Summer Short Courses
The Slade summer school short course programme provides a variety of courses for all levels of experience. Many students create an extended programme of study and choose multiple courses to advance their skills and interests.
The Slade summer school short course programme provides a variety of courses for all levels of experience. Many students create an extended programme of study and choose multiple courses to advance their skills and interests.
We are pleased to welcome students back to live studio teaching on the Slade Summer School 2023. The programme this year is centred around Painting and Drawing in our first-floor studios.
The studios will be open from 9am until 5pm daily, with teaching hours from 9.30-4.30 and a lunch break for an hour at 1pm. We offer an accompanying enrichment programme that includes artists talks and lectures and 4 exhibitions, open to all course participants on 3 evenings a week.
New this year is a trio of one-week courses built on ideas about colour drawn from the European tradition. These courses could be taken in succession or singly, or you could attend 2 or 3 in any order. ‘Colour in Practice’ offers introductory practical exercises in colour theory. ‘Eye and Brain’ explores the role of colour in observational painting through practical exercises and lectures, and ‘Colour- Material and Perception’ investigates the way methods and materials interplay with colour theory and practice in painting, in tandem with a personal project. It can be arranged for students on the other Painting courses taking place within the same timeframe to visit selected talks and demonstrations offered on these Colour courses.
The Slade summer school short course programme provides a variety of courses for all levels of experience. Many students create an extended programme of study and choose multiple courses to advance their skills and interests.
If you have any questions regarding the courses, you can email us at sladesummer@ucl.ac.uk or call us on 020 7679 2317.
Please note the enquiry line is open on Mondays and Tuesdays 10am-1pm and on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 4pm-7pm.
We are working on developing and adapting our offer for next year 2024 and welcome your input on this via the questionnaire on Microsoft Forms.
We look forward to welcoming you in July!
The Summer School team
Drawing
Summer School, 2017
10 July - 21 July / 2 weeks
Monday - Friday, 10.00am - 5.00pm
Course leaders: varied
Fee: £800
Level: suitable for various levels of experience
This course will introduce you to the essential first principles of drawing through group and individual tuition and help you develop your own practice and individual vision.
Each day you will explore particular aspects of drawing and experiment with a variety of techniques and materials. These include traditional methods of working such as observation of objects, the human form and light; the use of line, measurement, scale, and proportion; the organisation of pictorial space; materials and surface; investigating transcription and translation of existing art works; contemporary ideas about spontaneity, memory, imagination, abstraction and construction, and recording the creative process. In the second week, you'll be encouraged to explore and nurture ideas through drawing. You will develop your own art practice and personal vision at your own pace. Regular critiques of work will be held, along with discussions of future plans at the end of the course.
Wood Engraving
12 ,13, 14 July (3 days)
Monday - Friday, 10.00am - 5.00pm
Course leader: David Dobson
Fee: £255
Level: suitable for various levels of experience
Wood engraving is a relief printmaking process using the end-grain of the wood. The very fine detail and strong tonal images which can be produced this way means that it was the technique of choice for illustrating books and broadsheets for over 150 years until photographic reproductions became viable. It is now a vibrant art form in its own right.
In this three-day course you will learn the techniques for marking out, engraving and printing on box wood, producing one or two finished pieces. With reference to wood engravings in the UCL Art Museum you will be tutored in the principles of design for wood engraving and use of different tools and printing techniques. You will have sufficient experience to be able to continue the practice following the course.
All tools will be provided during the course, along with a practice block. Further blocks will be available to purchase on the course.
From Drawing to Developing Painting Practice
24 July – 04 August / 2 weeks
Course leader(s): varied
Fee: £800
Level: suitable for various levels of experience
This course acts as a bridge should you wish to extend your experience of drawing and consider how it might be developed into painting, whilst contemplating how these two disciplines cross over and inform one another. During week one you will be exploring some of the formal issues of drawing through observation. Special emphasis is put on looking carefully at tone and mark-making, the translation of tone and line into colour and the role of colour in both painting and drawing. In the second week you will investigate composition and paint handling, as well as strategies to generate and develop personal ideas in painting, using a variety of materials. Your personal development will be encouraged through taught studio sessions, slide talks and regular discussions about ideas and methods.
