Impressionist Portraits

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…

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…

This spring we’ve painted on a larger canvas – a (nearly) full figure oil painting over the course of 4 weeks. Starting with preparing the background with graded colour in acrylics, we then used a grid to get our image onto paper. This was transferred to the canvas and the figure was painted in oils. Finally, the whole…