Just finished facilitating a 6 week short course at Splashout Art Studios. It’s been a fun and interesting journey with a great group of 10 lovely participants. I’m so grateful for their enthusiasm and courage to try the things presented in this course, and their encouragement and curiosity towards my own methods of painting.

We’ve covered alot of ground with great results, and as always I learnt alot myself as we wrestle through what it is I’m attempting to teach. So many great questions came up during the course, some questions that had me thinking for days…and that’s the beautiful thing about teaching, you learn even more about what you already know…or at least think you already know.

lesson 1

The first lesson we looked at the structure of the head facing forward.

To make this an interesting lesson I needed to put together a task that participants could do to explore drawing front facing heads with paint.

lesson prep

playing around in my journal in the days before the first lesson helps me figure out what will work as a task to complete within the 2.5 hours lesson time.

All participants did a great job for the first lesson, I thought.

lesson 2

For the second lesson we looked at turned heads. This is alot more complicated because there’s so many variations and possibilities for a head that’s turned and/or tilted. We practiced drawing the template on paper together, from different angles using both a reference photo and from imagination.

For this lesson’s task we explored drawing the tilted head with two colours plus white oil paint using solvent as a thinner.

Burnt sienna and viridian plus white is a fabulous limited pallet to explore faces with.

For this task we all painted the same image to start with.

lesson 3

for this lesson we looked at the profile and skin.

we really covered alot of ground in this lesson so I forgot to take photos of all the work, like I should’ve taken photos of the pallets and the colour mixing which took up at least half of the lesson.

for my own preparation I painted one of the images we were looking at during my presentation.

I thought I’d be clever and paint on lovely Japanese paper but I ran into an unexpected difficulty when the ultra porous paper didn’t do what I intended it to do. ha! another problem to solve.

lesson 4

we looked at features and revisited skin and tried the skin pallet on a coloured ground. Again…should’ve taken more photos but was too engrossed in the process.

lesson 5 & 6

For the last two lessons, participants painted a portrait of their choosing on a stretched canvas. For this final painting they can put into practice the things they’ve learnt in the previous lessons, and some participants even had time to revisit one of their earlier studies and add another layer…

check out the work below, aren’t they fabulous!!