St Leonards Art School

03/09/2026

Wow! I did not know that dude 👌🏽😎

27/08/2026

28/07/2026

*News* Theresa Caruana is collaborating with The Stag Inn in Hastings Old Town on a series of exhibitions, commencing with her solo show, ‘Premonitions/ All The Ways In Which I Love You’.
The two part exhibition begins inside with a series of eerie paintings of meteors and planetary disruption in the skies above St Leonards. Started just before covid, foretelling impending doom.
Later in August these will be joined by newly produced sculptures in the beautiful terraced gardens of the Inn, exploring the complexity of human love and relationship. ‘Premonitions’ is now on show – watch this space for further details including dates for finnisage event.

22/07/2026

Wonderful example of wet on wet watercolour painting with layers of paint laid down to create change of tone from light in the distance to a darker foreground.

15/07/2026

Our ‘pay as you go’ kids classes will be closed from 31st July till 1st September 2026 but this looks like a wonderful opportunity to have some creative fun during the summer.

https://eequ.org/book/haf-music-play-and-rainbow-cooking-with-hastings-thrives-16137

11/07/2026

Wow! I never knew this about pencils

In the 16th century, a violent storm uprooted an English oak tree to reveal a freak geological anomaly: the only large-scale deposit of solid graphite ever found on Earth.

The deposit was located in Borrowdale, a valley in the Lake District. Locals quickly realized the dark substance left remarkably permanent marks, and its discovery completely transformed the way people wrote.

Before the Borrowdale storm, people wrote and drew with styluses made of literal lead or silver (a technique called silverpoint). These metal tools produced faint lines and required specially treated paper. The newly discovered Borrowdale substance, which locals mistook for a form of lead and dubbed "plumbago" (Latin for lead ore), was soft, smooth, and required no special surface. This mistaken identity is why the core of a pencil is still called "lead" today.

Because the Borrowdale graphite was incredibly pure and solid, it could be sawn directly into sticks. However, pure graphite is brittle and leaves a dark smear on anything it touches. To solve this, English makers began wrapping the raw sticks tightly in sheepskin or winding them with string. As the tip wore down, the user simply unwound a small section of the string to expose more graphite. Later, artisans realized they could protect the fragile core by hollowing out sticks of wood and gluing the graphite inside, creating the familiar wooden pencil.

When other graphite sources were discovered in Europe, they were full of impurities and crumbled easily. It wasn't until 1795, when the English Crown cut off the supply of Borrowdale graphite to France during the Napoleonic Wars, that a French officer named Nicolas-Jacques Conté found a workaround. He developed a method of grinding the inferior, crumbly graphite into a fine powder, mixing it with clay, and firing it in a kiln. This process allowed manufacturers to control the hardness and darkness of the core by altering the clay-to-graphite ratio, establishing the modern grading system from 9H to 9B.

04/06/2026

Doom Not Gloom! Excited for tomorrow's opening of Doom: Reimagined at All Saints church, where Ian Shillito and Ian Shelton aka The Two Ians will be showing their responses to the church’s medieval Doom painting alongside 20 other local artists - including St Leonards Art School students Amber Smith and Andrew Harvais, who will both be exhibiting for the first time.

Pic: Idolatrous - Ian Shillito