Portraiture

This course is built around drawing and painting from the model; observational drawing is at its centre. Likeness - essential to portrait painting - comes through observation. Learning to make measured drawings will increase your awareness of proportion. Through linear and tonal drawing you will become more aware of light and shade. Through an understanding of the square and the rectangle you will become more sensitive to composition. You will learn the traditional methods of scaling up and transferring drawings onto larger sheets of paper, board or canvas. Building upon your drawing experience you will start to understand the tonal meaning of primary colours. At the core of your palette will be two sets of primary colours. These will be the warm primaries: Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, French Ultramarine, and the cool primaries: Lemon Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, Prussian Blue. Using this versitile group of colours you will learn, through trial and error and much individual tuition, to mix colour equivalents of your visual sensations. Greyed-out colours made by complementary mixing (yellow/violet, red/green, orange/blue) will play an important part in this process. ("Adjoining complementary colours intensify each other to the greatest brilliance; mixed, they destroy each other." Johannes Itten, Bauhaus Basic Course 1919.) You will be taught individually, as a group and by tutor demonstration.