WEA courses

Part of the WEA Art and About Festival 2024. This course will provide opportunities to make drawing studies of female sculptural forms from a variety of ancient cultures in the British Museum. This includes comparisons with examples from Greek, Roman and Aztec cultures found on pots, temple columns, busts and smaller figurines. These drawing activities hope to provide a deeper insight into their visual differences as well as symbolic details. This will then enable us to reflect on and discuss what we can uncover about women's lives and their roles in those societies. Meeting Point is the Lion in the main Atrium at the British Museum

Ever wished that you had the skill to add figures to your artwork? Not quite ready to attend a life drawing class? This short course is an ideal introduction to the basics of figure drawing. Our experienced and supportive tutor will lead you through exercises covering proportion, posture, character and clothing. It will give you the confidence to create characters to include in your own paintings and feel able to tackle figure drawing from life. We will not be working from a life model. A great short course to get you started with figure drawing.

Explore your creativity through clay. You will learn about the materials, tools, and techniques to hand build pots using air drying clay. Create your own unique pieces of ceramic art, learning skills and techniques to complete your work with surface decoration, pattern, and texture. Ideal for beginners, the tutor will guide you through the process in a fun and supportive class. Join us to enjoy some calm creativity and find a new hobby for the summer.

Are you looking for a relaxing hobby to help you unwind? Creating moments of calm in the day is essential for our emotional well-being and mental health. Step into the world of mindful crafts with this course and enjoy art for relaxation. This creativity course allows you to explore your art skills to find practices that soothe you. This watercolour painting course can help you find a relaxing hobby.

This drawing course is for beginners who wish to find out about the basic skills of drawing. The course content will cover a range of drawing techniques whilst investigating the qualities of the drawing materials. You will learn about expressive mark-making, quick timed sketching, contour drawing, tonal drawing whilst recording from primary and secondary resources. You will be discovering the importance of line, tone, cross hatching, shape, pattern, and texture and how to scale up using a grid system. You will be using a variety of media which will include, pencils, fine liners, chalk, and charcoal pencils.

Empower yourself with practical skills to manage your money, make savvy shopping decisions, and master the art of budgeting with our Money Management Essentials course. Explore everyday scenarios like comparing prices, optimizing transportation costs, and meal planning, gaining insights to navigate personal finance confidently. With interactive lessons, practical exercises, and flexible learning, this short course is tailored for beginners and those seeking to refine their financial literacy. Join us on the path to financial empowerment and take control of your financial future today!

Do you get worried when you use computers or the internet or other digital technologies ? You want to learn digital skills but didn't know where to start ? If the answer is 'yes!' this is the course for you. This course is for learners with basic or no experience of digital technologies but who want to develop skills to use them in their everyday life . We will help you develop confidence while using laptops, smart phones, reading emails, news, word processing, using social media and more!

This eight week course is a public speaking course, where you will learn about the fundamentals of public speaking and be recording speaking about a subject that you are passionate about to a peer. Then listening to it and deciding how you could improve your public speaking. You will be guided by our expert tutor who will offer advice and techniques; all of which are designed to improve your delivery when addressing more than one person. All steps towards public speaking will be applauded and celebrated as you learn with others on a course designed to help you present yourself with an air confidence, panache and professionalism.

This five week series of workshops will explore your creativity. We will concentrate on writing drawn from personal experience, writing poems and short stories. Each session will concentrate on one specific aspect of inspiration and technique, and at the conclusion of each session students will have created enough material to be in a position to write the first draft of a piece of prose or a poem. We will explore how to develop personal experience and transform it into writing. We will also explore narrative shapes of the short story: causative situations, rising action, climax and denouement versus alternative strategies, plot construction: how to build convincing narratives. We will discover characterisation, how to develop psychologies for your evolving characters and traditional and contemporary techniques for poems. Each workshop will be self-contained but taken together will establish the main elements of writing short stories.

An exciting new opportunity to develop your confidence and skills in creative writing is coming to Longley 4G in Sheffield! Whether you are just starting out as a budding writer, or already have lots of experience expressing yourself through writing, this creative writing course will provide you with a platform to develop your talent. It’s a course for anyone, from beginners to those with a little more experience, giving you the opportunity to share skills with others in a friendly community atmosphere.