Aaron made his Phoenix Studio debut just before the pandemic. He ran a fabulous life-drawing-animation workshop – it was fabulous! What struck most about Aaron’s course was how passionate, focused and dedicated about his artistry. He really thinks about every aspect of his practise and shares everything he knows openly with his students.
Naturally I wanted him to come back again, but just focus on his painting this time – giving him time to share his wonderful insights and skills with our students. On this course he will show you how he creates his unique life studies, from using loose gestural mark making, mixing watercolours, and applying ink.
Producing vibrant and fluid figurative watercolour paintings is no easy feat. Many students struggle with overworking the paint, losing the elusive freshness, and never quite using this exciting medium to its fullest potential. Aaron helps artists of all levels overcome this and produce work they’re proud of.
Rather than a rigid step by step system only suitable for limited situations, Aaron teaches students how to analyse pose, lighting, and timing, and adapt their painting approach to suit. With this new mindset to figurative work, you will find something valuable to take away, whatever your usual style.
So much of watercolour is all about timing, and it can be frustrating trying to learn without immediate feedback and advice on the spot. Aaron’s attentive hands-on tuition could save you weeks of trial and error if you don’t know why your paintings aren’t working out how you wanted.
Aaron will guide you through a series of fairly short-posed exercises while you learn exactly how much water to use, how to time each step of your painting, and what does and doesn’t work when painting figures. Although life drawing is the main theme, Aaron’s underlying goals for this course are to help you understand the fundamentals of watercolour and how to use it to boldly and beautifully in any situation.
Up until now, the pandemic has complicated running courses with life models. To ensure that our students remain at a safe social distance from one another, we will be having not one but two life models for this course. One model will pose in the main studio, the other in the marquee and they will swap places regularly so everyone gets to draw each model.
The course fee has subsequently gone up so we can afford to pay for two models.
COURSE DETAILS
DAY 1:
DAY 2:
Pre course prep
ABOUT THE TUTOR
Aaron Jacob Jones
Aaron is a mostly self-taught artist, watercolour painting from life is Aaron’s main passion. Dedicated to capturing the moment and movement, Aaron approaches everything from figures to landscapes with a fresh, painterly eye and lashings of ink. Never one to confine himself to a studio or spend hours fussing over a painting, Aaron has spent his career working towards creating impressive original artwork from life in under 15 minutes.
Aaron’s distinctive paintings can be found in such prestigious galleries as hoarded in piles under his bed because he hates selling things!
Life drawing doesn’t have to be just an exercise – it’s a jumping off point for creativity in its own right. The limitations of timing and angle, the need to get something down without overthinking it… these things are, for me, what make life drawing a lifelong pursuit. My painting style evolved to suit the pressure of fast paced poses, using years of drawing discipline to capture convincing forms with minimal paint and line, in a seemingly effortless way.
Aaron Jacob Jones – Course Tutor
‘I’m still in awe of the energy and ease these drawings came out of. I’ve struggled with drawing faces for eons and Aaron just explained it so well I found my confidence underneath all that south doubt and depreciation. I will repeat this Debbie Millman quote again – “Confidence is the successful repetition of any endeavour.”
Vanessa Lee
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