My watercolour course (John) is available to the beginner, those who may have dabbled with the medium or the student whomay wish to develop further with their skills.

Donoughmore is set in a beautiful hillside setting overlooking valleys and has plenty of inspiration to offer the watercolourist.

I will take you through the basic techniques of this beautiful medium using pencil marks and leading into brush marks, using the brush in a variety of ways. Dry brush, washes, wet on wet, wet on dry, soft edges and lifting out are all techniques that will be introduced to the student.

Familiarity with colours and how they mix together to create hundreds of varieties using only three primary colours will show you jsut how simple it is to create these variations.

Donoughmore has a beautiful variety of skies, sunrises and sunsets. Very dramatic cloud formations are a constant feature here and I will take you through them all. Trees, a very important feature in watercolour landscapes are in abundance here as well. Hedgerow also in abundance will allow the student to focus in a particular area and seek out the beauty of nature that exists here and use it as a source of inspiration for watercolour.

Perspective and creating distance in landscapes will also be tackled in my workshops. Using simple principles I will show you how to create landscapes that will lead the viewer into your painting, thus creating a more satisfying composition. The basic principles of background, middle ground and foreground will be explained in a very simple way.

Because Donoughmore is surrounded by a farming community, animals on the landscape are also wildly common. I will show you how to add these animals to a landscape setting. People in landscapes will also feature here as well as buildings, outhouses, rustic gates etc.

Donoughmore offers a variety of creative possibilities for the watercolourist and I would hope that the landscape would allow you, the student, to seek out these possibilities. I have derived numerous hours of pleasure in painting Donoughmore and its endless sources of inspiration never fail to astonish me from season to season.