Course Information

This course is a reimagining of Kate’s popular Blackened Landscapes course at BHA - keeping its bones but flexing its muscles - a course not about drawing just any landscape, but drawing landscapes you care about and learning how charcoal can help you create drawings expressing that. There will be demonstrations, set tasks, and short bursts of structured activity (like rotating between three drawings, for timed intervals, to refresh your eye). But the heart of the course is in the one-to-one support: each student following their own path, with Kate offering insight, challenge and encouragement (and tea) along the way. You’ll begin gently, with a morning of warming up your charcoal muscles: a chance to get (re)acquainted with different types of charcoal and companion tools and loosen up with simple mark-making. This is the foundation of Kate’s own studio practice — a way to quietly calibrate the eye and hand to this beautiful material, whether you’re new to charcoal, returning after time away or even from last year! Kate will then guide each of you through her techniques for building a drawing: expressive marks, layering tone, creating texture, drama or subtly - developing a visual language that becomes entirely your own. Kate will show you how to work from your own photographs and use them as starting points for your drawings. She’ll bring examples of her working process, source images, sketchbooks and completed drawings, big and small. This is not a course about drawing just any landscape. It’s about learning how to use charcoal with all its surprising versatility to draw the places that mean something to you.