peak district CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS 2026

I have over 15 years experience teaching creative workshops to all levels of ability, from nervous beginners to those looking to challenge and stretch themselves. 2026 will bring many opportunities to take a workshop with me as I continue to run classes at Bullclough Art School in the beautiful Peak District as well as workshops in Oxfordshire. Make sure you are on my mailing list to hear about them first!

Contemporary Landscape painting workshops

Venue: Bullclough Art School, Peak District

In 2026 there are two contemporary landscape workshops that bookend the season. These serve as an introduction to contemporary landscape painting technique. The idea behind these workshops is that they provide you with the basic building blocks of landscape painting; line, mass,shape and mark making. I don’t want to teach you how to paint like me, though I will show you lots of the techniques I use in my work, I want you to begin to explore your motivation for painting- what is it you want to express? What colours and marks feel like home? How do you want people to feel when they look at your work?

If that all sounds very intangible then consider that you will also undertake lots of exercises that demonstrate the formal elements of painting like compositional formats, contrast and difference, line weight and colour mixing.

On day one we begin with some simple drawing exercises to get you exploring the ever-changing landscape around Bullclough art school. These sketches will serve as a jumping off point for several experiments with colour, tone and composition. We will explore together the idea of abstraction and expressive painting and, in particular, where you see yourself on that spectrum between detailed realism and contemporary expressionism. During the final day and a half of the workshop you will be able to work on a number of larger paintings informed by the things you have discovered about yourself and your own style.

All the materials you could possibly need will be provided for you including boards to work on and sketchbooks to record your time in this most magical of places. You will want for nothing. Drop me an email here if you have specific questions or you can use the links below for more information and to book. Nellie and Andy at Bullclough are always happy to help with logistics and to recommend place to stay, you can contact them here.

Developing Contemporary Landscapes

Venue: Bullclough art school

Friday 24th, Saturday 25th, Sunday 26th and Monday 27th July 2026

Take your contemporary landscapes further with this structured four-day workshop. This class is ideal if you have some experience painting modern landscapes or have attended one of Rachel’s Contemporary landscape painting workshops before. We will spend the weekend generating a body of work from the landscape that will allow us to explore new responses to the natural environment as well as pay close attention to what we are trying to express.

We will spend the first two days working within the Bullclough landscape using pre prepared underpaintings to generate new work that explores abstraction, abbreviation and bold use of colour. Our aim will be to work outside with limited tools (weather permitting) to respond to the landscape using fast and loose brush marks whilst developing a wider understanding of composition and the importance of contrast in our work, whether subtle or strong.

Tuition across the weekend will focus on helping you to paint in a responsive but considered way whilst trying not to get too attached to parts of your painting too early in the process. We will also investigate what line quality means and how we can achieve different gestural marks depending on how we hold our brush. We will discover painting with new colours by undertaking an exercise that looks at the influence of pre-mixed greens as well as an exercise that asks us to paint the verdant Bullclough landscape in any colour other than green!

We will spend the last day working with your preferred techniques on some wooden boards that will allow you to experiment with layers, texture and exploring your own unique creative voice.

During this workshop you will:

Explore compositional devices such as cruciform compositions, L-shape compositions, compound curves and the rule of thirds

Practice using colours you may not have encountered before and create saturated and desaturated palettes

Investigate your own preference for hard or soft transitions- how messy do you want to paint

The Abstracted Landscape- Exploring Mood and Atmosphere

Venue: Bullclough Art School

Friday 29th, Saturday 30th, Sunday 31st May and Monday 1st June 2026

Do you love the idea of painting abstract landscapes but find it difficult to move away from that rigid horizon line? Do you find yourself struggling to know what to do with your foregrounds? Do your paintings tend to end looking a bit static, even when you’ve tried to express movement and vibrancy?

This course will help you move away from traditional landscape compositions by exploring different ways of dividing up the picture plane such as grid compositions, l-shapes, compound curves and the rule of thirds, all the time retaining a sense of place and the atmosphere of the landscape you want to evoke.

Using the Bullclough landscape as our inspiration, we will begin by creating several preliminary sketches that will act as starting points for experiments in mark making, brushwork and colour. We will then create new compositions from these sketches, and you will be encouraged to move away from representational approaches as you focus on atmosphere and mood and how this might be captured in paint. I will show you how to use your brushes in a way that evokes drama and movement and introduce you to a process that allows you to build up a landscape across layers rather than simply paint an outline and fill it in.

We will explore the emotionality of colour and its influence on the mood of our work. We will also work with two of the main principles of abstraction; the rearrangement of recognisable landscape elements that take objects out of context and create something new, and the exaggerated expressive brush mark that renders complicated landscape structures with ease and simplicity.

During the second part of the workshop, I will help you to begin a piece of work on a board or canvas using the techniques we have experimented with, and this will be your opportunity to explore these approaches in more detail and at on a larger scale.

Skill level: suitable for both beginners and those with some experience