The Contemporary Portrait: Drawing And Painting, Days 1 & 2

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm taking a course on portrait drawing and painting at the Royal Drawing School this week. The course is split into charcoal/pastel drawing on the first days with one instructor and oil painting on the last three. Since the first part of the course ended today, I thought I'd write a quick post on how it's going so far.

There are about 25 people with two models each posing for half the participants at a time. Skill levels range from total beginners (such as yours truly) to former art students who want to reconnect with it. In fact, it's split pretty much into those two groups with a couple of intermediate students in between. We were told in the introduction to the course that all classes at the Royal Drawing Schools are taught without separating people into different levels. I quite like this approach since it's allowed me to learn from other participants as well as the teacher.

The teaching overall is pretty hands-off. The mornings and afternoons start with a short presentation of drawings and paintings for inspiration but the rest of the time it's pretty much non-stop drawing. Each time slot starts with some quick 5-7 minute drawings, followed by a longer ~1h drawing. During that time, the teacher walks around the room making comments and suggestions and making herself available for questions.

On the first day, we drew monochromatically with charcoal. I'm pretty happy with how the long drawings (the first two in the gallery above) turned out. I'm learning to see value and move away from drawing everything with lines. It's tough but I really tried to draw the shadows on the faces. Getting rid of the white of the paper is not easy...

Today on day 2, we introduced color by using colored paper and pastels. Some people were also using watercolor and acrylics. I tried making a watercolor painting but wasn't able to paint fast enough to finish in seven minutes. The first drawing in the gallery and the one on the pink paper are the two longer drawings of today. I'm extremely happy with both of them and a little surprised with how well they turned out. I especially like the scarf in the pink painting and how it jumps off the page (I believe the correct term is "it pops"). In both drawings, I think I captured the expressions of the models quite well.

Once the course is over, I'll make another post on the second half of it.