Look & Draw Workshops

What happens when movement becomes the starting point for drawing?

Join artist Dr Ginny Elston for an experimental workshop exploring mark-making through movement, sensation and intuition. Expect large-scale drawing, playful prompts and plenty of room to explore.

📅 Wednesday 17 June
⏰ 6–9pm
📍 Look and Draw, Edinburgh

Suitable for all levels. All materials provided.

Book via the website. Link in bio.

NEXT WEEK HAPPENING with Ginny Elston
Expanded Drawing // Embodied Inquiry
Wednesday 17 June · 6–9pm /£45
What happens when movement and sensation inform drawing as much as observation?

Working with simple materials and guided prompts, you’ll explore how marks can emerge from a felt sense of the body, responding to ideas of time, space and internal states.

As the session develops, you’ll work on a larger scale across wall and floor surfaces, using the body as both a tool and a point of reference. Through repetition, layering and accumulation, drawings will build and evolve over time, creating unexpected connections between movement, sensation and mark-making.

Suitable for all levels. All materials provided.

More info and booking:

Expanded Drawing // Embodied Inquiry | Look and Draw Wednesday 17 June 6 – 9 pm Tutor: Ginny Elston This workshop will work with the body as a primary means of mark making and drawing. We will explore how drawing can be an inquiry into the internal, felt sense of the body, as opposed to an external form to be described. Responding with a sense of cr...

Over at Hidden Door we’ve been slowly transforming a vast old paper factory into this year’s festival site and world.

As part of that, artist Laura McGlinchey is running free drop-in making sessions on Fri 29 May and Sat 30 May, exploring paper, sculpture, temporary structures and collaborative building.

These sessions feel very connected to the spirit of Look & Draw. Process-led, experimental, hands-on and a little bit chaotic in the best way.

Come help us build strange things inside the factory.

Free / drop-in / all welcome.

More info and reserve a space here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/laura-mcglinchey-x-hidden-door-drop-in-sessions-tickets-1989911232062?aff=erellivmlt

On Wednesday 8 July, Fiona Oliver Larkin will lead the next Expanded Drawing session at Look & Draw, in collaboration with Jill Martin Boualaxai. This multidisciplinary workshop explores drawing through movement, character and performative mark-making.

Beginning with a short movement warm-up, participants will experiment with simple objects used as extensions of the body and interrupters of the mark. Through a series of prompts and collaborative drawing exercises, gestures are exaggerated, redirected or disrupted by the objects being used.

Working on large sheets of paper, the drawing surface becomes a shared stage where movement, character and action leave traces. Marks emerge through tapping, dragging, balancing and shifting weight rather than controlled hand movements.
By altering the relationship between body, object and drawing surface, familiar drawing habits begin to shift and new gestures emerge.

Fiona Oliver Larkin is an Edinburgh-based physical theatre maker, puppeteer and circus performer whose work explores movement, storytelling and the body in space.

Further details can be found on our website.
Head to the link in bio to book your place. https://www.lookanddraw.co.uk/service-page/expanded-drawing-interrupted-marks?referral=service_list_widget

Sunday Life Drawing has been paused for a couple of weeks break over Easter 🐣

We are back this coming Sunday 19 April, with the usual relaxed space to draw from the model in good company ✏️
See you there 1 - 4 pm !

Booking link:
https://www.lookanddraw.co.uk/service-page/sunday-life-drawing-club-untutored-1?referral=service_list_widget

Last week Jill Martin Boualaxai ran the first session in the Expanded Drawing series, exploring drawing through objects, surfaces and trace.
We collected marks from the fabric of building itself and objects within it, taking rubbings, and inking objects as a means of recording surfaces. The session then moved into three large collaborative drawings. Using the objects as tools, participants translated the marks from the collected surfaces used built marks together across shared sheets of paper.

One of the key ideas we explored was rhythm in drawing. As marks accumulate, a surface needs variation; dense areas and open spaces, light and dark tones, different kinds of gesture and shape. Rather than filling every space, the challenge was to respond to what was already there and allow the drawing to develop a sense of balance. The result was a series of layered surfaces where traces, fragments and gestures accumulated over time.

Thank you to everyone who joined the session.
Expanded Drawing continues next month. More info here: https://www.lookanddraw.co.uk/service-page/expanded-drawing-interrupted-marks?referral=service_list_widget

Make Sunday Life Drawing part of your weekly ritual.
Regularly returning to draw from the figure helps train the eye and build fluency in your drawing over time. Join us every Sunday from 1–4pm for untutored life drawing.

The session is open to anyone who wants to draw from the figure. The atmosphere is informal, and you simply bring your own materials.

Spaces available today // 22 March

https://www.lookanddraw.co.uk/service-page/sunday-life-drawing-club-untutored-1?referral=service_list_widget

Drink & Draw // Monoprint Life Drawing
Our monthly monoprint life drawing session is coming up on 25 March, 6:45–9pm at in Abbeyhill.
In these sessions we use printmaking as a way of drawing from the figure. Unlike pencil or charcoal, where marks can be moved, rubbed out or corrected, monoprinting is much more immediate. Once the mark is made, it stays.
This interrupts the usual rhythm of drawing, asking you to respond differently. Plates often retain marks from earlier prints, drawings build through layering, and unexpected results become part of the process. The outcome is a series of quick, gestural one-off prints made in response to the model.
Here are a few images from last month’s session to give a sense of what to expect.
All materials are included.
https://www.lookanddraw.co.uk/service-page/drink-draw-the-safari-sessions?referral=service_list_widget

At Look and Draw we hold a weekly Friday mentoring group as a space for sustained project development rather than single-session outcomes. In this small mentored setting there is peer discussion and shared feedback to support the development and refining of your practice.

One of the artists in this group is Margaret Tiller, a painter who is drawn to fleeting moments in everyday landscapes. With spontaneous moments of inspiration, she loves to draw scenes from the television, or the mundane overlooked things around her. Zooming in on areas of shadow or dust, her work often features close-up compositions of everyday objects from a unique perspective. In the studio she paints these sketched ideas, quickly and intuitively. Using paint as a thinking process so each piece becomes a test and way of capturing something that might otherwise pass unnoticed.