Figure painting in oils – Spring 2017

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…

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…

For the next 4 weeks we’re going to be painting quickly – getting used to the feel of the paint, enjoying colour, not taking ourselves too seriously and seeing what we can produce. It’s often surprising what you end up with if you choose to paint quickly – some will work out, some won’t. Those…

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…

During classes running through April we looked at colour theory. There’s so much to learn about colour – we could have endlessly experimented with different colour schemes. These lessons only scratched the surface but the results were very interesting. After taking a look at the colour wheel and trying a wide variety of colour mixes, we chose…