Micro fiction and artist book creation - 15th Feb 2025

A picture tells 1000 words, but how many words do you need to tell a story? In this fun workshop with local writer Abigail Shepherd and Comrie Art Hut owner and artist Beverly Wainwright, you will learn how to use micro-fiction and drawings to expand your thinking and spark new ideas and creative work.

In the morning we’ll talk about what makes a good story and how to say a lot with only a few words, then you’ll have the opportunity to get your own creativity flowing in an exercise that brings words and drawing together to help unlock the stories in the things around us and an item special to you.

After lunch, we will expand on the ideas of story structure that we discussed in the morning and develop a piece of micro fiction. The final part of the afternoon will be an opportunity to bring all the work you have done so far together into an artist book, which will be a mix of words, drawing and collage.

This workshop is suitable for everyone and has been designed to inspire you to use storytelling to deepen your creative output, whether you are writing, drawing or both.

All materials included. 

Abigail Shepherd is a business copywriter and marketing content creator based in Perthshire. She loves writing anything, but feels a particular affinity to flash fiction. She’s had numerous stories published, including in The Drabble, Flash Fiction Press, Mystery Weekly and Coffin Bell Journal. Her work features everyday scenes or activities, often ending with a surprisingly dark twist or unresolved question for the reader to answer.

Beverly Wainwright has studied art courses at Leith School of  art, Edinburgh and Bridgehouse Art School in Ullapool where she completed her portfolio course. Her first business was ceramics and her studio was in East Lothian. She has  worked in photography and with a group of artists in Barcelona to produce portraits for sale around the world. She currently runs Comrie Art Hut where she teaches short courses in still life and abstract mixed media processes. The art hut is used for her own art practise over the winter

Join Katherine Gallacher for a one day workshop which will introduce you to the historical cyanotype printing process. This is a camera-less form of photography. The workshop will guide you step-by-step through the process of mixing chemicals, coating papers, exposing, and fixing your prints. You will have plenty of opportunity to experiment and leave with your own cyanotype masterpieces, as well as the knowledge to carry on creating at home.

You will also be introduced to a range of different materials to experiment printing with, including natural objects and working with acetate negatives.

No prior experience is needed to participate. 

All materials will be provided but you are welcome to bring your own botanicals. These could be leaves or flowers you've picked up on your way to the workshop or flat objects such as pieces of lace, feathers and even negatives. 

It’s best not to wear your favourite clothes just in case you get chemicals on them. 

What we will cover in the workshop:

1. Introduction to the process and a little history of cyanotype printing.

2. Introduction to different printing materials including plant materials, household objects and using acetate negatives.

3. Mixing chemicals and coating paper using dry and wet cyanotype process.

4. Making your own prints.

5. You will receive a workbook with step-by-step instructions to continue your cyanotype journey at home.

Katherine’s approach is collaborative and inclusive,  participants will be encouraged to pursue their own creative interests. 

Katherine is a Scottish artist with a passion for cyanotype, the creative process where ‘Art meets Science’.  Alongside creating her artwork, she leads workshops sharing her love of cyanotype and works as an art and design teacher in Falkirk. 

​In 2020 Katherine began developing her photography work through the Cyanotype process. Her interest in Cyanotypes comes from Anna Atkins, who was a Botanist and named the first female photographer. Atkins took the process for creating blueprints and transformed it to catalogue her work. 

Katherine loves the unpredictable nature of this process and experiments with traditional formulation by using elements such as vinegar and salt, adding them to the process to change the colour and texture of each piece.

By collecting flora from her garden and the Scottish countryside Katherine aims to highlight the individuality of each variety and bring wild unforgotten plants and weeds to the fore.  Katherine uses many surfaces as her canvas from watercolour paper, natural fabrics, sheet music and maps. Her

newest collection is an exploration of how colour can be altered in the cyanotype process pre and post-exposure. She has been experimenting with acrylic paints, watercolour inks and watercolour paint with a variety of intriguing outcomes.

