A Workshop on Drawing Portraits

I ran another of my Portrait Drawing Workshops this past weekend.  I've done this one several times before and we've always had a good time.  This class was no exception.  It's a 2-day workshop that goes for about 4 hours in the afternoon.  We don't hire models as we already have enough in the room already.  I have a format that seems to work pretty well.  And I use an unexpected book as a primary reference.  Each of these statements needs a bit of explanation.

These workshops go for no more than four hours because I've found that my students tend to hit the wall at that point.  At three hours, they're still going strong; at four, their eyes start glassing over and the enthusiasm takes a marked downward turn.  So rather than flog a dead horse, I wrap things up while there's still life left in them.  A couple of weeks ago, Robert Hagan ran a workshop in my studio that went from 9-5 for three days with one hour off for lunch.  I saw that the students came close to the saturation mark about the time we broke for lunch.  The break restored our enthusiasm and we wrapped up in the afternoon before we ran out of steam altogether.  So four hours seems to be the maximum amount of time to keep people cooped up and focused on something before they need a break.

I run my workshops in the afternoon.  The reason is simple: I don't like to get up early in the morning!  I did that for many years and don't want to do it again if there's any way around it.  And since I'm the one setting the schedule for my own workshops, there's definitely a way around it.

My portrait workshops don't use hired models.  Instead, all of the students model for each other.  This exposes them to a wide variety of differences in features.  They all have different eyes, noses, mouths, chins, hair (including a lack of), head structures, proportions, and so on.  I shift them around so they don't draw the same individual twice in a row.  And they all get to experience being a model for a bunch of artists and having their features analyzed in a class discussion.  So far, everybody has had a good sense of humor about it. 

For the format of the workshop, I start with a discussion of the basic structure of the head.  I don't break out a skull and have them draw it as that approach never really did much for me.  Instead, I show them a way to quickly build an armature for the head, a quickly sketched basic structure that they could stretch, compress, turn, and arrange as needed.  Then we look at all the various features: eyes, nose, and so forth, and talk about how they're formed and what to look for in each individual.  We also talk about proportions: the relationships between all the different features, some ways to analyze them, and getting them down on paper.  And then we draw each other, one at a time.  These are generally quick drawings, about 15 minutes to draw and then maybe 10 minutes or so to do a group critique.  This is a portrait DRAWING workshop, after all, so they should be drawing as much as possible.

As for my primary reference book, it isn't one about drawing portraits at all, at least not in the traditional sense.  It's The Mad Art of Caricature! A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces, by Tom Richmond.  Yes, my portrait reference is a book about caricatures.  Tom Richmond is one of the best in the world in this field.  You look at one of his figures and you know instantly who it is.  In caricature, you have to identify what makes an individual face unique and then exaggerate it so it's (a) recognizable and (b) funny.  In portraiture, you have to identify what makes an individual face unique and then render it at least somewhat realistically so it's recognizable.  The actions are very similar.  Richmond's book does a much better job at describing everything that goes into capturing the essence of an individual than any fine-art portrait drawing book I've ever seen.  I found my copy at my local Barnes & Noble, but you can get it at Amazon too (of course).

So we had a successful workshop.  I was really and truly impressed by how far the students came in just two days.  Everybody, and I mean everybody, showed improvements in their abilities to see the differences in features and to accurately capture the features in pencil on paper.  It really felt good to see that.  One of the students even asked if I could do this workshop once a month!  Umm, no, but I do give it about two or three times a year.  Maybe I'll do one that's a bit more advanced next time, or focus more on the "drawing" aspect rather than the "seeing".  

A Workshop with Robert Hagan

Last week, my studio was the site of a workshop by Australian artist Robert Hagan.  As you can see from the photo (taken on Day 1), we had a full house of students to soak up whatever this popular artist could teach.  I took the workshop, too, and learned a lot while having a good time.

