art group

Open Day – Saturday 22nd November 2025

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Our annual Open Day had 23 artists painting at the hall, 22 members and a young friend of one member being creative with us to see if she’d like to join the group. We welcomed about 40 friends, family, local residents and people who had seen the Open Day advertised on social media.

We all enjoyed the day painting and chatting to visitors and several commented that it’s really interesting to see artists at work whilst they enjoyed walking around the exhibition.

Words from visitors in the comments book included…

“Amazing artwork!” “Really enjoyed the exhibition!” “Wonderful work – so many good artists with different styles.” “Brilliant work, very good standard.” “Well done all of you.”

84 framed paintings were on the walls with 4 sold, one each by Sandra and Tracy and two by Patrick. Well done, Patrick, that’s brilliant!

There were browsers with 70 mounted pictures, with 2 sold by Peta and Angela and Dot sold 3 of her greetings cards. Two enquiries about membership were made. The 4 hours seemed to go past very quickly.

Thank you to everyone who helped with hanging on Friday evening and a HUGE thank you to all members who kept tea, coffee and biscuits constantly supplied to visitors on the day. Also for washing up and drying so many cups, saucers and teaspoons. We couldn’t run the day without your help and enthusiasm!

Here are all the paintings from Friday evening’s hanging session. (Apologies for the yellow cast on the photos, that’s the dull lighting at the hall, but the photos have been brightened.)

Our last session of 2025 will be the Christmas Party on Wednesday 10th December from 7-9pm.

Please email Tracy asap if you’d like to come to the party.

Paint on a postcard – August 2025 – Wednesday

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Last Wednesday fifteen members attended the session on a very warm evening. Most painted on the black and white and lightly tinted postcards, bought from eBay for a few pounds. They were mostly views from the West Country, Kent, the Lake District and Scotland, with a few other places too.

Acrylic paint applied thickly and thinly worked really well to add the colour, as did thick watercolour paint, ink, coloured pencils and felt tip pens. Some of the postcards had been used and the earliest message and stamp dated back to 1908!

Some artists drew and painted to their own theme.

Well done everyone, the painting on a postcard challenge was well received and very enjoyable.

Our next session is on Saturday 23rd August in the private gardens behind Rochester Cathedral. Please email Tracy asap if you can come or not.

“Summer”- Annual Competition – June 2025 – Saturday

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Twenty members met on Saturday to start or continue drawing and painting for our annual competition, which is a friendly affair, not fiercely contended. There was lots of chat throughout the day and we enjoyed painting with like-minded folk.

At the end of the session nineteen pictures were entered and after studying all the pictures we voted for our favourite one. After counting there was a clear winner and runner-up, with the rest of the votes evenly spread to other paintings.

These were the entries…

The runner-up was Chris W with her watercolour painting summing up the theme ‘Summer”. Her entry was all about Wimbledon with the winning men’s trophy, tennis rackets, tennis balls, a net and strawberries and cream. Well done Chris, what a fabulous picture!

The winner was Steve with his water mixable oil painting giving summer vibes of drinking wine on the beach in the sun with the blue sea lapping nearby. Congratulations on winning, Steve, we loved your painting!

Other artists drew their own pictures, brought in paintings from previous years with a summer theme or didn’t enter the competition.

Well done everyone, you rose to the challenge with your amazing paintings!

The next newsletter will be published on 1st July, with the next session on Wednesday 9th July from 7-9pm at the hall.

Portraits – The Diversity of Humanity – May 2025 – Saturday

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Twenty members attended the session with the suggested subject being to draw or paint a portrait of a person of a different ethnicity to themselves. It was a busy session with lots of work being produced, along with cuppas and biscuits and natter as usual.

It was pleasing to see that several people used pastels to create their portrait, using techniques learned at the workshop, as well as watercolours, acrylics and inks. Most are finished but some are works in progress.

Cynthia finished her Lynx from the workshop and it’s absolutely beautiful. The lynx’s coat looks real with the highlights the hairs. Well done!

Other members continued with their wild animals from last month or drew and painted to their own theme.

Great work everyone, it was a good, productive session.

Our next session is on Wednesday 11th June from 7-9pm.

Sketch week with Adebanji Alade

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With the focus on portraits this month here’s what five members of the group, Susan, Brenda, Steve, Jane and Tracy, did during Adebanji Alade’s sketch week in March.

Local artist Adebanji lives in Gravesend and is President of the Royal Society of Oil Painters, the resident artist on BBC 1’s The One Show and a published author with his Addictive Sketcher books. He has an online art group sketching and painting and twice a year runs a sketch week open to the public for only £10 for 5 lessons. They’re at 7.30pm onwards but if you can’t watch a lesson live you have until the following Friday to watch and take part.

