Lack of drawing ability is one of the biggest obstacles to sketching from life or creating a good painting. But it’s a skill you can learn. Spend a day learning techniques that will boost your confidence and your powers of observation so that you start seeing the world with an artist’s eye. Join Claudia Myatt for a one day workshop full of drawing techniques which will dispel the myth that drawing is something you’re born with or not.  Claudia is convinced that the language of line, like writing, belongs to us all – it’s just that we’ve never been taught how.  Most of the day will be spent in the studio but weather permitting we will also spend time sketching on the veranda or quayside. Techniques we’ll cover include: – Connecting hand and eye – how to see everything as interconnecting shapes – Switching off your 3D vision and getting past the interfering brain – Measured drawing, getting proportions right – How to cheat at perspective and a good look at the horizon – Sketching for fun – working fast, working slow – The importance of making mistakes These workshops take place in Art Safari’s riverside studio, where there is a wealth of material to be seen from the balcony and around the quayside.  To help you prepare we provide a short list of suggested art materials to bring with you.  A light lunch and refreshments are provided. Cost:  £70, including lunch and refreshments Must be pre-booked on 01394 382235 or info@artsafari.co.uk (You may also like to join Claudia on Saturday 6 April for her ‘Watercolour Basics’ workshop or on Sunday 7 April for Sketching Life on the Deben – call us for details on 01394 382235)

Watercolours are a delight to use and incredibly versatile, but it’s easy to get discouraged when you first try them as they have a reputation for being difficult. All you need is a bit of help and encouragement! Join Claudia Myatt for a one day workshop full of techniques aimed at beginners as well as those who’ve had a bit of experience with watercolours but feel a bit stuck and uninspired. Subjects we’ll cover include: – Trying out different materials – the importance of a good choice of paper.  – Basic watercolour techniques – how to get colours to flow, when to work wet and when to work dry. – Colour mixing – how to stop your palette turning to sludge – From bold and loose to gentle and delicate – finding your style – Line and wash – Sketching and painting – how to choose and approach a subject These workshops take place in Art Safari’s riverside studio, where there is a wealth of material to be seen from the balcony and around the quayside.  To help you prepare we provide a short list of suggested art materials to bring with you.  A light lunch and refreshments are provided.

Cost:  £70, including lunch and refreshments

Must be pre-booked on 01394 382235 or info@artsafari.co.uk (You may also like to join Claudia on Sunday 7 April for her ‘Drawing Life on the Deben – call us for details on 01394 382235)

Following the local hit film ‘Life on the Deben’ Claudia Myatt takes you to the reaches of the River Deben to sketch and paint in the springtime.  Spend a day with Claudia in a mix of studio and field work to enhance your own creativity.  

On the busy quayside outside the Art Safari studio there is a wealth of subjects including the iconic tide mill and boats of all shapes and sizes. A short walk takes us to quiet creeks with wading birds, salt marshes and the challenge of painting the constantly changing tide.

Claudia’s helpful tips and enthusiastic encouragement will help you observe the colours and shapes of the landscapes and give you every confidence to tackle the enchanting Suffolk landscapes – both the interesting details you may see as well as the full simplified landscapes.  And as a maritime artist herself, Claudia will also tackle ways of settling boats on to water.  Art Safari will provide you with wonderful lunches – beware, Claudia might make you draw it before you tuck in…

Workshop cost: £70 including lunch and refreshments.

This fun three-day course is designed for people wanting to use Photoshop to enhance their own artwork or creative photography.  

Wildlife and landscape artist Shelly Perkins uses this versatile computer programme to create her own beautiful digital artworks, combining traditional line drawings and paintings with digital techniques creating multi-layered collages.

She will show you how to use the powerful tools in Photoshop to edit artwork of any type by adding texture, colour, removing blemishes, combining elements… the possibilities are endless, but just like any form of art you must still use imagination and creative skills to get the results you want!

The workshop is purposefully set out in bite sized steps and tasks from the absolute basics through to the more complex elements of the programme to consolidate understanding of the diverse tools.  Some of the key skills you will learn are how to: create layers, work with photographs and turn photos into art, make patterns using shapes, and how to stitch work together to piece together different elements of a same image.

Download the programme and bring a laptop with you (we’ll send you a link to the software beforehand).

Shelly will give demos as well as one-to-one tuition as you work up your own images. There will be time for group discussions and time to show the progress of our own work.

At the end of each day there is the option to gather in a local restaurant or pub for a convivial Art Safari evening (dinner not included).

£285 for all three days, including lunches & refreshments

Places must be pre-booked on 01394 382235 or info@artsafari.co.uk

A new Art Safari itinerary with artist James Willis for 2019, painting medieval hilltop towns and the rolling countryside of Tuscany over Easter, before transferring to magical Venice.

