Click on the Youtube link to view a video of the wonderful work of our junior art students:

Your tutor for Paint Malta Courses is international artist Caroline S. Lawrence.Trained at St. Martin's College, London, Caroline has worked extensively as a professional artist throughout the Middle East for over 15 years and in 2002 decided to return to her native home island of Malta. You can view her artwork on her separate website: www.cs-lawrence.com

Having run several successful painting courses in Bahrain, she decided to set up a similar scheme in Malta. Her approach to teaching art is that there is a creative impulse in everyone and all that's needed for it to find expression is to overcome feeling intimidated or unsure of oneself. All too often people get put off from exploring their creativity because they are not sure how to use art materials; they assume there's a right and wrong way of painting or drawing. To a certain extent, basic understanding of a particular medium is required simply because it helps one to manipulate the process of conveying an idea or image onto paper or canvas. But the rest is up to you, or more accurately, the rest is in you.
In art, there's no right or wrong way-there's only YOUR way.

The courses consist of a minimum of 4 weeks tuition. Each weekly class is for 2 hours.Total tuition time in one course amounts to 8 hours. Days and times can vary according to the group's preferences.

Adult courses are currently being held every Wednesday evening from 5.30-7.30pm and Friday morning from 9.30-11.30am. Generally anyone over 15 yrs will be put into an adult class.

The Adult courses cover learning how to see, development of drawing skills using various media such as charcoal and graphite pencils, understanding perspective as well as painting in acrylic and oil pastels. Being based in the gloriously picturesque location of the Three Cities surrounding the Grand Harbour, we will periodically take you out to paint the quaint alleyways, the marinas, the grand bastions, the churches and other beautiful buildings in the area.

The Junior courses are being held on Saturdays from 10:00-12:00pm and from 2:00-4:00pm. The junior courses focus on learning how to see things and draw them as well as working with colour manipulation using gouache paints,colour pencils, wax crayons and charcoals. Environmental awareness will be emphasised by various mixed media projects using recycled products.

For adults: Acrylics are far easier to use than watercolours or oils but the only drawback in using them is that they dry fast so you dont have as much time to mix and manipulate colours like you do with watercolour and oil. However, the great thing about acrylics is that you can water them down to apply thin washes as well as use them thickly to produce impasto effects. You can mix colours with a variety of texturized pastes and also use different tools to create marks which produce interesting effects.
You will be taught how to layer acrylic colours; how to mix colours and use various mixed media techniques. You will also be shown how to mix colours without muddying them; how to put more "punch" into your painting by understanding complementary colours; how to use composition techniques to make your painting more eye-catching;how to work around mistakes and even incorporate into your picture the unexpected surprises that working with waterbased mediums often produce.

Drawing is, in Caroline's opinion, an essential skill which enables an artist to tackle any subject confidently. And working in monotone gives you a solid grounding in understanding the relationship between shapes and tones. Using charcoal or graphite leads, you will be taught how to translate 3-D objects onto a 2-D surface based on the simple rules of perspective.

Art materials

Many times a budding artist has been put off pursuing their interest in painting because they cannot seem to get the desired results in their work and its often because they are using poor quality materials. We have a limited number of products for the courses from the excellent range Faber Castell materials which can be purchased from our studio. We've put together a list of recommended materials for you to bring which can be printed out here.