Once you sign up you’re sent a list of materials but if you have a sketchbook, pencils from 2B to 8B and a rubber, you don’t need any extras. At 7.30pm the session started online with a run through of materials and a chat about that day’s picture. Everyone is emailed the reference photos which have been taken by Adebanji or are free on the Unsplash website. You can print the pictures out or save them to your phone or tablet to use.

Adebanji showed how to grid the reference picture and then reduce the photo to external and internal angles, internal shapes, light lines, dark lines, light tones, middle tones, dark tones, erasing areas then reinstating darks. Whilst the sketches start loose the image suddenly appears and in an hour you are done. You’re encouraged not to fiddle with the sketch but to leave it as it is otherwise you try have a perfect sketch, but they not meant to be perfect. After sketching he encourages questions online from the public and spends another 30 minutes to an hour answering them.

You could join a Facebook page if you wanted to see what other artists created. In the week we drew two portraits, a figure, a landscape and an animal.

We all enjoyed the evenings sketching live or catching up and thought it was fantastic value at only a tenner learning from such an experienced tutor. Adebanji’s enthusiasm is infectious and you really want to do your best. It felt exhausting sketching and learning at the same time but you could pause the live programme then play it again. We all liked learning how to sketch like this and using blending stumps and hatching and will use everything we learned in our own sketches in the future. Follow Adebanji’s advice and don’t sketch for more than one hour, stop after 60 minutes and they will forever be a sketch and not a perfect drawing.

Here are Susan’s sketches that she drew live.

Brenda sketched the old man twice, once live and once on catch up. She also sketched a lily using the same techniques.

Steve did a couple of the sessions live then caught up by replaying the sessions on YouTube the following week.

Jane unfortunately had a problem with intermittent internet connection all week but sketched when she could see the sessions.

Tracy used an iPad for the reference pictures and after finding it difficult to swap between pencils quickly she used nail varnish to put dots on the pencils to see 2B to 8B much easier.

Well done everyone you did so well! Thank you for sharing your sketches to see what we learned during the week.

Adebanji’s next sketch week should be towards the end of the year, so hopefully more members will take the plunge and join in.

Paul Hinks – soft pastel workshop – April 2025 – Saturday

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18 members attended Paul Hinks’ 5 hour soft pastel workshop and 2 members came along to paint their own subject. Soft pastels for some was a totally new medium and a day of learning for all.

Paul talked about pastel paper and different makes of soft pastel sticks and pastel pencils that he has used or uses now. Pipe lagging and paper stumps can be used to blend pastels and an ordinary plastic rubber can lift pastel from the paper. We were shown how to add a grid to a photo on an iPad using an app called ‘CopyIt The Grid Drawing Method’, which costs £9.99 from the Apple App Store, and how useful the greyscale tonal chart is for finding the tonal value of an area of a picture.

Paul had asked which wild animals the members would like to create in pastels and the top three animals requested were an orangutan, lynx and elephant, with a crocodile also suggested as you don’t see many in pictures. Using a large sheet of white Pastelmat paper he divided the sheet in 4 and used each quarter to concentrate on an animal.

With the orangutan Paul showed us how us how to complete the initial drawing and then add colours and shapes to achieve the texture of the hair and flanges. On the lynx we were shown how to achieve likeness of the fluffy ear hairs by using several colours of pastel pencil. The crocodile had scale shapes added and on the elephant we saw how to use dark pastel to create the trunk’s wrinkly shapes. Such a brilliant way to show all 4 animals in one go. Here’s the sheet at the end of the session…

The workshop started in a structured way as we coloured backgrounds and started sketching but soon we worked at different paces as some began adding pastel slowly and others confidently dived in with their pastels. Paul walked around several times to give advice to everyone individually and was a very personable and patient tutor as we could ask him anything and he helped us. Some members brought in their own wild animal reference pictures and he tailored his advice to each person.

Have a look at his accounts on Facebook as ‘Paul Hinks Art’ and Instagram as ‘paulhinksart’ to see his other artwork and commissions as they are amazing. Please give him a follow to see new works as they are posted.

Several photos were taken of members’ work at lunchtime as they left their desks to get another tea or coffee, but not all are shown. These photos show the many different makes of pastels being used and how we were a bit messy!

At the end of the session all the pictures were placed along the ledge at the side of the hall for all to see. The photos are grouped by similar animal, with individual ones at the end. Some are finished and others will be completed at home, so please send your photos to Tracy or Steve when finished. No one did the elephant’s head and full trunk, so will anyone give it a go at home?

Thank you, Paul, for such an informative and enjoyable workshop, we all had a marvellous day learning from you! We hope you will return for another workshop with us.

May’s sessions will be posted on Thursday 1st and the next session at the hall will be on Wednesday May 14th 7-9pm.

