Work together with your tutor in a friendly and inclusive group to discover the limits of your materials and your imagination as you experiment by combining watercolour, oil pastel and collage to make portraits. This is a new approach and we should benefit from each other’s results as we share ideas. The course includes practical work, discussions and demonstrations. There is some formal tuition to help you but no right or wrong answers!
Course aim
Use watercolour, oil pastel and collage to make imaginative portraits
Do I need any particular skills or experience?
- For students at all levels. Beginners should not give up if the course seems to move too fast for them. Artists are always exploring and never completely understand what they are doing! The other students are always encouraging and supportive.
By the end of the course I should be able to:
- Use watercolour and oil pastel separately and in combination to make interesting effects and to produce collage materials
- Work with the subject and materials in a playful and exploratory way without making premature judgements about the results
- Adjust the spatial relationships between facial features to make a convincing portrait
- Use loose-lay collage to test new compositional possibilities
- Select from multiple experiments to make one or more portrait compositions
What else do I need to know?
Bring: head and shoulders photos of people important to you, good quality (not budget) watercolour paper approx A3 size, kitchen roll/clean rags, watercolours, brushes, water pot, oil pastels, PVA or acrylic matt medium, plastic sheet or old newspaper, scissors. Some materials available to borrow
View full course information sheet
Experimental portraits in watercolour, oil pastel and collage
