Are you looking to invigorate your organization with engaging presentations and hands-on workshops? With 20 years of teaching experience and a proven track record of successful collaborations with various art groups, colleges, and studios, I bring valuable insights and dynamic teaching methods to the table. My interactive sessions are tailored to meet the specific needs of your audience, ensuring a memorable and impactful experience. Let’s work together to inspire creativity with artist talks, art material lectures, art classes, workshops & critiques—contact me to discuss how I can contribute to your goals!
Popular Classes / Workshops
Pet Portraits
Join Sharlena in the studio to capture the colourful character of your beloved pet in this playful acrylic painting workshop! Work from your own photo and follow a step-by-step process to create a fun portrait to gift or keep. All levels are welcome, Drawing experience is an asset.
Fearless Drawing
Give more life to your drawings and build confidence with foundational and conceptual exercises that resolve and work through creative ideas. This course will provide technical fundamentals and experimental inspiration for developing drawing skills through observation, memory, and imagination. Projects will integrate stylistic techniques and creative expression by exploring materials, composition, mark-making, 3D shading, referencing images and introducing colour — all to engage with your inherent abilities and to liberate your flourishing artistic spirit! Perfect for beginners, with optional challenges for Intermediate artists.
Spirit Trees
Develop your observational skills and technical mastery to render extraordinary trees and landscapes with dynamic depth in a classical medium. Complete projects capturing the personality of various tree species, patterns in bark and dancing leaves, secrets to referencing photographs, creating 3D illusions and remarkable details to showcase the unique characteristics and spirit of trees.
Animal Crackers • Ink Drawing
Learn how to draw curious and wonderful animals using various formats of ink. Get comfortable with classical and expressive mark-making, creating depth, patterns and textures. Perfect for Beginners, with optional challenges for Intermediate artists.
Fantastic Animals • Soft Pastels
This wild adventure explores projects of uniquely fantastical animal portraits using soft pastels. Fantastic Animals provides the technical confidence of knowing your materials, rendering accurate proportions and experiencing joy in the creative process. Each class features an animal portrait project, motivating critiques and being proud of your artwork.
Expressive Landscapes
Journey into the magical realms of your imagination with intuitive painting methods for abstracting from nature’s inspiration. Explore photo referencing tricks, dynamic compositions, unconventional tools, brushwork and colour harmonies, acrylic mediums and mixed media experimentation, all to help convey new ways of representing what you see and how you feel about the world around you. Inspiring demonstrations and exercises support Open Studio time for work with guidance in a nurturing and collaborative environment, celebrating fearless expression!
Colourful Skies
Make your mark with lyrical brushstrokes! Master brush techniques using acrylic paint to capture the movement and vivid colour of clouds and water reflections of a sunset landscape. This workshop aims to develop a confident, signature stroke that will convey the spirit and tone of narrative elements in your future works.
Mini Masters: Fauvism
For Lovers of Colour! These sessions will study the history and theory of the Fauvists, to inspire colour explorations in your personal artwork. These classes will focus on colour, technique and stylization as we learn about this brief, yet powerful art movement that follows Impressionism and leads into expressionism. Previous experience in your chosen medium is essential. Artists for study: Henry Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Andre Derain, and Auguste Herbin.
Mini Masters: Bone Wind Fire
For the love of nature and everyone who has dreamed of walking their own path! Explore the lives and works of Georgia O'Keeffe, Emily Carr and Frida Kahlo. These remarkable women listened to their own voices at a very interesting time in art history, defining a legacy with a connection to nature, passionate drive and skill-based process. Learn from the Masters by studying key works of flowers, landscapes and symbolic imagery, with step-by-step demonstrations, critiques.
Mini Masters: Impressionism
Study the Masters of Impressionism to inspire expressionism in your future brushwork and colour explorations! Look at the history and apply theory Monet and Renoir developed, in mini studies to explore what influenced these Impressionists artists, their work and how painting has since been profoundly affected by the movement.
The Magic of Charcoal
Charcoal is a cosmic medium with many formats and exciting possibilities, from traditional to contemporary applications. Master drawing skills developed during the Renaissance by studying Chiaroscuro and the hazy beauty of Sfumato for dimensional portraits and still life, to experimental and expressive landscapes and abstract designs. Embrace lively discussions, innovative projects for all levels, inspiring demonstrations, constructive critiques, and finding joy in the process of creating beautiful, exciting works of art!
Mixed Media • Drawing & Painting
Let’s talk about the power of drawing and painting combined. Mixed media can be daunting even if we technically understand our favorite materials. Knowing what mediums and surfaces work well together, permission to test and be experimental, and confidently break-rules are important and empowering.
Acrylic Confidence
Everyone deserves to paint with confidence, and this series of classes provides all levels of artists with the technical knowledge of acrylic paint and mediums to do just that. Learn essential techniques, starting with the anatomy of polymers, grounds and additives, pigments and colour mixing, plus many innovative possibilities of this modern medium, from glazing to palette knife tools, textures and mixed media. Subject matter will include abstractions to landscapes, and a Master Study with plenty of studio time to finish all projects. Benefit from demonstrations, critiques and personal guidance for beautiful paintings that combine knowledge with the joy of painting!
Fresh Wilds
Paint looser, bolder, freer and lighter! Push the boundaries of expressive mixed media that explore composition for bouquets and flower portraits in various styles. Have fun learning about colour, value, texture, tools and experimental acrylic mixed media combinations while strengthening your observational and conceptual skills to work more intuitively. These classes will be upbeat and liberating, fearlessly wild and philosophical, inspiring your creative courage to bloom.