Michelangelo – March 2025 – Wednesday

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Fifteen artists attended the session and we enjoyed drawing and painting pictures about Michelangelo and other subjects. Michelangelo was a difficult subject but the pictures produced were well drawn and will be finished at home.

There’s Michelangelo’s portrait, the hands of Adam and God, Eve from the Creation of Adam too and the Cumaean Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Also the chest and head of the sculpture of David in the Accademia Gallery of Florence.

Other members finished or continued their pictures from the previous subjects of Fauvism and Art Nouveau or their own themes.

Lovely work everyone!

Our next session is on Saturday 22nd March from 10am to 3pm. Please note that March has five Saturdays but we meet on the fourth one.

March 2025

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Isn’t the brighter weather better than day after day of dreary greyness? It’s lovely to see the spring flowers appearing in all their colours. Here are the suggestions for March but if you’d prefer to ‘do your own thing’, then please do!

Wednesday 12th – 7-9pm – Michelangelo 1475-1564

Michelangelo was born 550 years in the Republic of Florence and his paintings, frescoes, sculptures and architecture still adorn the places they were built, painted or sculpted, or are in museums throughout the world.

If you like drawing and painting faces and people then choose Michelangelo himself or any of the people in the stories of Genesis, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Apostolic Place in Vatican City, or in The Last Judgment painted on the chapel’s altar wall. The Creation of Adam sees two hands almost touching, so you could study hands and draw them in detail.

Michelangelo’s sculptures include David, Pietà (others were sculpted later in his life), the Bruges Madonna, Moses, Bacchus, Victory, Apollo, and the Slaves.

Many buildings in Rome and Florence were designed by Michelangelo and he was one of the architects involved in the building of St.Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

Wiki entry… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo

Website with lots of info, click on the words on the banner at the top… https://www.michelangelo.org

Michelangelo’s masterpieces in Rome… https://www.througheternity.com/en/blog/art/michelangelo-masterpieces-in-rome.html

Sistine Chapel… https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/storia-cappella-sistina.html#lnav_explore

Ten famous sculptures… https://onlinegallery.art/en/blog/the-10-most-famous-sculptures-of-michelangelo-406/

Saturday 22nd – 10am-3pm – Art Deco

Whilst this subject might sound very similar to last month’s Art Nouveau, it’s actually the next step forward in the history of design. Gone are the sinuous, natural lines and forms of Art Nouveau and in come the geometric lines inspired by speed, modernism, industrial machinery and the bold colours of Fauvism.

After the First World War there were many artists and designers active in France but the world came to see these designs in an exhibition in Paris in 1925 called Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts), shortened to Arts Décoratifs.

Not just paintings, but sculptures, buildings (think of many of the skyscrapers in New York of Art Deco design), fashion, jewellery, home design etc. Well known artists and designers include Tamara de Lempicka, René Lalique, Le Corbusier and Georges Lepape. The costume designs of Romain de Tirtoff, who you will know by his shortened name of Erté (from his initials RT) has designs on the front of thousands of greetings cards and calendars in shops today. Clarice Cliff the ceramics designer used Art Deco designers in her work and we had a session on her in 2022… https://chalkartgroup.uk/2022/09/16/clarice-cliff-september-2022-wednesday/

Art Deco is very broad subject, so decide if you’d like to draw or paint people, buildings, objects, jewellery or one or two of each.

Wiki entry… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco

The 1925 exhibition Wiki entry… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Exhibition_of_Modern_Decorative_and_Industrial_Arts

10 Art Deco buildings… https://www.arch2o.com/10-most-fascinating-art-deco-buildings/#google_vignette

10 Art Deco artists… https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/art-deco-artists

Clarice Cliff… https://claricecliff.com/home

(Please note the session finishes at 3pm and we have another 15 minutes afterwards to put away our tables and chairs.)

Art Nouveau – February 2025 – Saturday

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We had very busy session on Saturday with 26 artists attending including 5 new members. Welcome to Vikki, Chris T, Julia, Sandra and Nick. We hope you liked drawing and painting with us and we enjoyed meeting you!

The suggested subject was Art Nouveau and it proved to be a popular theme with many pictures drawn and painted during the day in pencils, pastels, acrylics and watercolours. Sinuous, natural shapes adorn the pictures. Two paintings had silver and gold metallic watercolour paint on them so they’ve also been photographed at an angle to show off the shiny paint. Some artworks are finished, some are works in progress.

Some artists drew and painted to their own subjects in different mediums.

Well done everyone for your enthusiasm on Saturday, it was fantastic to have such an interesting and creative session!

Next month’s subjects will be posted on Saturday 1st March and the next session will be on Wednesday 12th March from 7-9pm.