Our classes
We offer a broad range of small group classes and workshops in a relaxed environment, making use of our beautiful outdoor areas. If you would like to arrange a private, small group class booking, please get in touch. We welcome course or workshop suggestions, including invitations to bring our studio to your community. If there’s anything you’d love to explore in your artistic expression but don’t know where to start, ask and we may be able to teach it.
To find out about our mobile adventures, including workshops being held in country South Australia, or overseas please see our Art Travel tab.
Life Drawing
Our small, friendly and relaxed life drawing sessions and courses are suitable for artists at all experience levels. If you would like more information or to book a private group session, please contact us.
We hold monthly full-day, mentored and untutored sessions on second Saturdays, as well as occasional introductory courses, depending on demand.
We provide easels, backboards, personal art tables and chairs/stools and include the life model fee in the session cost.
Please bring your favourite drawing materials and you are welcome to bring drinks and snacks (we have a fridge for cold drinks).
We usually start with some short warm-up poses, followed by long poses.
Life Drawing Courses
We occasionally offer 3 and 6 week introductory life drawing courses depending on demand. Our small courses are perfect for both novice and experienced artists. Courses include anatomical drawing techniques and the use of different figurative styles. We use adventurous and fun activities to assist you to joyfully extend your artistic expression. Life models are present at all sessions. Please email us to register your interest in participating in our next course.
Life drawing course participants at Cerulean Studio
More than a Muse Project
More than a Muse’ intentionally disrupts the historical master (artist)/ muse (model) power relationship that has persisted within the Western canon of art for centuries. The series offers an alternative approach to the ways in which life models, and the artists who draw or paint them, might navigate the model-artist relationship in contemporary times.
Models direct and choreograph their session/s, including venue set-up, activities/poses and timings. Sessions are based on the models’ life stories, passions, knowledge or expertise beyond life modelling, to be interpreted by the artists. Each session is unique and may involve storytelling, movement, poetry, costume or musical performance. At the end of the series, the models will curate an exhibition of selected works created during, or inspired by, the series at Cerulean Studio.
Life drawing, by Alex, at Cerulean Studio, charcoal and oil pastel on cartridge paper.
Past courses
Six session course
In this small-group, six-session course, you'll have the opportunity to learn expressive oil painting techniques from the experienced artist and tutor, Cristina Metelli. This course will inspire you to capture the beauty of nature on canvas. The course is designed to help to develop skills and confidence in painting plants, flowers, and objects from life using oil paint, with a loose and expressive feel. The course is designed for people with some previous experience in painting with oils.
Dates: 20th and 27th January, 3rd February [one week break] 17th and 24th February and 2nd March 2024
First and second class focus: Getting used to painting from life using a limited colour palette to encourage simplification of form and understanding tonal value.
Third and fourth class focus: Exploring composition choices such as the size, shapes, edges, and elements that will visually establish background and foreground.
Fifth and sixth class focus: Gestural paint application - connecting to your personal response to what you see and expressing this through texture and colour.
Expressive oil painting with Cristina Metelli
Cristina Metelli
Having spent her childhood in Italy, Cristina moved to Australia as a young adult. She is a multi-award winning South Australian artist and gained a First Class Honours Degree from Adelaide's premiere art school, Adelaide Central School of Art in 2018. Cristina has been practising art making for 40 years, and teaching expressive painting for four years.
'Inspired by the diversity and beauty of nature, Cristina Metelli’s work investigates the depth to which human lives are entwined and connected to the natural environment through subjects of belonging, spirit of place and nature’s vulnerability.
Her investigations draw upon her interest in the fields of both natural sciences and psychology, and the way in which people can be positively affected by their interaction with nature. Her abstract paintings mark the space between nature and human perceptions. Each painting depicts a moment in time, a unique experience of the natural landscape through a sensorial and emotional response. With a bold use of colours and paint application techniques, Cristina seeks to evoke in the viewer their own memories and emotions.'
(Cristina Metelli’s website)
Cristina Metelli, Orchids
Alla Prima Short Courses
In Italian, alla prima means ‘at first attempt’, and is a wet on wet painting technique, usually undertaken in oil. The whole painting is completed without allowing it to dry between layers. We offer still life and portraiture courses once or twice per year.
These short courses comprise three evening classes in which you will practise the alla prima technique.
Please register your interest by email.
Dusk in Spring, 2021, by Hamish Fleming, oil, ash and spray paint on plywood panel.
Your tutor Hamish Fleming, is an Adelaide based painter working predominantly in the genre of expressive realism. Fleming’s work centres around the potent and unspoken emotional significance of objects, places and people, exploring his fascination with identity and the connection formed between the individual and their environment.
Golden Age, 2022 by Hamish Fleming, oil, acrylic and aerosol paint on canvas.
King Protea, 2022 by Hamish Fleming ,acrylic and aerosol paint on plywood.
Portraiture
In the portraiture course, you will paint portraits of models in-class, plus one self-portrait using a mirror. You will paint one, complete, small-scale work each class, following the same processes as described for the Still Life course.
Materials list to be discussed before course commencement.
Masonite, easel, palette, mirrors, painting medium and odourless solvent supplied.
Basic oil painting experience assumed.
Alla Prima student works completed in January 2022 short course.
Still Life
This course comprises three evening classes in which you will practise the alla prima technique, painting still life oil compositions from life in-class. You will gain an appreciation of the conceptual depth that can be captured and conveyed through painting ordinary objects with emotional richness. You will paint one, complete, small-scale still life each class.
Class One: Introduction to still life and depicting simple objects in space.
This class will be in black and white, with a very simple still life set-up in which you will practise fundamental techniques in alla prima painting.
Class Two: Colour
In this class you will dive straight into colour. You will learn to mix an array of tones to describe common objects and textures including flowers and petals as well as a transparent glass object.
Class Three: Personal Still Life
You will be invited to bring 1-3 objects of your choice to create something meaningful to your own life experience and identity. In describing your own still life set-up using the alla prima techniques you have learned, you will explore the conceptual richness that can be achieved in still life paintings.
