Watercolour Fungi Workshop (11 April 2026)
Watercolour Fungi Workshop with Ingrid Bartkowiak
2–5pm Saturday 11 April 2024
Spend an afternoon with artist Ingrid Bartkowiak for a delightful adventure into watercolour painting through the wonderful world of fungi.
Get ready to paint some seriously stunning fungi! Learn to transform mushrooms and toadstools into gorgeous watercolour creations, picking up playful techniques and confident brushwork along the way. Whether you're a complete beginner or just fungi-curious, this workshop will have you creating mushroom masterpieces using watercolour.
To start, Ingrid will guide you through the basics of using watercolour paints, paper and brushes. You will learn how to activate your colours using water and how to mix colours, and how to layer colours to change tones and intensity.
Ingrid will demonstrate how to bring these elements together to achieve different results, with a focus on the particular techniques that you'll be using in this workshop. You'll be shown how to create key fungi characteristics, such as the shine on a smooth mushroom or the gills on its underside. Next, it's your turn to practice your skills by creating gradients, brush strokes and colour mixing.
We'll start work on our first full fungi painting by spending some time discussing composition: how we might position our fungi on the page, and how it looks when we add other colours/shapes/forms to our design. Working on A6 or A5 watercolour paper, we will start painting a basic cap-shaped mushroom (such as Protostropharia semiglobata) by first breaking down the shapes, then putting them back together.
Once we've finished our first mushroom, we will practise our watercolour skills by painting different types of cap-style fungi and adding other botanical elements like moss or bark to our artworks. Ingrid will demonstrate how you might add a background or floral elements to enhance your painting and provide personalised tips and feedback on how you could continue to add depth and interest to your work.
Materials
All the materials required for the workshop will be provided. Please wear an apron if you are worried about staining your clothes.
Who Should Attend?
This workshop is suitable for beginners with little or no experience, and more advanced students who would like to learn from Ingrid and develop their watercolour knowledge and techniques.
About Ingrid Bartkowiak
Ingrid Bartkowiak is a Brisbane-based artist and illustrator who paints Australian native flora, fauna and fungi using watercolour. Ingrid's work celebrates all things small and intricate, from tufts of moss on a footpath to the fungi sprouting from a wombat dropping. Her distinctive style is inspired by botanical illustration and the Arts and Crafts movement through its use of tiny patterns, exquisite detail, and vivid blocks of colour.
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Cost
$120 / $108 (Frequent workshoppers)
Frequent workshopper discount: Sign up for 2 or more Plant Empire workshops, or register 2 or more people for the same workshop, to receive 10% off the total registration price (discount will appear at checkout).
Location
Plant Empire has moved! This workshop will be held at our new premises in Tennyson, Brisbane: 15/55 Lofter St, Tennyson Q 4105.
Accessibility
In our new premises, we have ground floor workshop spaces as well as mezzanine level spaces with stairs. The ground floor spaces are all level without any steps, while the mezzanines are accessible via a staircase with 22 steps and 1–2 landings. Please let us know if you have any mobility issues that would limit your access to the mezzanine spaces so that we can ensure that your workshop is located at ground level by adding a note in the special instructions field when you register for your workshop: for example, "no stairs" or similar.
Reminders
You have full control over how (and how often) you receive reminders for our events. You will receive one email confirmation from us when you purchase your workshop registration; but we won't send any further email reminders, so please ensure that you have the workshop details in your diary. You can also use the "add to calendar" function in our events calendar to add workshops to your digital calendar and customise your reminder preferences.
Cancellation Policy
Please choose carefully before registering for this workshop as we do not offer refunds on event bookings. If you need to cancel your place up to 24 hours before the workshop, we will provide you with a voucher that you can use to attend a future workshop or any other purchase at Plant Empire. We regret that we are unable to provide vouchers for cancellations made within 24 hours of the workshop.
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Multi-pass discount: Sign up for 2 or more Plant Empire events, or register 2 or more people for the same event, to receive 10% off the ticket price (discount will appear at checkout).