We fly to Florence Airport and stay at our pretty Villa in the Tuscan countryside near Cortona for seven nights.  In April the Tuscan hillsides are gloriously green, peppered with wildflowers and swathes of yellow and mustard broom.  

Cortona is perched high on the hillside of Mount Egidio, surrounded by olive groves and age-old cypresses, it’s a walled town and dates back to Etruscan times.  We make painting excursions in our mini-bus to nearby towns and villages in the Tuscan hills, painting landscapes, Renaissance inspired building, Monasteries, ancient Churches and Abbeys.   

On 24 April we drive to Venice.  We are staying at a hotel in a 14th-century Palazzo on the Grand Canal for five nights, a short distance from Rialto Bridge.  In Venice we will walk and take vaporettos to our painting locations, capturing reflections of Venetian life in our sketchbooks. Bellissimo!

Tour cost

Small single rooms from £3576 excl. flights

Large single rooms from £3938 excl. flights 

Call 01394 382235 to book your place.

Follow in the footsteps of Vincent Van Gogh…

Join urban sketcher and artist tutor Vincent Desplanche in the South of France, sketching and painting in the beautiful light of Provence.

The lagoons and marshes of the wild flat Camargue are invitingly on our doorstep.  Here we may paint the flamingos of Western Europe’s largest river delta and see the Grand Rhône and Petit Rhône flow into sparkling Mediterranean Sea.  The Camargue’s vast plain is comprised of large salt lagoons or étangs, cut off from the sea by sandbars and encircled by reed-covered marshes.  White horses roam here, flamingos feed in the lagoons and herds of majestic black bulls graze on salty coastal meadows.

We will also spend time painting and sketching in the Roman city of Arles, as well as the charming village of Saint-Remy-de-Provence, with its narrow cobblestone streets, colourful shutters, shaded squares and fountains. 

Our base for this painting holiday is a converted 19^th century farmhouse close to Arles.  We hope the auberge’s shady terrace and swimming pool will be ideal for relaxing in the warm evenings after fulfilling days of sketching and painting…

Tour cost: from £1825 per person sharing (excl. flights)

Single room supplement: £300

Call 01394 382235 to book your place.

Spring is such a good time to paint outdoors!  The skies are often so powerful and the light so dramatic and bright on vibrant spring colours. 

We are delighted to have Julia Cassels here in Woodbridge to lead this short Suffolk art break with demonstrations, exercises and one-to-one tuition time.  Plan to arrive on Monday evening, and paint until Friday lunchtime.

Out and about, sketching and painting en plein air, venturing to parts of Suffolk that have enchanted artists, poets and authors over the centuries, river estuaries, isolated churches, and the serene gardens and deer park of Helmingham Hall.   

We will have some wet weather options at our locations just in case!

Your sketchbooks will fill with happy images of Suffolk in late spring. 

The Art Safari Studio is on the quayside in the Market Town of Woodbridge, Suffolk, with fabulous views of the Deben Estuary from the elevated deck.  The iconic Tide Mill is just a few steps away and the mysterious Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo is just across the river.

Enjoy the company of your fellow artists with fulfilling days of artistic exploration and convivial evenings.

Workshop Cost: £375 per person for tuition and one lunch and refreshments at the Studio, and entry to Helmingham Hall Gardens.

Join artist Mary-Anne Bartlett to whirl around the galleries of Vienna to sketch the city and to see many masterpieces of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  From the Secession to the Albertina, from the Opera to St Stefan’s Dom, from the wonderful Museum’s Quarter to the gardens and galleries of Schoenbrun and the Belvedere, this is a grand city full of character, as well as “Kaffee und Kuchen”. Vienna lives and breaths art and vitality.  It’s an exciting place to sit in a cafe and start drawing – buildings, people and activity.  Decorative architecture from  Baroque to Jugendstil by fits comfortably next to bright modern slabs of colour with no ornamentation. 

The Austrian way is to embrace new style and design – in art, fashion, food and design.  The city’s streets, galleries, bars and parks are full of people enjoying the spring.  We have time to explore this delightful city with our sketchbooks, taking in exhibitions as well as some of Vienna’s most treasured attractions.  Klimt and the Secessionists, Schiele and contemporary art will all feature in our gallery visits. One of the highlights of the week is a visit to sketch the Lipizzaner’s practising at the Spanish Riding School. We stay in a comfortable hotel in the historic centre, walking to nearby painting locations.

Tour cost from £998 per person sharing Single Room Supplement £336

Call 01394 382235 to book your place.

We visit Zambia at a cooler time of year.  Shelly Perkins will be running a full week of painting in South Luangwa National Park, which supports one of the highest concentrations of game anywhere in the world! 

This relaxing residential course is a wonderful opportunity to study wildlife in depth, improve your field sketching techniques and your plein air confidence.  

