4 week course, Thursday evenings, 6-8pm, 5th – 26th June
Full course £80 or £72 for Two Queens members
Book your place on Eventbrite here
Join us for this intermediate level, 4-week course with artist Tom Robertson to develop your skills in making portraits with Oil Paint.
In this course participants will have space to develop their understanding of how oil paint handles, hone their approach to colour palette mixing, and experiment with unconventional surfaces as a basis for effective portraits. Through the 4 week course, participants will work using unconventional surfaces, exploring the relevance of why the ‘ground’ of a painting is useful for underpinning the entire image, before working with a restrictive four-colour palette in the stages of underpainting and deadcolouring, building the painting through alternating cool and warm values, as found in some Dutch Master paintings. The final week will see the paintings refined and shifted to finalise the composition through glazing, scumbles and velatura.
Each week Tom will guide participants through a series of exercises, with time for independent working, producing a series of studies and outcomes.
Course Structure
Week 1, 5th June, 6-8pm: Preparation of a surface with a traditional ground & exercises in committing to mark making through confident brushwork
Week 2, 12th June, 6-8pm: Underpainting 1: Establishing and correcting form through cool tones
Week 3, 17th June, 6-8pm: Underpainting 2: Deadcolouring with warm tones
Week 4, 26th June, 6-8pm: Introducing colour through glazing, scumbles and velatura.
All materials and equipment for this course are provided. Participants are encouraged to bring a colour portrait photograph to work from, and a surface to paint on. Weird and wonderful discarded materials are encouraged – any rigid surface or piece of fabric that can be applied to a board for example.
This is an intermediate level course, aimed at those with some experience in painting and/or figurative drawing, and who are looking to develop their skills further. If you are a complete beginner, please consider signing up for our ‘Portrait Club’ sessions first.
