be looking at visual texture and how it affects the way we "model form" as we have done up to now. Van Gogh's shoes...