Figure painting in oils – Spring 2017

What fun we had with these impressionist portraits. After getting over the initial nerves at painting a couple of portraits in a 2.5 hour session, let alone portraits from the great impressionists, the paint was flowing and faces started to appear. This was a great exercise in a number of things. Firstly, practicing portraits without…

We’re looking at small, speedy painting in this block of lessons. We’re concentrating on getting an idea of the subject across with minimum fuss, learning to paint what we see plus practice colour finding. Whether we like to paint in detail or loosely, this is a good exercise to do as it requires little time…

A bit late bringing this post to you – these portraits were painted in lessons during January and the beginning of February. We took our time over these paintings; once we’d sketched the image onto tracing paper using the grid method, we transferred it to our canvas. Some folks had prepared a plain canvas with…

After a week of portraits, some students fancied trying a still life subject so we chose Cezanne as a reference for his bold colours and brushwork. These were painted in a similar manner to the portraits – in oils, around an hour per painting. I think they’ve come up with some great paintings. These little…

What a lovely day I had with the artists from South Muskham art group. We painted a portrait in oils – starting with preparing an acrylic background on our canvas, learning a method for gridding to get our image in proportion before transferring to the canvas. We then had fun painting with oils. The subject…