Join professional en plein artist Alastair Gordon for the first of our Landscape Drawing Club outdoor workshops.

This session invites participants to create a panoramic concertina sketchbook, building a landscape painting one section at a time. Inspired by Trellis, William Morris’s first design for wallpaper (1862), participants will explore how time, rhythm, and changing weather can be expressed across an extended image.

Working from observation in the William Morris Gallery gardens, participants will develop a sequence of connected views, each panel forming part of a larger unfolding composition. Using watercolour and various sketching pencils, the workshop introduces a process of building a painting in stages, allowing each section to inform the next.

This is a workshop for adult learners and no prior experience of painting is needed.

If you are not able to attend on this date, there is a second chance to book this workshop on Friday 17 July. Participants should book for one only.

About the artist

Alastair Gordon (b. 1978, Edinburgh) is a London-based artist working in painting and drawing. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and Wimbledon School of Art, and his work has been shown in galleries and museums in the UK and internationally. He presents meticulously illusionistic landscapes shaped by en plein air expeditions in the Scottish Highlands and Lake District, where hyperreal wilderness meets the studio’s marks and residue, reframing landscape as both artifact and “painting about painting.”

About this workshop series

Landscape Drawing Club is a series of artist-led outdoor workshops inspired by William Morris’s belief in close observation of the natural world. Participants explore en plein air drawing, learning to observe and capture the landscape directly from life. Each session is shaped by landscape works from the Gallery’s permanent collection, using these as creative starting points while offering insight into how historic landscapes continue to inform contemporary practice.

What does ‘en plein air’ mean?

It is a term commonly used in art to describe painting or drawing outdoors, directly from the landscape, rather than working in a studio. The approach became popular with Impressionist artists like Monet, who wanted to capture natural light and atmosphere on location.