Face-to-Face: Drawing & Painting a Portrait

Creating a portrait can improve artistic skills for anyone – whether experienced artist or absolute beginner. This course emphasises individual choice of medium and subject, introducing some easy-to-absorb seeing skills to apply in a likeness of your favourite person – or animal!

Using a few “easy-to-understand and apply” techniques, our experienced tutor and artist will show you how to improve your ability to “capture a likeness”. Emphasis is on the individual choice of portrait but there will also be plenty of opportunity to practise drawing from a live person! Along the way we will select some unique artists who have taken portrait as a favourite subject and apply some of those techniques to our own work.

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:
- Understand and apply some standard proportions for drawing the face (human or animal)
- Demonstrate how to use those proportions to compare standard measurements with individual faces
- Use a chosen medium in a wider variety of ways and choose another to develop
- Draw on an appropriate seeing skill to develop a particular part of the portrait
- Recognise and apply some ‘signature’ features of both realistic and expressionist portraiture
- Complete at least two finished portraits

Initial paper and pencils included but feel free to bring along other drawing or painting materials you enjoy using, plus a photograph or image to use as a subject.

Wellington High School Presenter: Ian Logan