About

Glena Art Studio opens in London on the 1st of November 2022, following seven years long history of the Glena Art Studio project for art education, workshops, and creative events across the UK, Bulgaria, and internationally via online tutoring.

The leader and teacher of the studio is Galina Hristova, a practising artist and educator, with BA and MA in Set and Costume design and MFA in Fine Arts.
Her professional training started at the widely acclaimed National school of Fine Arts ‘Tzanko Lavrenov’, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and was sealed with the MFA Fine Arts Course at Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL, London, UK.

Trained in the academic tradition of painting and drawing, Galina now works multidisciplinary with main focus on Painting and Performance art. Together with her teaching experience, she has led different workshops, presentations, and talks. Her practice expands in curation with the realisation of different art exhibitions and live events.
Galina has six solo exhibitions and a great number of collective shows.

Her purpose as an educator is to guide and encourage students to discover and release their creative potential, but also to support personal development. Through the formation of self-esteem and social integrity, raise values such as equality, compassion, and acceptance.

Teaching Methods

Glena Art Studio facilitates group and 1:1 art classes. They are organised to establish an engaging and responsive interaction between tutor and students.

A systematic process aims to help them effortlessly, with curiosity and attention, learn how to draw and paint from observation and examples, complete additional tasks to explore different mediums and techniques, and integrate those skills by applying fundamental theory and practice to depict and recreate competently every subject or motif from life and imagination.

In Glena Art Studio’s classes, the learning process is based on classical principles of representation. They are further developed and integrated into a broad range of creative tasks and artworks. The students learn how to recreate reality through observation and to develop their personal style further.

The foundation begins with studying the elements of composition, proportions, scaling, tone, and colour. Through shading in black and white material and colour, students acknowledge the organization of shades and highlights resulting from the effects of light. They explore how to understand form and how to define it to appear accurate and convincing as a 3-dimensional value in the 2-dimensional space. 

The standard methodology starts from drawing with a pencil, followed consistently by watercolour, gouache or acrylic, and oil. After mastering the basics, different techniques expand into producing texture and materiality to exploit the qualities of each medium.  The students collect a ‘toolbox’ of skills and train their perception to construct complex elements and compositions.  While studying the fundaments, they explore all genres and various subjects while experimenting with additional mediums such as charcoal, soft and oil pastels, collage, mixed media, working from example, imagination, and external references.

In the teaching process, areas of Perspective, anatomy, Design, and History of Art are also implemented as an integral part of the Visual arts practice.

Adults

Those principles are introduced to adult students while they work on a selected theme or a subject. The introductory classes cover work from observation to support their process – to help them understand and apply the ‘laws’ of art to their creative work and experimentation. Themes are suggested by the tutor and discussed with each student to target the student’s particular direction of interest. The individual approach depends on the goals the student set for themselves and the difficulty of requirements increases according to the level and pace of progress.

Children 

The age between 8 and 12, depending on the pace and experience of the student, is suitable for introduction into the first steps of acknowledgement drawing fundaments. They are slowly introduced in simplified examples to move securely into each next stage. Explanatory observation over Still lifes combined with accessible basic theory aims to train visual perception and the ability to transfer the observed object correctly in the picture plane.  After a considerable level of experience, the subjects become more complicated, challenging, and demanding. The other genres and, at this stage, still relatively ‘free’ use of different mediums are introduced simultaneously in classes and as homework assessments.

The Youngest

The classes with the youngest students in the age category 6-8 focus on exploring a diverse range of themes. Figurative compositions, the world of nature in flora and fauna, as well as the world of books and film characters… Our young students are encouraged to express their intuitive approach to representation and give visual metaphors of their imaginary realms.  Theories of composition, shape, and colour are implemented in a playful way to navigate the imagination towards the next stage of learning Art.