Fast and Loose: A Direct Approach to Portrait Drawing

This workshop acts as a way for students to either learn about the complete process of portrait drawing loosely and quickly, helping them see the whole process play out organically over a short period of time. It also allows students who have done portraits before to sharpen their skills under a time crunch and work more intuitively and organically, blending stages together that they already know. To aid in this fast and loose approach, we will work with any and all tools: blending stumps, our fingers, pencil erasers, graphite powder, a range of pencils. 

Day one will start with a demo by John. Students will then begin by linearly laying out the major contour lines of the head, then proceed to mass in values softly and flatly. Once general proportions and feature locations are correct, more values are added, still keeping things soft. Over time, we will start to darken and sharpen areas bringing up the drawing as a whole until each part has been fully realized. 

Students will do one portrait the first day, followed by four 3hr portraits the next few days, and then end with one 6hr portrait on the final day.

Throughout the class, a heavy emphasis will be put on the structure of a portrait from an anatomical standpoint and how this relates to form, giving students an understanding of what they are looking at. This will include the structure of the skull, the planes of the face, and the shape and structure of the features of the face.

John’s method includes one on one critiques and demos. 

Dates: Sep 3-6

Times: 9:30 - 4:30