ColourWheel Art Class Chester

Here's another piece that's just come in, from our Jill in the evening class, who would drive from Chirk to Chester (in the heat and in the snow!) every week after work for her "me time".

She's always quietly working away and her style is usually an understated elegance, just like her version of African lady here: graceful and strong.

For the final week of our summer portraiture series, we're off to a lovely new venue - The Pavillion @ The Wyldewoods - where our students worked with soft pastels to give us these stylish side profiles of African ladies with colourful headscarfs! Loads of fun, especially when our teaching team brought some bold African fabrics into the class for us to have a little play!!

Special thanks to the friendly community at The Wyldewoods for your warm welcome! 💫

This week our students dived into the deep end by attempting a task that even professional and seasoned artists find hard: self portraits.

It's a known fact that self portraits are so hard for artists mainly because of the pre-existing, fixed mental image we have of how our own face "should" look - which often do not hold up in reality, thus preventing us from seeing what is actually presented to our eyes. Not to mention the mixed bag of emotional vulnerability, self-criticism and shifting identity that also come into play.

So this week we find some of our artists dashing out of the door before we could take pictures of their works, while others called their portraits "awful", and some even vowed never to do self portrait again!

But all in all, when we look at it objectively, we must say all our artists have done incredibly well for they have achieved at least 70% likeness in most cases (if not more!) - at least we can tell who is who without looking at the signatures. Most importantly, something that is 'unique' about each individual shone through in all of these portraits.

This is a major win considering they only had a couple of hours to execute the work. To put it into perspective, even Portrait Artist of the Year gives artists all the time they need to work on their self portraits before submission (and at least 4 hours to paint someone else!) so our students are incredibly brave and have done well we must say!! ✨️

It's been a bit of a roller coaster ride this summer for our team here in Chester, but we're glad it's all worked out in the end.

Here we are, back in the game with our spirits high as our students bravely dived into the world of portraiture and got their hands dirty with charcoal. Watch this space for more amazing works from our Summer 2026 Portraiture Series!

For the final week of this term, our afternoon and evening classes experimented in different ways of working with ink, including printing (and stamping) techniques to produce these duck studies.

That's a wrap of our Spring classes, and a little preview of more printing fun to come next term!!

Enjoy the sunshine, and watch this space for our coming summer workshops and short courses 🎨🎨🎨

WOW!!! That pretty much summed up this week's Klimt-inspired portrait collage lesson, as our afternoon and evening classes allowed their imagination to run wild. What great fun we had, and fab results too!! Enjoy every one of these unique, one-of-a-kind posters 😍

This week is all about going with the flow...of where the water or sprinkles of powder might decide to land and take on a life of its own!! It's time to play with Brusho and bleach to create these loose studies of fern.

Well done everyone and especially to all the 'control freaks' amongst us! You've made it through 3 hours with 'minimal control' over your artworks and actually enjoyed it 👏👏👏

This week our afternoon and evening classes worked with acrylics to come up with these adorable and delicate butterfly studies. Love them!! 🦋🎨✨️

This week we welcome back the watercolour flamingoes. Though we normally do not repeat our lessons, this one is back after two years by popular demand! And sure enough, we had loads of fun with, you guess it, pink!!

Finally, after 3 weeks of black & white, it's time to work with oil pastels, which are perfect for adding some vibrant colours to these pretty tulips!! We love every single one of them, well done afternoon and evening class 💯