Here’s some ink test papers hanging out in my studio.
A basket of natural art materials goodness from Found and Ground first published at my regular Substack newsletter, to which you can subscribe.
Dear friends, it’s been a while! I hope you are having a lovely spring up here in the north, or a peaceful autumn in the southern hemisphere. I’ve been working hard on projects, teaching and research for online courses, more of which below.
There’s so much coming up, so I’ll dive straight in.
Upcoming Courses
The natural pigment watercolours are multiplying! I have almost filled another empty box and am eyeing up a third…
Found and Ground 5 day in person course. Devon UK
There are only two spaces left on Found and Ground, my foundation course for natural art materials, held each year in Devon, UK, this year it’s 22-26 June 2026. The venue, food, company and landscape we’ll be in are so beautiful. I have great guests and assistants and of course, you’ll get free rein with more materials of earth than you can shake a stick at! We cover: pigment foraging, ethics, safety, making, paints (watercolour, gouache, egg paints, vegan paints), pastel making – hard and soft, sketchbook making including natural cordage, fixatives for pastels and charcoal, charcoal making, a visit to the wonderful Princetown Press, a visit to local pigment places with a geologist and more. All the details and bookings are at the link here: Found and Ground course
Refining malachite for pigment
Drawn From the Wild 5 day in person course Devon UK
There are a couple of spaces left on the first outing of my new ‘level two’ course based on my current book. Here, we’ll be deepening and extending our expertise with paints, including casein and glue paints. We’ll be making a beautiful perpetual foraging diary / sketchbook to document our natural materials finds, making graded, conte and graphic pastels, refining, grinding, levigating and working with semi-precious pigments, creating metal point grounds and using a host of everyday and precious metals to create beautiful sensitive indelible drawings, making chars and other unique blacks, alternatives to oil pastels and a day of experimentation with all my materials as well as what you’ve made. We’ll make oil paint, and glue paints which work beautifully on leather, wood and other alternative surfaces. We will have a special guest artist coming up from Cornwall to join us, more about that next month. This is the course to take your practice deeper and refine the quality and range of what you can do without plastics using techniques refined over centuries but sometimes overlooked today. All the details and bookings are at the link here: Drawn From the Wild course
Online courses
Printing and Painting on textiles with natural colours. This course is ongoing and you can join anytime to access the upcoming online lessons and all the recordings and pdfs. I am covering painting and drawing on leather and parchment, techniques which also work well on canvas and cotton duck. Click for more: Painting & printing on textiles online
Making and working with natural art materials. This amazing line up of teachers and classes will take you deeper into territory we first walked in last year’s Natural colour making for artists (which is still available as recordings). This year I’ll be teaching metal point, graded pastels, conte, etc, and a dual session about ink for pens with awesome Annie Hogg. There is so much in this course! Details at the link here: Make & work with natural art materials
Italy: 5 days in with Artisans of Now in November 2026 will be announced later on in the year.
West Dean, Sussex, UK: my first week teaching there this February went so well, thanks to all who came. I wasn’t free to teach a one day class this spring but I have been asked to go back next year. I’ll let you know when.
Pestles and mortars at the ready at West Dean in Febraury
121 tuition and groups
I have been teaching in person private courses with 121 students and just had a great three day session at a pioneering British engineering company which I am not allowed to mention by name… Coming up, students are coming to my home for in depth research from UK and Hungary. All my slots are full this year, but I am taking bookings for 2027. You can get in touch about this or anything else by messaging me via the webform at the homepage of this website.
Poetry book: I wrote a poetry chapbook Artemis Scribe which Princetown Press beautifully letterpress printed for me. It grew from last year’s art residency at the Imaginal Field Project. There’s a limited edition of 100 handmade, signed and numbered copies. They are £10 plus letter postage costs to anywhere in the world. Get in touch via my homepage if you’d like one. More about the book and the whole project here.
In Spring 2027, I’ll be teaching a weekend course as part of the Nostos Institute with my friend, the wonderful writer and teacher Dr Sharon Blackie . It seems a long way off but will come round soon. You can subscribe to the Nostos Institute Substack to find out more. We are weaving our plans over the coming months and I will let you know more in the autumn, but expect sacred geometry, natural forms, luminous watercolours and meaningful practices for participatory contemplation. We will aim to bring contemplative art and philosophical practice together as an antidote to contemporary disembodied, unexamined life. So, not much for a weekend, then!
A small amount of the ongoing mess project that is getting all my pigments into small sample cases so that I can carry them to classes more easily. Every pigment is hand annotated.
Pigment news: I am in the (rather wonderful) process of sorting, archiving and making more portable my entire pigment collection. Talking to dear Lucy Mayes recently, we both feel it’s time to give away and use the larger part of our pigments. So, with this in mind I have found a suitable storage method for small amounts of everything I have so that my students and I can always refer to them. That means hundreds of extra unique colours will be available to make paints and pastels at my three main courses this year. In labelling them, I realise every colour has a story. The labels may not be big enough, but luckily, the stories are alive and in my heart, ready for retelling.
Short news
- Joumana Medlej’s books are a must for any natural materials artist and she has been rewriting and expanding her work on the Golden Age of Islamic inks and paints. I have just gladly received a copy of her excellent Wild Inks and Paints – a seasonal palette, after mine got drowned when a student’s water bottle exploded in the bag she took it home in. A fresh copy now sits beside the well-loved original.
- A few great recent articles I’d like to recommend are: this one about pottering about, this hugely relatable post about art school burnout from incredible felt artist Gladys Paulus, and this great publication Pigments, Colors and Other Stories.
- I am relieved and glad that my mum found her art coursework from the 1976 City and Guilds art, millinery and dressmaking courses she did while I was a wee nipper. They had gone missing in her house move just before lockdown, but have now resurfaced. Seeing them as a child is what set me off drawing, loving colour and wanting to make art.
Who was it who first made you want to make art? Who first encouraged you?
Wishing you all a great Spring. More from me next month. See you online or at the mulling slab soon, I hope! Warm wishes, Caro.
Found and Ground 