Experimental Drawing
24 July – 04 August / 2 weeks
Course leaders: Tess McKenzie and Christopher Earley
Fee: £800
Level: varying levels of experience - some experience of an Art practice recommended
In this course you will explore the scope of what drawing can be today. Across two weeks, you will work with a range materials and techniques – both traditional and non-traditional – and experiment with how drawing interacts with other media like sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. The aim of this course is to help guide you to expand your artistic vocabulary and to give you space to independently develop your own contemporary drawing practice.
In the first week, tutors will lead you through a series of workshops, introducing different approaches to drawing. Each day you will work with a new set of materials paired with a new way of thinking about making art. In the second week, you will move into personal studio spaces to develop your work and try out new experiments, culminating with a public exhibition. Throughout, you will regularly discuss your work in personal tutorials and group crits, and you will expand your thinking through a programme of contextual lectures, artist’s talks, and gallery visits.
The Art of Looking: how do you tell a good painting from a bad one?
16,17,18 August (3 days)
Course leader: Rose Davey
Fee: £255
Level - suitable for various levels of experience
This three-day course will equip students with the necessary tools to identify quality within artworks and explore the many problems this exercise poses. Artworks will be pitted against one another to provoke lively debate and better understand why one work or artist might be perceived as ‘better’ or more ‘valuable’ than another.
Students will be schooled in the art of looking through the identification of the formal values inherent in art that can discreetly ensure an artworks quality, and the seductive nature of symbolic value which can often propel an artwork to fame. The course will be structured around lectures and seminars at the Slade, and intense debate whilst stood in front of original artworks. Gallery visits will range from world class collections such as the Tate Modern and National Gallery, to lesser-known commercial galleries showing the work of students fresh out of art school. The course will culminate in students delivering a short presentation on an artwork they perceive to possess quality, in contrast to those they consider to be lacking in quality. The aim is to leave with a curious, critical eye, educated through the observation of the artwork, combined with a knowledge of the context in which it was made.
Casting
07 August -11 August / 1 week
Course leader: Jo Guile
Fee: £425 (includes a materials fee)
This 5-day waste mould-making course is suitable for beginners, more experienced students or professionals interested in different fabrication processes.
Focusing on alginate and plaster moulding and casting. This hands-on intensive course will teach you: life-casting from the human body, casting from ‘still’ life, such as provided objects or spaces, and small objects/sculptures you can bring in. Alginate has been chosen as the core material because, it is a natural material which has a short curing time, allows flexible and highly detailed moulds to be made and is a safe material to use.
To help your personal creative process, the course will teach you a number of techniques. These will include, piece-plaster bandage moulds; poured and lay-up alginate moulds; casting in a variety of plasters and wax, both solid and hollow casting; and experimentation with pigmenting, finishing and direct sculpting techniques. Alginate has been chosen because it allows students to experiment with all these techniques in a short time frame, and to create a variety of small sculptures.
The course will consist of a mix of demonstrations and group and individual activity and will not only teach you some principles of moulding, but also offer you an opportunity to experiment with different types of materials and mediums. This course is relevant for anyone involved with art, design and 3-D Making or interested in finding out more about mould-making and will set you up to move on into silicon casting.
Painting
07-18 August / 21 August – 01 September / 2 or 4 weeks
Course leader(s): various
Fee: £800 for 2 weeks / £1440 for 4 weeks
Level - suitable for varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice, some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
This course will give you the support and guidance needed to develop your own independent practice. You will be setting up a studio-based study to evolve your own practical and aesthetic interests. This will be supported by a series of optional morning workshops including: working from secondary sources, mixing and applying colour, discussing supports and grounds, methods demonstrations, and learning some of the essentials of the painter’s craft.
A life model can be booked on selected days to generate source material. There will be individual tutorials, slide shows and group critiques run by invited artists, representing a wide spectrum of professional practice in terms of style and subject matter. This course may be followed for two or four weeks as appropriate.