So how did this come about?  Last summer, I saw a posting on a local artist board, looking for a place that could host the workshop.  I didn't know anything about Robert, but looked him up and discovered that he has a very different style of painting from mine.  And he travels around the world giving these workshops.  So the combination of learning some very different painting techniques while seeing how a pro runs a workshop was too much to pass up.  I volunteered my studio as the location and we took it from there.  It required a good bit of coordination to get everything lined up, but we did it, and Wednesday morning we kicked off the workshop.

Robert is quite the personality.  He is a largely self-taught painter focusing on popular subjects such as people on the beach, cowboys, horses, cattle drives, and similar themes.  Things that I just don't paint.  And as a self-taught artist, he has a very different way of putting paint on canvas.  Many of the things he did are variations on traditional techniques, such as scumbling, but his approach and tools were not at all traditional.  I found it to be quite liberating.  In fact, I have a commission coming up in a couple of weeks and had been wondering how I was going to make it livelier than my usual working style.  Now I have a pretty good idea of ways that I can loosen this commission up.

The other aspect that I wanted to focus on was how he ran the workshop.  I run art workshops several times a year and am still figuring out how to make them effective and fun.  Robert certainly hit it on both counts.  He had us all working from photos so that everybody was making the same paintings.  It was very interesting to see how each student developed their own images.  He's very energetic and personable, too.  No big or sensitive ego.  He's good at what he does, knows it, and wants to share his skills with the students.  He spent a lot of time one-on-one with each one of us, making sure we understood what we were doing.  Very effective and enjoyable.

Robert worked our tails off, too.  We started at 9 am and continued, with a lunch break, until 5 pm each day.  Which meant that I had to be up at 6 am every day in order to get the studio open shortly after 8 for all the early birds.  At the end of the day, the last people trickled out around 6 or later.  Long days.  Now, I am NOT a morning person.  I spent many years in the Navy getting up at 5:30 or 6 and I just don't do it anymore unless it's absolutely necessary.  Not only that, but I was on my feet all day.  I can't paint sitting down.  So three long days of standing wore me out.

At the end, I'd achieved my goals: I'd learned some new techniques and learned a lot about how to run a good workshop.  And we all had a good time.  It took me two days to get my studio back to normal and I just finished today.  So tomorrow, I can start playing with new paintings and try some of these techniques.  Lookin' forward to it!

Who's Your Teacher?

Had an interesting discussion with a couple of artists before tonight's life drawing session in the studio.  One had taken some painting lessons from me and then had taken a workshop with two more well-known artists.  The other has taken a couple of my workshops and has studied with a lot of other artists.  Some of her friends couldn't understand why she studied with so many different people.  "Why don't you just stay with one teacher?" they asked.

I was a bit surprised at that question.  In my experience, when you study with a new teacher, you learn a lot in the beginning.  Then the amount of "new" begins to taper off until you're just getting old lessons reinforced.  There's a good bit of value in that, particularly when your natural style, subject matter, and ways of working mesh with your teacher.  And there's a lot of value in having a long and deep mentor relationship.

But taking classes and workshops from a lot of different teachers has value as well.  You learn a lot of different approaches.  The way I paint a figure is completely different from the way a good friend of mine paints a figure.  My way isn't the "right" way any more than his is.  My way is just right for me.  So when I teach, I show the students my way of working.  I tell them why it works for me, but it's certainly not the only way, and they may find another artist's approach that is better for them.  In the meantime, here's a way that may have some value for you.

When I was working on my senior show at UNC Asheville, I had two instructors whose work was very different from each other.  One is a figurative artist who  does a lot of allegorical work.  The other does some fantastic trompe l'oeil paintings.  ("Trompe l'oeil" means "fool the eye" - the paintings are so hyper-realistic that you think the yardstick and apple hanging in front if it are real).  One would beat me up over what the paintings meant, while the other beat me up over the way they were painted.  I learned a tremendous amount from those two artists.  I could not have learned nearly that much from just one.

