Portraiture for Beginners - West Bridgford Methodist Church - Adult Learning

The Portraiture for beginners course will introduce you to the skills needed to begin making portraits. We will be exploring different ways of creating drawn and painted portraits, using a range of different techniques and media. Some experience of drawing and painting is useful, but not essential as throughout the course you will be building on and extending your existing skills. Each week will have a different creative focus, exploring the formal elements of line, mark making, tone, proportion, form and colour through a range of different drawing, painting and printing techniques, developed from observation.

You will also have the chance to experiment with a range of media (including pencils, oil pastels, inks, and acrylic paints) to develop your personal skills further. You will learn about the tradition of portraiture and self-portraits, different drawing and painting techniques and how to use formal elements and media effectively through looking at and discussing other artists work and by demonstrations, personal experimentation and individual tuition. By the end of the course, everyone will have explored and gained confidence in using a range of drawing and painting techniques to produce portraits and gained skills for future art and design work.

What will learners achieve by the end of the course? You will be able to:

• Discuss how other artists have created portraits and self-portraits using formal elements (line, tone, markmaking, form, proportion and colour).

• Use line drawing to describe shape.

• Use tone to describe form, surface and contrast.

• Use colour to explore shape, form and contrast.

• Produce observational portraits and self-portraits using a range of drawing, printing and painting media.

• Use art and design language confidently to describe your own work and others.

Please bring to the course with you:-

• Apron or big shirt.

• B, 2B, 3B pencils, rubber–WH Smiths, Amazon.

• Range of paintbrushes- pack from The Works, WH Smith or Amazon.

• Scissors.

• Charcoal or charcoal pencils. Hobbycraft, Amazon.

• Set of acrylic paints, The Works, The Range, Hobbycraft, Amazon.

• Water pot.

• A3 cartridge paper pad (at least 140g paper) – (example Daler Rowney A3 cartridge pad yellow and red cover, or Seawhites cartridge paper pad) The Range, Hobbycraft, WH Smith Amazon.

• Palette- The Works, Hobbycraft, The Range, Amazon.

• Oil pastels (if you have them).