Make a splash

Are You Ready to Create Loose Portraits with Interesting Backgrounds?  Would You Like to Explore a Painting Process that Begins with Freedom and Letting Go?

Make a splash

In this course, Emma will show you her fun and free way of creating intuitive abstract paintings, which will later become the base for your portraits!  We will explore using these colorful and strong underpaintings as the foundation for our portraits, and allow them to stay in the forefront of our work.  Gift yourself the freedom to reveal, and not feel the need to conceal.  I hope to see you in class where we will let go and have fun!

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this course students will have an understanding of the following concepts:

• Learn to see the shapes within each face, the contours and plains that make up a face
• Create large abstracted splashy colourful underpainting
• Reveal your underpainting in your portraits.
• Play with composition and placement of your portrait
• Loosen up in your portrait work
• Experiment with working fast and letting go

DESCRIPTION OF LESSONS

We will begin first lesson with observation, as this is the most important tool in painting portraits, people and faces.  We will learn to see the shapes within each face, the contours and planes that make up the face.  Next we will move on to create a large, colourful, abstracted, splashy underpainting.  We will take this piece and split it into smaller pieces to use as backgrounds for our portraits.  I will show you how to embrace these techniques to make your own, unique paintings.  After we create our colourful backgrounds, we will learn to resist temptation as we learn to reveal our underpainting within our portraits!

We often create our portraits in a vertical position.  Let’s play with orientation and create a horizontal portrait while exploring composition.  We will experiment with placement of the head, omitting the top of the portrait to create interest, and more.  Following this lesson, I will teach you how to spend some time with smaller studies.  This is a great way to practice and embrace the abstract nature of moving fast and using loose line and brush strokes.  Learn to pay attention to values, highlights and shadow.  Finally, we will move onto a canvas.  In this lesson, paint larger while adding texture using a variety of mediums.  In this piece, we will add hands to our portrait to create more emotion and interest.

MATERIALS

Below is a list of the supplies that I will be using for the projects in this course.  However, you are always encouraged to use what you have on hand.

Substrate

• Large sheet of mixed media paper (20×22, 22×26) a sketch book would also be equally fine.
• 4 x A4 sheets of mixed media paper (taped to a drawing board)
• 16×20 Canvas

Drawing 

• Black Chinagraph or charcoal pencil
• Derwent charcoal pencil in black
• Stabilo ‘marks all’ in black
• Neo colours crayons or pencils

Acrylic paint

• Amsterdam turquoise green
• Amsterdam Greenish Blue
• Amsterdam pyrole red
• Amsterdam raw sienna
• Amsterdam titanium white
• Amsterdam paynes grey or black
• Amsterdam azo orange (a bright orange)
• Vallejo cobalt turquoise (any turquoise blue will do)
• Vallejo cadium red hue #45 (a rusty earthy red)
• Pueblo naples yellow hue (a soft creamy custard color)

Paint Brushes

• Flat edge – 2 inch, 1 ½ inch, ½ inch, ¾ and ¼ inch
• Scruffy Old Paint Brush

Mediums

• White gesso
• Plaster of Paris/ fine wall plaster
• White craft glue, wood glue(called PVA Glue in the UK)

Other

• Brayer or foam roller
• Paper tear off palette
• An old credit card or paint scraper
• Paper towels
• Water spray
• Drawing Board
• Masking Tape
• Pastel fixative
• Hair dryer
• Old tub and spoon for mixing