So my advice to all budding artists: learn from all of us.  Take workshops and classes from different artists.  Find great works that resonate with you and copy them.  When you find a teacher who meshes well with your natural way of working and your personality, then you can stay with them for a long period of time.  But no one artist has THE ONE answer.  You have to find your own way.

Two Paintings and a Workshop

Two paintings and a workshop walk into a bar ...

No, that's not how it goes.  Since the last update here, there have been several things going on in the studio.  And yes, I have pictures this time!

In the last post, I mentioned that I was working on a new sample painting for the live event painting side of the house.  That one is now done, and here it is:

Rick and Julie

Oil on canvas, 24"x30"

This was fun to do, and a bit of a challenge, but in the end I think it came out very well.  It has certainly gotten lots of good words from people who have seen it.

I completed another painting several days after this one.  Long-time readers will know that I've been wrestling with some new (for me) concepts in figure painting.  Mostly, they revolve around the concept of completeness, meaning how complete to make the painting.  I've been working on a series of charcoal and pastel figurative works over the past year that dealt with that concept and those seem to be working pretty well.  Not so with the paintings.  Almost all the paintings in which I've tried that concept have been painted over or otherwise destroyed.  I just have not been able to translate the feeling of the charcoal and pastel works into paint.  My most recent attempt is a bit more successful and I don't mind showing this one:

Amy D #1

Oil on canvas, 24"x18"

It is definitely not where I want to be, but it's further along the path than I've been so far.  What I'm focusing on here is finer brushwork around the face, with increasingly looser brushwork the further you move away.  I'm also very conscious of edges.  The only sharp edge is along the side of the temple and cheekbone, with a slightly softer edge around the shoulder, and considerably softer edges everywhere else ... in some cases, no edges at all.  And I'm looking at value contrasts to help guide the eye.  Here the highest value contrast is in the same place: along the temple and cheekbone.  So the brushwork, edges, and value contrasts are working together to put the focus on her face.  Color isn't playing along, though.  The strongest color is the blue clothing, which draws attention away.  The background is a muted red, but it's still a bit too strong and does nothing to guide the eye.  And, finally the color in the face is the same as the color on her side.  Again, nothing to indicate what's important and what's not.  So I guess I'll have to try another painting and see if I can figure it out.

In addition to doing a couple of artworks, I ran a portrait drawing workshop a week ago.  Had a good turnout for it and they were all a lot of fun.  My focus in this workshop is less on the drawing and much more on seeing.  So we spent the first day talking about shapes of the head and different features, and drawing each other, and then talking about what we were seeing.  The second day, each of the students took a turn as a model while the others drew.  After each, we talked about what features made each individual unique, and how the different drawings were successful (or not) in capturing that.  It was really cool to see everybody develop very rapidly over such a short time.

Coming up, I've got a workshop scheduled for Saturday, March 4, to talk about a logical, easy-to-use approach to mixing color.  Lots of schools don't really teach it.  In my early days, they just wanted me to remember what all the colors would do with each other.  Right.  I have trouble remembering what I had for breakfast, and you want me to remember an infinite number of color combinations?  Finally, when I was taking classes at Maryland Institute College of Art, I learned an approach that worked for me.  That's what I'll be teaching at this workshop.  Interested?  You can sign up on my website:
www.skiprohde.com/store/p16/Color_Mixing_Workshop.html

Figure Painting Workshop

I ran a figure painting workshop in my studio this weekend.  We had a full class of six students - the maximum I want in my studio so they're not falling all over each other.  The workshop ran for four hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

I divided the effort into two parts.  On Saturday, the students worked on a monochrome painting of the figure.  This was a value study done in only one color.  A painting done this way is often called a "grisaille" (pronounced "griz-I").  Grisaille means "gray", and a grisaille painting is technically in black and white, but since we used burnt umber or other colors, I prefer the term "monochrome".  (Okay, enough nerdiness, on to the rest of the story ...)

