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Tone to color in Portraits

• Teacher: Ruthie V.
• Fee: Model fees included in course price
• Class Length: 8 week session
• Class Days: Fridays, beginning April 21
• Time: 6:00 – 8:30 pm PDT

Friday evenings have become “hang out and draw” nights, with a quickly moving sequence of lesson, drawing or painting time, and feedback. This class series will start with inspirations in tone, then expand into sketching in warm & cool grey-tones, dip our toes in a limited palette, and then drop us all into a pool of color. Photographs and self portraits will be our references, but to pull us away from the temptation to copy or produce realism, we will practice various ways of thinking about line, tone, and color so the process of drawing or painting is the goal, not a preformed idea. We will explore form, contour, space, mass, pathways, point-to-point, temperature, and color. Artists will be encouraged to work between careful measuring and purposeful distortions for process-rich drawings and paintings. With long poses that continue through the class, we’ll have time to explore full compositions and layered expressions of the figure in interior. Classical and contemporary approaches will be presented, and artists will be encouraged to develop their own individual style.

If you have taken this class before, take it again! No class series is ever the same, each series offers new ideas within familiar structures. Returning students will find they “get” the concepts faster and are able to take their work to new levels, or travel farther down some pathways that looked particularly interesting.

Inspirations: Diebenkorn, David Park, Gretna Campbell, Giacometti, Sargy Mann, Katherine Kehoe, Cecily Brown, Seurat’s tonal drawings, Ginny Grayson, Sangram Majumdar, Oskar Kokoschka, Kathe Kollwitz, Euan Uglow, Stanley Lewis, Janice Nowinski, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Nicholas Uribe, Emil Joseph Robinson, Cezanne, Alice Neel.

Materials List 

Artist’s choice: Artists can work in charcoal, acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, colored pencils, pastels, digital, collage. Must be comfortable experimenting in your chosen media. Items below in bold are strongly suggested, but whatever you have is fine.

• HB & 6B pencil
• Soft willow charcoal sticks
• Plastic eraser such as Caran D’Ache Technik or similar
• A few sheets mixed media paper such as Arches 22×30″ 90lb cold press watercolor paper (for drawing and mixed media) or similar
• Chamois
• Straight stick, such as a long bamboo skewer or ruler
• White acrylic + tiny amount of a few colors
• Masking tape (for taping drawings to a board or the wall)
• Drawing paper such as 14” Strathmore-400 or similar
• Inexpensive canvas, durable gessoed paper, or panels (artist’s choice size – avoid square)
• A few brushes (whatever you have)
• Easel or drawing board so your work can be vertical instead of horizontal

Portrait painting by Emma Nadolny