Pastel portrait art course

Pastel portrait art course

19th and 20th of March 2016

Anna. pastel. 23x30cm. P Milner

Saturday

We spent an intense weekend working and I’m pleased with the quality of the pictures produced.

I have two statue heads which served as models for the first morning. This is a traditional and useful way of illustrating how light and shade make up the volume of the head.

drawing from the statues.

Construction of the head.

After lunch Remy posed and the students adapted this method of ‘construction’ to a live model, as in the

During the second half of Saturday afternoon, Anna posed for a longer pastel portrait. which was to be continued the following day.

Sunday

We looked at some examples of portraits, considering artist’s colour choices in their work.

I printed had printed out photos of Mathilde and we used these to work from, exploring portrait colour possibilities with pastel, integrating the skin colour into the background and using cross hatching to enrich the modulations of the face in pastel. It’s always so interesting how each student’s individual style is present when working from the same subject. this is one of the things I really enjoy about teaching art courses.

On Sunday afternoon finished off with Anna as a model, taking up the same pose and enabling the students to continue with their pastel paintings.

model posing in the studio.