WEEKEND WORKSHOP
Watercolour Foundations Intensive
Two days to build your foundations, confidence, and understanding of watercolour.
When: Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 October
Time: 10am–3pm each day
Duration: 2-day intensive
Where: The Hive Art Gallery, 23/5 Coghill Dr, Currumbin
Investment: $280
Class size: Maximum 10 students
All ages and experience levels are welcome
The Watercolour Foundations Intensive is a focused weekend that gives you a practical understanding of watercolour fundamentals in a small, supportive studio environment.
Across two days, we'll work through colour, value, form and technique. Kicking off with the foundations and building your colour palette, before working towards more practical painting techniques.
You'll mix your own colours, create a swatch chart, explore the relationship between water and pigment, build depth through layered washes, work from life and experiment with applied colour theory and negative painting.
Across two focused days, you'll build the foundations needed to confidently continue your watercolour practice, whether you're completely new to the medium or looking to strengthen what you already know.
The intensive is also designed as a pathway into Slow Sundays: Intermediate Watercolour, beginning Sunday 18 October. By completing the Watercolour Foundations Intensive, you'll have worked through the core concepts and techniques covered in the earlier classes, allowing you to join the intermediate group as they continue developing their practice.
What to Expect-
We'll begin with the essentials: understanding your materials, working with a limited cool/warm primary palette, and learning how water and pigment interact. No prior watercolour experience is required.
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Learn how to mix secondary colours from a carefully selected set of warm and cool primaries. You'll create your own swatch chart to use as a practical colour reference throughout the weekend and beyond.
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Discover how much depth can be created from a single colour by changing your water-to-paint ratio. We'll build a series of light washes before applying our understanding of value to painting simple forms from life.
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Sunday moves beyond the foundations into applied colour theory and negative painting. You'll experiment with techniques that encourage you to think differently about colour, shape, and the spaces around your subject.
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This isn't about producing a perfect painting by the end of the weekend. It's about understanding the medium well enough to work with it confidently. You'll leave with practical tools, a body of experiments, and a foundation you can continue building on.
Saturday Theory Workshop
Foundations: Colour, Value & Form
Arrival
Foundations & Colour
Lunch Break at Bread Social
Value & Form
Wrap Up
9:45am
10:00am
12:00pm
1:00pm
3:00pm
Sunday Practical Workshop:
Colour Theory & Negative Painting
9:45am
10:00am
12:00pm
1:00pm
3:00pm
Arrival
Colour Theory in Still Life
Lunch Break at Bread Social
Negative Painting Technique
Wrap Up
meet your instructorLucy Tasker
Lucy is a multidisciplinary creative working across art, illustration and design, and the founder of Peachy Studio.
Self-taught and working with watercolour for over 10 years, Lucy's own practice spans plein air painting, still life, photographic reference, character creation and world building. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and commissioned for commercial projects.
Lucy’s approach to teaching is calm, encouraging and grounded in experimentation. Rather than chasing perfection, she believes in learning to understand the medium, work within its parameters, and let yourself explore.
Her classes are designed to build both technical understanding and creative confidence, giving you the foundations, guidance and space to develop a watercolour practice that feels like your own.
Find her on socials:
@peachy_studios
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONSStill have questions? Take a look at the FAQ or reach out anytime.
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No. The intensive is designed to begin with the foundations, making it suitable for complete beginners as well as anyone who has experimented with watercolour and would like to strengthen their understanding.
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Absolutely. While we'll begin with foundational concepts, the course is designed to deepen your understanding of colour, value, water-to-paint ratios, form and technique. It can be a useful reset if you've painted before but don't yet feel confident with the fundamentals.
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Negative painting is a technique where you build your subject by painting the space around it, rather than painting the subject itself. We'll explore this on Sunday as a way of thinking differently about shape, layers and composition.
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No. All essential materials are provided, including watercolour paints, paper, brushes and the other materials you'll need throughout the weekend.
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Yes. The class is limited to a maximum of 10 students, allowing plenty of opportunity for individual guidance, questions and feedback throughout the weekend.
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The course includes a one-hour lunch break from 12–1pm each day. Lunch itself isn't included, but you're welcome to bring your own or make your own arrangements nearby.
Anyone who would like to continue the conversation is also invited to join us at Bread Social, just a few minutes walk from The Hive.
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Yes. The intensive is designed as a complete two-day course, with Sunday's content building on the foundations established on Saturday. For this reason, casual single-day attendance isn't available.
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You'll take home your colour swatch chart, exercises, studies and paintings created throughout the weekend. The aim is to buildi a body of experiments that you can refer back to as you continue your watercolour practice.
A folder is recommended to keep your work safe. -
The intensive brings together the foundational concepts explored across the current Slow Sundays course and introduces the next stage of techniques in a concentrated two-day format.
It has been designed specifically for people who would like to work through those foundations over one weekend.
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Yes. The Foundations Intensive covers the prerequisite content from the current Slow Sundays course, so completing the intensive will give you the foundations needed to join the existing Intermediate Slow Sundays group from Sunday 18 October.
You don't need to continue into the intermediate course, though; the intensive is also designed to stand alone as a complete introduction to the foundations of watercolour.
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Because the course is structured progressively across two days, we recommend attending both sessions. Unfortunately, this means, we won’t be able to offer a refund if one of the days is missed.
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If the course is cancelled by The Hive Art Gallery, students will receive a full refund.