Contemporary Drawing and Mixed Media

Enhance your expressive capabilities and expand your visual vocabulary with a focus on drawing and mixed media. Learn to use collage as a dynamic tool to explore subject matter, balance compositions, test colour and spatial relationships and venture outside your comfort zone. Renata Pari-Lewis guides you to explore drawn and painted gestural marks using a variety of media including charcoal, ink and gouache. She demonstrates techniques and delivers group exercises designed to build skills and gain an understanding of how to use colour and tonal relationships in image construction to create original artworks. Renata also introduces you to works of modernist and contemporary artists working in collage and mixed media, revealing the processes involved in making compelling imagery.

* NAS Short Courses are open to students of ages 16 years and over. The NAS Art Club is open to students from ages 15 years and over. 

* Drawing and painting short courses may be held in upstairs studios. If access to stairs is not suitable, please contact us at short.courses@nas.edu.au 

* What to bring? Please refer to the list of required materials in the Art Materials field below. 

Renata Pari-Lewis studied Fine Art in London before completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art at the National Art School. Her work has developed from printmaking to mixed media and installation and she now primarily works in painting. She is interested in pursuing a diverse repertoire of mark making and a dynamic set of chromatic and tonal relationships that evoke the atmosphere and mood of a subject or scenario; a kind of theatre in which light and composition direct the viewer to a particular aspect of the individual and the spaces they inhabit. Over the last three years Renata has been a finalist in the Darling Portrait Prize, Portia Geach, the Mosman Art Prize and KAAF Art Prize. She is represented by Nanda\Hobbs Contemporary in Sydney.

Students must supply their own art materials, please refer to the list below.

Art Materials
• 4 sticks of willow charcoal
• a small range of coloured pencils
• 1 small bottle black ink
• 1 large sheet box board, cut into 4 pieces

• 1 sheet of black cardboard or thick black paper A2 size
• 4 pieces of watercolour paper A3 size
• Small set of gouache paints
• Plastic painting palette
• Soft eraser
• Acid free craft glue and old brush (any size)
• Old rags


Brushes
Three different brushes - these do not need to be expensive:
• 1 synthetic brush – flat 3-4cm wide
• 1 synthetic flat brushes approximately 1cm wide
• 1 synthetic flat brushes approximately 2cm wide

Collage Materials
• 8 single sheets of A4 paper: 2 sheets of each colour - black, grey, off-white and one other darker colour
• Old book of any kind of text - for tearing out pages
• Selection of coloured scrap paper for collage – e.g. wrapping paper, magazines, not newsprint.

Enclosed footwear is essential in all studios on campus.