2026 Painting Workshops...and a new Landscape Painting Film!

Hi everyone, hope you're all well. This is just a quick video. If I might have five minutes of your time there's just a couple of quick things I'd like to mention. The first is the retreats that I've got booked for next year and then second I just want to tell you about a video that's going to be released on YouTube this coming weekend. So painting retreats and workshops for 2026. I'll be visiting Virginia again and hosting a series of three-day retreats and six-day retreats at the Mill at Fine Creek. It's the same location that I've been to for the past couple of years and it is just perfect for learning landscape painting and for honing our skills as watercolour painters. The three-day courses are split into two subjects. One is to cover trees, water, rocks as important subjects to paint and the techniques that we need to do that and the second subject is a focus on foregrounds. Really important as an element in landscape painting. I'm going to show you how to get to grips with those and the six-day retreat is going to be a focus on techniques and this is important because it'll help you to tackle whatever subject you want to paint by having a good grounding in things like brush strokes, colour mixing, managing your washes. We'll be painting on location, we'll be painting in the studio and I'll be mixing that up with a number of interesting exercises to help embed those techniques. The second retreat I'd like to mention is a week in May in the Occitanie region of southwest France. The focus there is going to be on sketching, building a sketchbook, formulating ideas for paintings but also maybe how to curate your stay in France as a sketchbook slash journal if you like which is an interesting thing to do. It's all based around my philosophy for landscape painting which is inspire, sketch, paint. That process is tremendously important and we'll be focusing on the inspiration, sketching side of that process. Now focusing on the UK, I have a one-day workshop in March at Windrush in the Cotswolds. It's a wonderful place to paint and hopefully, weather permitting, we'll be doing some painting outdoors on location. Huge amounts of inspiration there, places are very limited on that one. And finally, following the success this year, I have three weeks of retreats in Corfe Castle in Dorset. The retreat is called Coast and Countryside and we're sketching, we're painting gorgeous landscapes, the wonderful coastline on the Isle of Purbeck, the hospitality at Morton's Manor where we stay is fantastic and they're just wonderful weeks. So hopefully you'll be able to join me for some of these. The details for all these courses are in the section beneath so the links are there. It's all on my website oliverpyle.com on the courses page but of course if there's anything that's not quite clear, please get in touch and we'd be delighted to give you some further information. That brings me on to the new video that I've made. I say a new video, it's more of a film really and I'm going to be posting it on YouTube. It's just over an hour long so it's something to get your teeth into. It's called Landscape Painting an Introduction. Don't paint anything, paint something. You'll see what I mean by that when you watch the film but I'm painting on three separate locations in Chichester Harbour in Sussex and I have filmed this so that it's not a tutorial but more an inspiration for those of you that are new to landscape painting but also to inspire those of you who've been painting for a while and maybe have just started to hit a bit of a brick wall. When I say it's not a tutorial, I filmed this such that there's no intention for you to follow on or copy what I'm doing but rather I'm just hoping it's something that will inspire you to pick up your sketchpad, pick up your paints and get out into the landscape. Don't get me wrong, there's quite a bit of instruction contained in the video but also I think you'll find it's just a nice watch too. Just to say this will premiere on YouTube this weekend 9pm UK time on Saturday. If you watch the premiere and I'm not going to be there doing my normal comments thing that I've done in the past on these YouTube premieres but if you watch the premiere you'll see it without any ad interruptions so that's quite a nice thing. After that of course if you want to go back to it those ads will be there however on an ongoing basis if you want to watch it without any breaks at all might I suggest subscribing to my Patreon page where many of my YouTube videos reside and can be watched ad infinitum ad free. Thanks ever so much for watching, thanks as always for your support. I've got some really interesting things I'm going to be bringing to you through Patreon, through YouTube in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for those but in the meantime keep painting!