Portrait Workshops – how children of different ages approach portrait painting

I started running Portrait Workshops recently after asking my students what they find most difficult to paint. Their collective answer was “portraits” and that didn’t surprise me. “Every year at school we are asked to paint a self-portrait and I hate it! I don’t know where to start from and it never looks like me.” – said one of them.

I want to teach my students mixing colours, techniques with different materials, perspective, proportions, shading, but also how to be artists and gain confidence in their own artistry that they can draw and paint everything! So why not helping them with what they find most difficult.

The portrait workshop is focused on how to start sketching; learning face proportions, face features and mixing skin colours. Students have fun painting favourite or imaginative characters while developing artistic and technical skills with experienced Master’s level qualified tutor in my face. The workshop is longer than our weekly art lessons to give us more time to focus on the portrait and to create beautifully finished artwork by the end of it, ready to be framed and hanged on a wall.

I want to point out how different each artwork is from the others. The instructions I give to my students are the same, but the artworks are different. The most important thing for me is to teach my students to be brave and express themselves through colors and shapes, by using the pencils and brushes to create different marks. I don’t teach my students to copy the samples, me or my work, my style or my creative vision. I teach them something much more important: How to see the world with their own eyes. How to develop their own creative vision. How to be real artists! This is my mission because this is what brings me inner satisfaction in my work as a teacher.

If you or your child want to learn to draw or paint a portrait, practice proportions and different facial features, mixing skin colors, join my workshop. We create a different portrait each time. Portraiture is perhaps the most difficult and there is always something new to learn.