Light, water, air: Watercolour landscape painting course
- Thursday, 16 July 2026
- Friday, 17 July 2026
Enrol
| Standard: | £360 |
| Concessions: | £324 |
Please book a ticket to attend this course which will take place in the Roden Centre for Creative Learning.
Suitable for participants aged 18 or over.
Tickets include entry to the National Gallery. Please arrive in good time to access the building and find the event.
Bookings close 10 minutes before the event begins.
Concessions are for full-time students, jobseekers, and disabled adults.
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About
Join artist Jo Lewis for this two-day intensive watercolour summer school exploring the joy of working outside in nature.
Watercolour has long been the ideal medium for working outside – exceptional results are achievable with the most simple and portable of materials; water, colour and paper. Inspired by artists in the National Gallery such as Turner, Constable, Claude and Cezanne, we’ll explore techniques and approaches particularly suited to outdoor painting, from quick, spontaneous studies to more sustained and developed works.
Inside the Clore Art Studio at the Gallery, and outside in St James’s Park* (about a 10-minute walk from the Gallery), you’ll experiment with working at different speeds and scales, responding to changing light, weather and atmosphere. A series of guided exercises will focus on building a practical yet expressive colour palette for outdoor work, balancing restraint with richness. You’ll create small, portable studies in the traditional watercolour sketch style, to larger pieces that explore the physicality of flowing water, gesture and colour. As your own visual language develops, we’ll consider many of the enduring questions that have preoccupied watercolour painters for centuries.
Whether you are new to painting outdoors (en plein air) or returning to it with fresh eyes, this course encourages confidence, experimentation and a renewed relationship with watercolour.
*Please dress appropriately for working outside. In the event of poor weather, the daily structure will adapt to make the most of opportunities to work outdoors.
This summer school is suitable for all levels. All materials are provided, and your work is yours to take home. Handouts with extra resources will be provided in advance of the sessions.
Suitable for participants aged 18 or over.
The first day will start with a series of simple exercises designed to acquaint ourselves with watercolour and the many different ways we can use it outside. Using not only brushes we will experiment with fluidity and mark to consider our practical repertoire of approaches when working outside. We will briefly draw in the Gallery gaining inspiration from artists for whom outdoor watercolour painting was an important part of their practice. Back in the studio we will prepare our materials and papers for the afternoon ahead.
After lunch, we will walk together to the park and spend the rest of the afternoon responding to its beautiful light, water, trees, shadows and sky.
Today we will begin by focussing on colour. Starting with simple yet profound colour mixing exercises we will consider what makes a successful palette when working outside. Again, time will be spent in the Gallery drawing in a water-soluble medium to inform and inspire our individual work. We will prepare for an afternoon in the park focussed on making a body of work that reflects our own personal ideas and responses to place.
Your tutor
Jo Lewis is a London-based artist. She works primarily with ink and watercolour on paper and her work explores aspects of movement and stasis, and the fragility of the moment of interaction between pigment and paper. Recent series have been based around bodies of water and landscapes in Guangxi, the Rhone river and the river Thames. Jo’s work has been featured in exhibitions in both the UK and internationally. She has had recent solo shows in London, Paris and Lyon. She is currently preparing for a residency in Iceland this summer. Recent group shows include at Vivienne Roberts Projects in London, in Lyon, The Trinity Buoy Wharf 2024 Drawing Prize,and Galerie Papiers d’Art, Paris. Jo was invited to present her work at the Drawing Research Network Conference: ‘Temporal Drawing ’1, 2023 and at the Radical Drawing Symposium held by the University of Leeds Beckett in 2024.Her work has been commissioned and collected by individuals and institutions globally including Hermès, Royal College of Music, 22 Bishopsgate, Commonwealth Bank of Australis, Ashtead Hospital, Paris Baguette, Seoul. and the OWO Raffles Hotel, London.