August 2019 Art Group Success Story

The art group, with Mel as our resident artist and tutor, have had a very successful time at the Heald Green Show. In the Oil/Acrylic Painting category Kelvin Vann came first and Shiela Dawes came second. The Beginners Paintings category saw Pauline Mullarkey take first and third prize. Linda Vann received first prize for her collage work in the Handicraft section. Glenys Steedman came second in the Mixed Media category and Pat Pembridge came second for her silk painting and embroidery in the Any Other Handicraft Item category. As can be seen the art group cover a wide range of media and techniques. Well done to Mel and the art group!

June 2019 En Plein Air

This month we were able to have our first art session en plein air (outside.) We were lucky enough to have Vera very kindly open her beautiful Cheadle Hulme garden for the group, with its wide variety of plants and ornamental features to inspire us. We had a thoroughly enjoyable morning painting, helped by weather that was just right and delicious home baked cakes.

2018 Wooden Wall Plaques

August 2017 Collage

During August 2017 members of the Art Group had the opportunity of joining a collage course run by local artist, Barbara Boswell. This proved to be highly successful. The group learnt how to handle different media and all were amazed at the variety of work that was produced. Here is a small selection, some of which are not yet framed. T

The year began with many of the group continuing to be tutored by Mel using Zoom. The limitations of using this for art meant we looked at Drawing for our topic. We started with how to correctly apply shading and finished with drawing water in a glass, which we thought was going to be impossible but we all achieved with good results. Using Zoom has been very beneficial as we have been able to see in close up Mel's techniques and then apply them to our own work. September 2021 saw us return to face to face meetings and for those of us who used Zoom the paints came out and we started by looking at backgrounds. Those of the group who didn't use Zoom have been looking at some of the drawing techniques that were covered and have looked at portraits and methods of scaling up pictures using the grid method.

We only managed a few sessions of art before Lockdown began. However Mel, our tutor, insisted we kept in touch and stayed busy from that moment on!

April 1st started with 'Cheeky Creative Challenge'. This meant we were given a different word for every day during April and we had to create a short sketch for 10-15 minutes, or we could do a longer project as our interpretation of that word.

May continued with 'Crazy Creative Challenge'. We had five subjects: Wacky Hair, Animals wearing glasses, Animals with antlers (not deer), Vehicles made of food Something hatching out of an egg, (not a chick).

June was the month we had the challenge of doing a piece of artwork using a favourite poem as a starting point. During this time Mel set up a group on Facebook where we could share our work.

We then heard that the Village Club was reopening and so we spent August getting ready, doing Covid risk assessments etc in the hope that we could return to class in September. This was not to be, following further restrictions from the government, and so after contacting the group members Mel started to organise using 'Zoom' to tutor us online. This has been very successful and she is now running two groups with members from both Bramhall and Cheadle Hulme U3A.
We have now covered topics such as transferring images and resizing, drawing, shading, breaking images into shapes and we have just finished an introduction to perspective.
Chris Stubbs

The art group under the guidance of Mel, our resident local artist, has gone from strength to strength this year, so much so that we've had to form a second group, again under Mel's direction, which operates in Cheadle Hulme. This means we have had some movement from members who changed to their nearest group, which has now given both groups a few spaces. This year we have covered a variety of topics and media as well as having our first 'en plein air' session in a beautiful local garden. Another highlight was a tutoring session from artist Stan Brookfield whose speciality is painting animals and birds. He won an international competition for his work, which is absolutely stunning.

The group had several successes with work entered in the Heald Green Show, we had three first prizes and several second prizes much to the delight of all, especially Mel.