Chalk Kent

Christmas Party – December 2025 – Wednesday

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Our Christmas Party was an enjoyable evening with members, partners and family members coming along in Christmassy jumpers, hats and glasses. For those too poorly to join us, we hope you get better very soon.

With a tasty selection of sweet and savoury food, Christmas music, quizzes and Pass the Parcel we all had a fun evening together. A special mention to Cynthia whose ham and cheese flower wraps and Nutella flowers were much admired!

Thank you to Angela, Myrna, Neil, Ron and Tracy for contributing time and effort for Pass the Parcel, the music and the quizzes. And thank you to everyone who helped set up and tidy everything away.

Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and hope to see you on Wednesday 14th January 7-9pm for our first session of 2026.

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.

Jane Austen – November 2025 – Wednesday

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Ten members came along to Wednesday evening’s session and enjoyed painting together and having a chat over biscuits and a cuppa.

The suggested subject was Jane Austen as this year is the 250th anniversary of her birth. Unfortunately it was not a popular subject with only one member having a go. The picture took a long time to draw out so only a little watercolour paint was added at the session and it will be finished at home.

Other artists drew and painting to their own subjects with many themes started or continued in watercolours, acrylics and coloured pencils.

Our next meeting is on Friday 21st November 7-9pm when we hang all the paintings for our Open Day on Saturday 22nd November. It’s a normal timed session from 10am to 3pm, with visitors from 10.30am to 2.30pm.

Please email Steve asap with details of all your paintings! Thank you :o)

November and December 2025

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Please read everything as there’s lots of info!

Here are the dates of our next meetings-

Wednesday 12th November – 7-9pm – Jane Austen or finish paintings

Friday 21st November – 7-9pm – hanging evening

Saturday 22nd November – 10am-3pm – Open Day  (Visitors from 10.30am to 2.30pm)

Wednesday 10th December –  7-9pm – Christmas Party.

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When the poster for Open Day is emailed to everyone please print some out or screenshot it and pass the info to friends and family and pop a poster in your local library and shops. If you’re a member of a sports group, U3A, WI etc, please send the poster to your secretary and ask them to forward it to all members. Passing on details of the Open Day this way gets the day heard about. Local Facebook and Instagram groups will also be contacted.

On Open Day you don’t have to hang your paintings on the walls or in the browsers if you’d prefer not to, it’s not compulsory. We call it Open Day, not an exhibition, to open the hall for a day so visitors can see what we paint at our sessions. It’s also a good way of showing the group to people looking for a local art group to join. If you have interested friends or family please ask them along. 

If you aren’t showing your paintings please come along and enjoy a day of painting. 

Wednesday 12th – 7-9pm –   Jane Austen or finish paintings

Jane Austen was born 250 years ago and her books are classics today, with films and tv series popular to new generations. There’s only one pencil portrait of Jane Austen and one watercolour of her wearing a dress but facing away, both by her sister Cassandra.

Draw or paint a lady wearing Georgian or Regency clothes, in a place that Jane lived. Or take a scene from a book or film and paint the characters. Use any media or mixed media.

Wiki info… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen

The Jane Austen Society… https://janeaustensociety.org.uk

About where she lived… https://janeaustens.house/jane-austen/jane-austen-a-life/

Portraits… https://jasna.org/austen/more-on-jane-austens-life/portraits/

Or if you have any paintings to complete before Open Day, finish them tonight.

Friday 21st November – 7-9pm    – Hanging Evening

Please email Steve ASAP with how many framed paintings you will be hanging for our Open Day, along with their names and prices or NFS (Not For Sale). 

Framed paintings – up to 6 and not too big to hang from the hooks. No clip frames as they easily break. Use D rings and cord across the back with a label hanging down below the frame or on the front with your name, name of the picture, medium and the price or NFS. 

Mounted pictures – any number for the browsers but they must be for sale, all labelled front or back. There won’t be a list of mounted work, so keep a record yourself of which ones you bring along. 

If you need insurance for your artwork then please make sure it’s in place for today and tomorrow.

From 7pm drop off your paintings or stay and help hang them all up. Please bring scissors to cut the hanging cord.

If you can’t come on hanging evening then please arrange for someone else to bring your artwork. 

Saturday 22nd November – 10am-3pm –   Open Day

*****Visitors welcome 10.30am to 2.30pm*****

We open our doors and invite friends, family and Chalk locals to come and see what we paint. Please don’t be upset if you don’t sell anything. It’s lovely to welcome people into the hall to talk about art and painting. 

There’s no set subject, just bring along something to paint during the day. 

So no one gets stuck in the kitchen for hours please take your turn making teas and coffees for visitors, even if you don’t know them, and also wash and dry up the cups and saucers. Please wash up the teaspoons too as they don’t wash themselves ;o)

Membership – If any visitors want information about becoming a member please take them to Steve who can tell them about joining the group. 

Sales – If anyone is interested in buying a framed or mounted picture please take them to Tracy for payment. We don’t have a card reader for debit or credit cards, it’s cash only.

Wednesday 10th December –  7-9pm –    Christmas Party

Come along in your Christmas jumpers, sparkly outfits or fancy festive hats and enjoy some quizzes and Pass the Parcel. Bring along a plate of food to share, savoury or sweet, and pop it on the side tables. Also bring your own plates, cups and drinks. 

If your food is for vegans or coeliacs please label everything clearly and place on the separate table.

Your partner is welcome to come along too. Please email Tracy asap if you’ll be coming so we know numbers for Pass the Parcel and the quizzes. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available as usual.

Johannes Vermeer – October 2025 – Saturday

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Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived over 350 years ago and his beautiful paintings of people and places are still popular today. Sixteen members met on Saturday and the suggested subject was to paint in the style of Vermeer or to bring your own style to any of his paintings, particularly the Girl with a Pearl Earring from 1665.

Members rose to the challenge with gusto and all the paintings showed imagination of Girl with a Pearl Earring, with bright colours, a ruby earring instead of a pearl, as an elderly lady, as Claudia Winkleman, in Zentangle patterns, with glasses and other interpretations. Special mention to Cynthia who painted her little dog, Mollie, as Vermeer’s Lacemaker, and Mary who painted her granddaughter standing by a window, lit from the side, like so many people in Vermeer’s paintings. Some paintings are finished and others are works in progress to be finished at home.

Two watercolour paintings from the last session about trains have been finished.

Some members painted their own subjects. Sandra’s portrait of her sister’s dog is amazing and Doreen’s pencil portraits are beautifully detailed.

Super work everyone!

Next newsletter is on 1st November with details of hanging evening on Friday 21st November and our annual Open Day on Saturday 22nd November. Please note that there are 5 Saturdays in November but we meet on the fourth one.

Still Life – September 2025 – Saturday

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It was great that the session was well attended with 19 members coming along for a still life session, with plenty of time for a natter over a cuppa and a biscuit. Objects were set up by the artists in front of them, drawings were made and then painted with watercolours and acrylics or further details drawn.

Many of the photos include the still life objects and show the pictures as works in progress. A couple of paintings were done at home of the previous still life theme of fruit and vegetables.

Other artists chose their own subjects.

Super work, everyone, it was an enjoyable day of creativity with good company too!

The next session is on Wednesday 8th October from 7-9pm.

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.

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.