WATERCOLOR
SPRING
WEEKENDS

Weekend editions of Algarve em Aguarela – indoor and outdoor!

A bright spring weekend in Algarve, full of light, colour, and inspiration. These workshops offer an immersive approach to watercolor, with two guided 4-hour designed to refine your technique while keeping the atmosphere calm, focused, and uplifting.

Check this short video of from the past Watercolour Weekend session: https://vimeo.com/1157312577
to get the idea of the focused, welcoming studio experience.

What We’ll Explore:

We begin by getting familiar with essential watercolor materials — paints, papers, and brushes — before moving into the core skills that bring the medium to life.

• Mixing colour with intention: understanding limited palettes, and how hue, value, and saturation shape every shade you mix.
• Luminosity & transparency: how to keep your colours vibrant, avoiding “pale” or “muddy” results.
• Brushwork & edges: exploring hard, soft, and dry edges through wet-in-wet and dry-in-wet techniques.
• Negative space & simplification: learning how few shapes you actually need to create atmosphere, contrast, and clarity.
• Confidence & looseness: practising the expressive, unpredictable beauty that makes watercolor so rewarding.

I’ll guide you step by step through the core watercolor techniques and compositional thinking. With practice and patience, you’ll discover how satisfying and expressive watercolor can be.
I’ll also teach you to love working with a big brush and using bold, confident strokes — so your paintings stay fresh, expressive, and not overworked!

I’m Grażyna Ostrowska, the person behind Lighthouse Artcourses — an artist working between light, colour, and the changing rhythms of the Algarve.
While my own artistic practice evolves primarily around oil painting, the passion for watercolour is what I share with people coming to Lighthouse.
As a teaching medium, it allows us to work directly from life — attentive, mobile, and fully present.
It is also ideally suited for en plein air work and travelling light.

Watercolour doesn’t wait.
Once the brush touches the paper, it demands quick choices, trust in the moment, and the courage to let go. Working this way sharpens perception and pulls you out of overthinking and back into seeing — light shifting, colours bleeding, forms finding their place.

It’s focused, honest, and quietly joyful.

Painting boats in the marina of Olhão
July 2025