Cut Away Edinburgh with Robbie Bushe RSA

Join acclaimed Scottish artist Robbie Bushe RSA to create your own staged worlds filled with figures, actions and events unfolding across a single composition.

Work directly from the streets around the Royal Scottish Academy and transform familiar façades into imagined interior worlds. This masterclass focuses on the cutaway method used in Bushe’s paintings, where buildings are opened up to reveal layered spaces, activity and narrative. Using the contrasts of Georgian Princes Street, nearby brutalist architecture and views towards Edinburgh Castle, you’ll move from direct observation into speculative drawing.

We’ll begin the two-day masterclass by exploring Bushe’s work and the concept of the cutaway as a drawing device. We’ll continue outdoors around Princes Street, where you will draw a series of façades, comparing Georgian architecture with modern and brutalist forms. Through these studies, you’ll produce drawings that will then be reworked through tracing and redrawing, introducing floor levels and sectional cuts to begin opening the buildings.

Next, you’ll develop one drawing by removing walls and revealing the interior, creating spaces that include rooms, figures, movement and light. The final stage of the workshop focuses on refining your drawing, clarifying structure, adding tone or colour and editing before concluding with a group discussion.