I’m often telling myself I ought to make more time for creative pursuits and one way I find easy to do this is take an art class.  It had been a while since I’d been able to take a class, so I signed up for two running at the same time at City Lit.

Class 1 – Starting Portraits

I’ve made a couple of attempts at drawing portraits from photos at home, so thought it would be interesting to get some guidance and the chance to work with a model.

In the first lesson we used charcoal, explored some of the main points around face structure and were given a few tips on how to draw the features.

We were also give a photo print out and homework to draw a portrait from it.  I enjoyed this exercise and was quite pleased with my first attempt, but after completing it realised that the proportions were a little off so decided to try again.  I was quite surprised by the result, not only were the proportions better but the whole portrait seemed to have a lot more life to it – just goes to show the value of practice!

For the second lesson we worked with charcoal, coloured paper and also introduced some black and white chalk to create stronger contrasts between light and dark.

In the third lesson we had a different model and after an initial charcoal and chalk drawing started to introduce colour with some chalk pastels.

Then for the final lesson we didn’t have a model, but worked from one of our previous drawings and from this drew another piece then a final work with paint.  I’d need a bit more time to blend the colours in better with this one (the aim was more to get the tones right than to mix accurate colouring), but it was a useful exercise.

Class 2 – Painting and Photography

The class covered not only ways of painting using photographs as references, but also gave us a few ideas for combining photographs and painting to create pieces.

This was the first class I’ve taken where the students chose what they work on, as we each brought in photographs that we wanted to work from.  This felt quite strange at first, really just because I’m used to being given at least a starting point in classes, but then it was great to be able to work on my choice of subject while getting feedback from the tutor.

I decided to work from a rhino photo I took while on safari a few years ago.  I first used the gridding up method to transfer the outline and key features to my paper.  I’d learnt this technique in school but hadn’t used it in years as for some reason I’d got it into my head that this was cheating – that belief has definitely been dispelled now and while I don’t think I’d want to use it to transfer lots of details, I found that having a good basic outline knowing the proportions were correct allowed me to be a lot freer as I started painting.

For painting, I used acrylics and just the primary colours (warm and cool tone of each) and white.  This meant I was doing a lot of mixing of black, but think this was definitely worth it as the slight hues of different colours make for a more interesting painting than just different shades of grey from pure black.

I’m really happy with this painting and think it will be the first painting I’ve done in a class that goes up on a wall (another advantage of getting to choose the subject as well as working on a single piece over multiple weeks).

Taking the classes at the same time was enjoyable as I got to apply learnings from one to the other.  Overall conclusion is that I want to work on more animal portraits – good job I’ve got all those safari photos to work from!