Paintbox Threads, Watercolour Rescue, Plant Printing, Painted Lace

Our newsletter for 21st November 2019

Hello and welcome to our newsletter. It’s been a busy week here at DesignMatters HQ! What with trips to London and the arrival of our new thread collection for Madeira, we have lots to tell you about so please do read on for all the latest…

To help celebrate their 100th birthday, we’ve worked with Madeira Threads to bring you a brand new selection box of all our favourite threads. The collection is called Paintbox and we hope that you’ll find it a tempting palette of colour. We love a mix and match approach to our thread choices and to encourage you to try the same, we’ve picked rayons, cottons and metallic threads so there’s a lovely mix to experiment with and use in combination.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be showing you some ideas for using the threads so get your hands on your set early and take advantage of our special introductory price of £24.99 which makes them excellent value. You can order online in our store and use your Classroom Credits if you want to!

If you pre-ordered your thread collection then it’s been packed up today and is on its way to you as we speak. We hope you’ll love the threads as much as we do and can’t wait to see what you make with them.

New on DesignMatters this week…

Video Workshop – Watercolour Rescue

Have you ever started a watercolour painting, but then it didn’t turn out quite as you hoped? Don’t worry! We find that happens all the time, but there are lots of things you can try to rescue your work. In this workshop Linda will guide you through some of the practical solutions she has for fixing those paintings that don’t quite work out first time.

Ways to watch:

If you have a DesignMatters TV Membership you’ll find this workshop is automatically available to you, just click on the link above.
If you don’t have a Membership, you can purchase this workshop as a one-off for £1.50. You might like to use Classroom Credits to do this. As you know we are gradually phasing memberships out and a couple of months ago we introduced the Classroom Credit option. Many thanks to those of you who have already added credit to your accounts – we hope you find redeeming them against any of the new videos or any title in the Classrooms is really straightforward. And don’t forget, any purchased videos stay in your account for unlimited viewing!

Don’t Miss…

Plant Printing

As we approach the end of the year and look back, one of our most popular workshop series by far was Plant Printing.
In this collection of three workshops we showed you:
  • how to work directly with the beauty of nature to print from leaves and flowers onto paper. This intriguing and serendipitous technique will create beautiful papers that are perfect for collage and mixed media work, binding to make a book and as the basis for drawing.
  • how to make concertina books to bind your loose papers. These books are perfect for binding your plant prints, monoprints, indeed any work that you’ve done on loose sheets that needs a home! Discover this simple method of bookbinding that has endless creative opportunities.
  • Take a close look at Linda’s plant printed pages and learn how you can use coloured pencils, pen and watercolour to enhance and develop your prints on paper. See how with a little additional tone and colour you can enhance contrast and detail to really make the most of those prints and importantly, add a personal direction to your work.

All of these three workshops are available for just £4.50 with instant, unlimited access. Just click on the button below to find out more.

Right: Take a look at a flip through of one of Linda’s plant printed sketchbooks.

Painted Lace

Finally, I’ve been in London this week enjoying some of the art to be found there. I just love Tudor portraits, especially for the way that the clothing is painted. Just look at this fabulous example of costume in this portrait of Queen Elizabeth I.

 

I’ve written a blog post with lots more photos which you can find here, and it’s also published in the Painting Classroom for your future reference too.

 

Thank you for reading our news this week. We will be back next week with more! In the meantime please follow along with us via social media (the links are below) and if you have any questions about anything please feel free to email.
Love Laura
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