Interiors & Traces / Drawing Spaces

Thursdays 17 September – 26 November 2026 Tutor: Jill Martin Boualaxai This course treats the Heart of Newhaven building as a kind of living archive — full of textures, corners, echoes and old stories. We’ll use the building (and bits of Newhaven’s history) as the starting point for a project that grows through drawing, colour and mixed media. We begin in sketchbooks with quick interior studies, rubbings, tonal notes and small structural sketches — a gentle way of gathering visual information from the space. These pages become your research: the marks, textures and odd little details you’ll build from. As the weeks go on, we pull in old maps, photos and small archival fragments connected to the school and the area. Not to copy — just to spark ideas around texture, atmosphere and composition. From there, we shift into colour and mixed media. Think collage, egg tempera, oils, colour monoprint, layered drawing — all feeding back into your sketchbook research. It’s very process-led, and the aim is to develop a small body of connected work rather than a single final piece. By the end you’ll have a bundle of drawings, colour studies and mixed-media pieces that sit together as your own response to the building and its history. You’ll explore: • interiors, structure + architectural rhythm • rubbings, surface impressions + texture notes • drawing from maps, photos + local fragments • collage, pigment, egg tempera + small oil studies • colour monoprint + simple transfers • building a series from place-based research