Our knowledgeable safari guides are passionate about wildlife, experienced with artists and help us to explore and understand the ecology of this unspoilt wilderness.  Our days will be governed by what is happening in the animals lives and by what our guide leads us to each day.  We will spend time in the national park and also work up sketches back at our Safari Lodge on the banks of the great Luangwa River.

We will sketch, paint and photograph impala, giraffe, zebra, baboons, and shy leopards in woodlands of Miombo and Mopane.  Shimmering rivers and sweeping oxbow lagoons, pods of hippos and flocks of water birds will fill the pages our sketchbooks and doubtless fuel months of artwork afterwards…

This Art Safaris is challenging and great fun whatever your level of artistic skill; non-painting partners are also welcome to join.

Tour cost: from £1963 per person sharing excl. flights

Single room supplement: £281

Call 01394 382235 to book your place.

Travel to Orkney to paint mesmerising landscapes, coast and wildlife with Art Safari tutor John Threlfall on Orkney from 2 – 9 June 2019.

There’s a glimmering brilliance to Orkney in June.  It’s joyously decorative as if it’s been storing all its light, energy and colour until now!

John is really looking forward to taking this Art Safari to some of his favourite painting locations.  We will spend our time island hopping, visiting the most amazing bird colonies and walking on glorious beaches, interspersed with stone circles and ancient dwellings….   

Our base is in Kirkwall, in a simple but comfortable hostel right on the harbour.  We will be taking over the whole this 8-room hostel, giving us the freedom to spread out and use all of the space for living and painting. 

Tour Cost from £850 per person sharing

A room of your own (only four available):  single supplement £200

Transport Costs (not included): A share of transport costs will be added based on a sliding scale from £90 per person in a shared 9-seater vehicle if there are 8 people in the group or up to £180 per person if there are only four people in the group. 

Call 01394 382235 to book your place.

Join artists Mary-Anne Bartlett and Mark Boyd for two intensive days of studying animals.  It’s rare to have time to think too hard about the anatomy of an animal when it’s moving around its natural environment so we’ve ingeniously devised a day of anatomical drawing in the Natural History Museum in Tring followed by a day of studying animal movement at Whipsnade Zoo.

On the first day we concentrate on the skeletal structure by studying the exhibits in the Museum from the menagerie collected in Victorian times, along with the beautifully presented static displays.  The skeletons and stuffed creatures make fantastic educational subjects.  Tring is part of the Natural History Museum in London. 

On the second, it’s a day at the zoo to study movement.  Whipsnade, part of ZSL London Zoo, is home to many large mammals as well as birds and amphibians, all of which will enliven our drawing sessions by moving out of position frequently.

Cost £155 for two days (excluding entrance tickets)

Call 01394 382235 to book your place.

Join artist and explorer Mary-Anne Bartlett on this new and very exciting Art Safari to Yunnan Province, China.  This 15-night painting holiday starts in Kunming, ‘City of Eternal Spring’ and winds through village and towns on the Ancient Tea Horse Road to the mountain paradise of Shangri-la.  Yunnan is both breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly culturally diverse, and every part of this journey is a feast for the painter’s eye.  Your sketchbooks will be filled with images of snow-capped mountains and wildflower meadows, richly decorated temples and quaint courtyards, many styles of traditional costumes and scenes from traditional rural life. 

This is an unspoilt and quieter part of China, far removed from the bustle of its modern cities. Accompanied by our local English-speaking guide we will learn about the many ethnic minority cultures – including Bai, Dai, Naxi and Tibetan each with their own distinct language, traditional dress, food, traditions and architectural styles, making this a real voyage of discovery! 

Along the way there will also be plenty of opportunities to sample some of the many local delicacies such as ‘crossing the bridge noodles’, ‘Yunnan eight bowl’ or Ba Da Wan served on special occasions,  and Yak butter tea! China – 12-27 June 2019 – detailed itinerary

Tour cost: from £4885 per person sharing excl. international flights Single room supplement: £1400 Call 01394 382235 to book your place.  

Located 28 miles from the Cornish coast, the Scilly Isles are classified as an area of outstanding natural beauty with crystal clear water and white sandy beaches, secluded rocky coves and colourful sub-tropical gardens.  Tutor Claudia Myatt knows and loves this stunning archipelago having sailed and painted there many times.  We are based on St Mary’s, in the centre of the island at Longstone Lodge surrounded by lovely countryside.  With our sketchbooks, watercolours, pens and pencils we will walk and take excursions by boat to Tresco, St Martin’s and other islands and rocky islets gathering inspiration for paintings. When you are not sketching and exploring there will be time to savour delicious fresh food, watch the sunset and gaze at the stars. This is a perfect tour for those who like to combine painting and walking.

Tour cost: from £1137 per person sharing. Single room supplement: £350

Please call 01394 382235 to book your place.