Hello and welcome to the wonderful exploratory world of the Indigo drawing stones.

I have put this short course together to encourage you to explore with me the properties and potential of this water-soluble deep inky blue piece of promise...
It was my friend Dee Walker who introduced me to the indigo in one of her Instagram posts. Now, Dee loves her art materials and has a really open and infectious way of working, so I am really pleased that she has agreed to film herself working with the indigo and talking about how she likes to use it in her own work.

I am also lucky to know Pip Seymour as we have worked together before, so after requesting some of this magic pastel, I eagerly ‘unboxed’ my art goodies and set about recording myself having a experimental session. The resulting film is a part of this course and you will be able to see how I approached using them for the first time on a couple of different surfaces.

The combination of rough, dry velvety marks with loose nebulous veils of colour is a heady one.
I have devised this series of exercises in the hope that they will not only help you to explore the possibilities of the indigo stick but also open up your approach to mark making.

If we were in a real workshop environment this content would most likely be covered in a full day session. But as you can work at your own pace then I suggest you may wish to linger over certain parts and maybe even develop a series of studies at each stage to help you really get to grips with this new material and get the most out of your time.

So be calm, be attentive, be curious and let the work evolve out of a conversation between yourself and the materials.

I have also added in some optional handout files for you to download and print out.
When I initially made this course it was sent out as an email with links to the films and handouts. Now the course is built into the Podia platform you do not need to print the handouts out as all the information is within the body of the course.

As you do see me referring to the handouts throughout though I have decided to include them here as an option for you to download.

Simply download them from the following lessons to your own device and refer to them when wanted throughout the course.

Let's get started with some dry and fluid warm up exercises.

It is nearly time to work with the Indigo!

But first I suggest that you make a cup of tea and make time to watch the next two films. The first one is the recording I made when I first tried out the indigo and it was actually the enthusiastic response to this film that led me to create this course and the second film shows how artist Dee Walker uses indigo in her abstract studies.

I hope that you will be inspired by how two artists can take the same materials and yet produce quite different results with different intention. This goes to show how you will be able to take this material and let it guide you to invent your own world of marks, washes and textures over time.

For this section you will need your choice of paper, an indigo pastel, charcoal, rubber, soft rag, white chalk, glue stick or oil bar and the 'Prompts' sheet (available as a download in the next lesson)

Take a moment here to think about what you enjoyed about working with the charcoal and ink and make a few notes to remind yourself. The beauty of this indigo stick is that it has the potential to offer both the textures and properties of the the charcoal and the fluid nature of the paint and ink. This first exercise with the indigo is going to be led somewhat by my set of ‘Painterly Prompts’. You may want to print out a couple of copies - one to work through in the order they are written and one to cut up and fold so you can mix it up. This will become clear in my demonstration film.

The beauty of this way of working is that some of the decision making is taken away from you as you follow the commands in the order you receive them. I have been using this way of settling into my painting sessions for a while now and it is also a useful tool if you only have a short time in which to create as you can set yourself time limits at each stage.

So settle in and watch the film through first before you begin your own discoveries...

For this section you will need all of your studies and experiments along with some some card 'L's' or apertures/mounts. I love to use my iPhone camera which can act as a view finder too.