Impressionist Portraits

Hats off to everyone with these studies in acrylics – not only were folks very restrained and resisted the temptation to eat the still life in front of them, they also did a fantastic job at a deceptively tricky subject. Painting cakes is harder than you think – have a go and post your results…

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…

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…

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…

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…