Breaking into Portrait Painting in Oils with Nicholas Thorp

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In this hands-on workshop you will paint four portraits over three days to establish a foundation in painting portraits in oil. Three will be painted with an alla prima technique, and one will be painted using the slower indirect, academic approach. This will give you a wide variety of tools to start you on the exciting road of painting portraits.

Each morning you will paint one portrait in alla prima, with a focus on mixing paint and simplifying shapes to get a likeness without being distracted with too much detail. These portraits will be complete in a single session. The first day this will be in black and white in order to improve your accuracy and get good values (how dark or light a color is.) The next two days, we will expand our color options to the famous Zorn Palette. This palette simplifies the strategy of mixing colors so you can mix any skin tone without being overwhelmed.

In the afternoon sessions, we will develop a single portrait instead over all three days using an indirect technique. The first day, we will do a preparatory drawing of the portrait to focus on measuring to get an accurate foundation for our painting. The next two days you will be layering the paint to build up a more detailed image. Initially this will be in thin washes of paint and then thicker, opaque paint on top.

Between these two approaches, you will leave with a confident foundation to paint portraits of friends or family members or whoever. If you have wanted to learn how to paint portraits but were too intimidated to try, this is a great opportunity to break into portraiture in oil paints.

A variety of reference images will be provided to you, but you may bring your own if you wish. 

Even though this class is for beginners, it is preferred that you have some basic experience in drawing or painting, even if in a different medium or subject matter (e.g., watercolor landscapes, or acrylic still lifes.)