art courses – drawing faces

Kaitlin

I’ve been taking a course by artist Marco Mazzoni on the Domestika teaching platfom on drawing chiaroscuro portraits with coloured pencils. Chiaroscuro is a Italian term for a technique which uses strongly contrasting light and dark to create art.

This portrait of Kaitlin from Sktchy is the first one I’ve created using the technique I ’ve been learning in this course. I need a lot of practice but I’m pretty happy with this for a first attempt.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Marco Mazzoni’s course you can find information about it here.

Laura’s husband

I’ve been taking a class on drawing with ballpoint pen in the Sktchy Art School taught by Robin Hilthouse. It’s a great course and the key technique is smooth transitions between colours. I’ve enjoyed it enormously and learned a great deal. However, I know don’t have the patience to work in exactly the same way that Robin does, so by the time I was halfway through this, my final practice portrait for the course, I was starting to adapt and move more towards the kind of hatching I do with coloured pencil. I simply don’t have the patience to create the kind of gentle invisible hatching that Robin creates, and I’m not a realistic artist anyway, so I think I’ll be taking what I’ve learned and using it for a more textured hatching, more like that which I use with coloured pencil, which conveys a sense of the person without creating a realistic portrait. I’ll be practicing more in the coming weeks and I’ll have to see where it takes me.

This was drawn in a Moleskine sketchbook with a variety of Bic and Staedtler ballpoint pens. It took about 5 hours to complete.

Tarana

As well as having a great artist community, Sktchy also offers some great portrait courses. At the moment I’m taking a course with artist Charlotte Hamilton on drawing patterned portraits. This portrait of Tarana was inspired by this course and this week’s Sktchy Patterned Portrait Party.

It was drawn in a Hannehmühle Nostalgie Sketchbook with coloured pencils (from a variety of makers).

The good news is that, although you need an IOS device to have Sktchy app, you don’t need one to take a Sktchy course because they run on the Mighty Networks platform which is available via an app and a website. If you’re interested in finding out more about Sktchy’s portrait courses you can find out more by visiting the Sktchy shop at https://shop.sktchy.com.