Join Clare for a relaxing painting workshop at the beautiful rural retreat of Comrie Art Hut which is based at Comrie Croft, Perthshire. This is a one day, non-residential course focusing on sketching and painting seasonal flowers and plants. You will learn about and experiment with a loose style of watercolour. The workshop is designed to introduce beginners to watercolour and if you are familiar with watercolour already to help nurture and develop your own style. There will be plenty of one-on-one guidance and demonstrations to help enhance your observation and develop expressive painting skills.

All art materials will be provided but if you have your own please feel free to bring watercolour paints, brushes, pencils, sketching paper.

CLARE ROBINSON is a watercolour artist and textile designer with a love for the painterly and softly hand drawn images. She grew up in Cheshire and her love of flowers and fine detail was apparent at a young age. Studying at Manchester College of Art & Design, then graduated with a BA (Hons) in Textile Design from Loughborough College of Art and Design. Working for Menswear and Womenswear brands, London Savile Row as a product developer/buyer and then Samsung Textiles Division, California. She later took a creative design role at the iconic British Heritage Brand, Mackintosh, Glasgow brought her to Scotland. Her watercolours and illustrations are full of delicate, subtle colours, with a hand drawn & sketchy feel to them. Interiors and magazines seems the natural choice to display her work, with a collection of paintings & drawings at deVOL kitchens showroom in New York, illustrating for Liz Earle Wellbeing Magazine and exhibiting in galleries in Scotland.

Join Rebecca for a creative/writing workshop with Rebecca Sharp, drawing from themes explored by her new poetry collection Long Field Loop. When so much of moving forward includes looking back, the poems in Long Field Loop make space for making amends – where land, humans and more-than-humans explore patterns of experience in times of reckoning. Set within the wider context of late-stage capitalism, seismic global unrest and climate crisis, Sharp’s poems consider how we find our feet again, the recovery of values and voice, what we must lay to rest and how we carry on. Unspooling all of this, the workshop – a Loopshop – explores geologic and other expressions of time, energy and ecology; layers, cycles, patterns, overlaps, interconnectedness, disruption and repair. Through a series of bespoke written, visual and combined exercises, we’ll identify loops we want to break for individual and collective progress; and those we want to reinforce or renew.

First presented at the Scottish Poetry Library in October 2024 as a 3-hour workshop, this 2-day extended Loopshop for Comrie Art Hut is a unique opportunity to experiment further with the themes and techniques, looping them into new written, visual and all forms of hybrid work.

“I have never come away from a workshop with so many new ideas and techniques. It has been a gamechanger for my own creative practice. It’s very rare to attend an event that offers so many new approaches, well researched information and unique techniques. Rebecca’s workshop was truly inspirational and also simply joyful.” Britta Benson

DAY 1 - Indoor presentation of concepts, themes and imagery. Some ice-breaker visual and writing exercises. A local walk – with creative note-taking. Indoors to close, mapping and writing. 

DAY 2 - Gathering materials, then the walk again, different this time. Creative note-taking, mapping. Indoors to collate material into written and visual forms.

Rebecca Sharp is a poet, playwright and interdisciplinary artist based in Fife. Poetry includes Long Field Loop (Tapsalteerie 2024), listed for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, which she researched and wrote as the inaugural Artist in Residence with the Centre for Energy Ethics (University of St Andrews) 2022-2024. Rough Currency (Tapsalteerie 2021) explores the poetics of oil and the imagination, receiving a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature, and an Art of Energy Award. Interdisciplinary collaborations have been shortlisted for the Scottish Landscape Awards and the Brush & Lyre Prize for Multimedia Poetry.

About Long Field Loop:

“…an extraordinary, utterly unique collection, exploring the faultline between science and poetry, and proving, in doing so, that science in the right hands can be a form of song. This intelligent, resourceful book is an antidote to the Anthropocene – hugely informative, hugely readable, written to remind us of the beauty and fragility of our relationship with the natural world.” – John Glenday, poet

THIS WORKSHOP IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY 

THE CENTRE FOR ENERGY ETHICS