On Sunday, the students took the monochrome painting and went over it in color.  We focused on skin tones, warm and cool tints, reflected lights, shadow colors, background colors, and matching the values of the colors to the values of the monochrome.

Dividing the painting process this way might seem roundabout, but it's actually easier for many artists, including me.  It separates the decisions associated with the composition, drawing, and light/dark values from the decisions associated with color, warm/cool, reflected lights, and intensity.  The idea is to use a simple approach first to make the fundamental decisions about the composition of the painting, and then gradually add more light/dark values and then color until you get something you can consider done.  (Or until it's so badly messed up that you throw it away.  One or the other.)

I had a great time with the students.  This was the first time I'd put on this particular workshop and I didn't know how it would go.  When you have good students, it always goes well.  They all seemed to thoroughly enjoy the class as well.  I paused the painting process a couple of times each session so we could see each other's work, talk about what was working and not working, get the students to talk about what they were experiencing, and compare notes.  All of them had different approaches.  By talking about their issues, and about what they saw in each other's work, they could learn a lot more than if everybody was doing the same thing.

So here are a few images from this weekend:

Some of the students, hard at work ...

And here are their paintings:

I'm proud of the way all six of them developed over just two days in the studio!

Putting On a Workshop

This past weekend, I held the first artist workshop in my studio.  It was about drawing portraits.  It went really well.  Five people participated, ranging from complete newbie to fairly advanced, and they all seemed to come away with new skills and capabilities.  And we all had a heckuva lot of fun.

Planning for this event took some thought.  I started advertising it in December, long before I had an idea of how it should be taught!  Nothing like committing yourself to a course of action to spur yourself into figuring out how to do it.  My basic course of action was to start with the basic structure of the head, then to discuss the various features, and finally to do several exercises to tie it all together.  I'd scheduled the workshop to run for two days (Saturday and Sunday), for 3 hours each day.  Was this too much?  Not enough?  I didn't know.

But I need not have worried.  Learning how to do portraits is a life-long endeavor.  No matter how long a workshop is scheduled for, it won't be enough.  There's always something to work on.

I put together a handout for the students that discussed my major points and gave them some illustrations that were cribbed from the interwebs and other places.  My approach was to show the "standard" structure of the head: normal proportions, features, and shapes, as well as typical things to look for.  The upper lip, for example, has three parts: the tubercle, which is the dip or V-shaped form in the center, flanked by two wings, while the lower lip has two wings with a central furrow.  Once the students knew what the standard structure was, they could look for the individual differences in their particular subject.  Their model might have a very thin upper lip with almost no tubercle that protrudes slightly over a slightly more full lower lip with short wings.  We discussed this same process for the shape of the skull, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, forehead, ears, neck, and hair.

Some of the illustrations I used came from fine art: drawings by old masters, or from "how to" portrait courses and books.  But some came from a genre that many might find surprising: caricature.  Why?  Caricature is just an exaggerated form of portraiture.  A good caricature is instantly recognizable, even though it is completely unrealistic.  The artist has to be able to look at the subject and determine what features are different from the "standard" head and face, and then exaggerate the difference in a way that is convincing.  If a nose is just slightly bigger than normal, the caricaturist makes it BIG.  But something has to give: if the nose is big, something else has to be small to compensate.  The eyes, maybe, or the jawline - something.  And the differences have to be those that anybody can see.  The typical fine art courses don't say that - they typically take a "draw what you see" approach without talking about the tradeoffs like caricaturists do.

The artists in the class understood all that.  As a result, we had a good time talking through the issues and drawing each other.  Every one of them was doing a better job at the end than at the beginning.  So I'd say it was a success.  I came away with a laundry list of things to change for the next class, but the structure of the class turned out to be sound, so the changes are in the details.