Colour in Practice
7 - 11 August / 1 week
Course leader:
Fee: £400
Level: The course is open to anyone interested in developing skills in relation to colour and their own discipline. It suits a cross-section of experiences from complete beginners to those with previous experience or creative practice in general who would like to develop a more comprehensive understanding of colour, its applications and theories. This course can be taken on its own or as a complement to the course ‘Eye and Brain’ and/or 'Material and Perception’.
This course offers you the opportunity to develop both a critical and practical understanding of colour theory. The emphasis of the course is to examine the science of colour and light with a view to its practical application. The teaching method is structured around a series of lectures, demonstrations and creative projects. Lectures include an exploration into the history and theory of colour, colour systems and terminology, meaning and concepts. The theory is complemented with practical exercises through a variety of projects that elucidate the expressive, symbolic, scientific and cultural aspects of colour perception. Using a range of materials and techniques from paint to collage, you will investigate the characteristics of colour, hue, value and saturation, colour contrasts and colour harmonies. You will explore how colour behaves, the relationship of one colour to another and the way that colour generates light and form to create a colour space. Working from various source materials, you will develop methods to find a personal approach to subject and dynamic articulation of colour. You will be encouraged to consider the role of colour in historical and contemporary art practices and in relation to your own artistic development.
Eye and Brain: drawing and painting from observation
14 August - 18 August / 1 week
Course leader: Kate Hopkins
Fee: £400
Level: This course is suitable for varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice, some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
This drawing and painting course is inspired by ‘Eye and Brain’ by Richard L. Gregory, explaining “how we see and what we see, including the strange phenomena of illusions”.
Drawing on this publication and more recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, we will explore formal issues involved in working from observation, and develop your awareness of the surprising issues of our perception of size, shape and colour involved in this particular practice. Through a series of exercises, you will scrutinise scale, shape, tone and colour, considering these in the light shed by the psychology and neuroscience of vision.
This course can be taken on its own or as a complement to the course ‘Colour in Practice’ and/or 'Material and Perception’.
Material and Perception
21 August -25 August / 1 week
Course leader: Malina Bush
Fee: £425 (includes a fee for materials)
Level: suitable for varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice, some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
Build confidence seeing and using colour in your creative practice. On this painting course, you will learn to make visual judgements about a colour and identify colour characteristics, develop an understanding of colour relationships and behaviour, and develop an understanding of colour phenomena.
Through demonstrations, group discussion and class projects, you will learn how to select and organise different types of palettes, how to ‘key’ a palette, and how to use colour relationships to heighten mood and create expression in your own work. Drawing upon the resources of the Slade, we will examine colour through Josef Albers’ prints and the Material Research Project in Graduate Painting. This course can be taken on its own or as a complement to the course on neuroscience and painting.
Life Painting
Summer School 2017
21 August -01 September / 2 weeks
Course leader: Andy Pankhurst
Fee: £800
Level: suitable for varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice, some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
This two-week course will give you the opportunity to work directly from a life-model for two weeks. You will explore working ideas of initial compositional drawings and colour studies together with the nature of painting from sustained observation and concepts connected to it.
The course will begin with an initial introductory slide talk with the first two days focusing upon drawing aspects such as: proportion, tone, temperature and composition. The remaining time of the first week will be a combination of quick day and two day colour studies and paintings from the life-model.
Our second week will be working from the life-model in a sustained pose for the whole duration of that week utilising lessons and concepts learnt. Working collaboratively together with the model through a creative process we will explore varying possibilities of poses, compositions and colour environments which sets the models pose and set-up for the week as a group, including participants working spaces.
One-to-one tuition will be offered on the experience of a sustained visual exchange: perceptual shifts taking place between the artist & subject, colour mixing, tone & temperature, form and the role of structure in terms of proportion and spatial relationships.
Essentially studio time working from the model will be interspersed with demonstrations, discussions and slide talks including, and not limited to, colour theory, perception and colour mixing.
The final session of the two weeks will be devoted to feedback and support for continuing after the course finishes.