I'm running a different workshop next week.  It will be on mixing colors.  I stayed away from painting for years because I didn't understand anything about color mixing.  Eventually, while taking a painting course at Maryland Institute College of Art, I learned a very logical and easy-to-understand method for mixing up the colors I needed.  We'll discuss this in the workshop and do a lot of experimentation.  Interested?  You can read more on my web site and sign up there as well.

So I'm having fun teaching, and I'm going to do more of it this year!

Catching Up

The weekend after my last post (about the radio interview with Marilyn Ball), I took an online workshop from the painter Steve Huston.  I'm struggling with finding an appropriate style of painting for my new "Survivor" series and Steve's work appeared to offer some ideas.  The workshop was hosted by the New Masters Academy (NMA) in Newport Beach, California.  This was their first foray into streaming a live workshop.  The workshop was scheduled for 8 hours a day for 3 days.  I wasn't sure about how useful the workshop would be, especially since I'd be at home on my computer instead of slinging paint in the studio, but decided to give it a go anyway.

As it turns out, the workshop was very valuable.  Steve talked a lot about drawing, building the figure, composition, painting techniques, and much much more.  He did demos from a live model, and the NMA staff posted photos of her so those of us online could draw as well.  She was a lovely young lady whose poses, unfortunately, were the most boring and uninspired that I've seen in a long time.  Maybe I'm just spoiled by the outstanding group of models here in Asheville.  But Steve's thoughtful discussions and demonstrations were invaluable.

As this was the first time the NMA had done such an event, I expected to see some glitches, and there were.  But they fixed them quickly, and by midway through the first day, everything went extremely well.

The NMA is continuing to develop more online workshops, and they already have a lot of recorded courses online, by Steve and others.  I was impressed with the group.  Take a look - you might be, too.

During the next week, I went back through my notes (22 pages of them) and sorted them into something that would be easier to use and follow.  And I spent a good bit of time in the studio to try out some of the ideas.  Lots of other stuff was happening around the house, so I didn't have time to update this blog.  But I have a lot of things to share from that workshop.  I'll do that in my next blog post.

Then last weekend, my uncle passed away.  He was 87.  He went into the hospital for some relatively routine heart surgery (as if any heart surgery is "routine"), but then had cascading complications that couldn't be stopped.  On Monday, I drove down to Corinth, Mississippi, to attend the funeral.  Despite the circumstances, it was great to see my cousins again.  We haven't all been together in one place in over 35 years.  Like many families these days, we're widely scattered: Colorado, Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, and New Mexico (where my sister, who wasn't able to attend, lives).  There were spouses and children that I'd never met.  We spent long hours together, talking and catching up, telling stories on each other, getting to know those we just met, and sharing the grief of losing my uncle.

My uncle, by the way, was an amazing man.  He was a scout for Patton's army in World War II.  Subsequently, he earned a bachelor's degree from Ole Miss, a law degree from Tulane, and was a Rhodes Scholar in Cambridge, England.  He could've written his own ticket at any big-league law firm anywhere in the world, but he returned home to the small city of Corinth to practice there.  He was a leader in the First Baptist Church, a lifelong board member of the YMCA, coached YMCA baseball for over 20 years, served as the attorney for a variety of local government organizations, served as Director of the Chamber of Commerce, taught Sunday school, and was President of the school board.  At the same time, he and my aunt raised four wonderful kids.  I remember him as a very gentle man with an easy laugh and all the time in the world for us kids.  Uncle Jimmy will be missed.

After the funeral, I went to Memphis to visit my parents' graves.  I also visited with Persi Johnson, my first art teacher.  Persi is pushing 90, but her mind is as sharp as ever, and she has lost none of her feistiness and wit.  Visiting with Persi was a treat.

It's kinda sad, isn't it, that sometimes it takes a death to make us realize that we really and truly need to take the time to be with our close friends and relatives more often.  I had been meaning to get to Corinth and Memphis for years to visit with Uncle Jimmy, Persi, and my cousins, but never got around to it.  Now it's too late to talk with Uncle Jimmy again.  But I can still talk with my cousins.  And I will.