Experience our full-time program in a week-long workshop.

Students begin by drawing a plaster cast or still life in charcoal, developing their ability to render accurate proportions and value relationships. As students progress, they are introduced to the fundamentals of oil and/or pastel techniques, composition and color.

Experience our full-time program in a week-long workshop.

Life drawing is at the core of any serious program of fine arts. In the class, students draw from the figure in pencil. Each drawing is created over a period of several sessions, developing the student's eye for accurate proportions, gesture and anatomy.

This class includes a lecture and hands-on workshop. Joy’s lecture will discuss how to present your art professionally on an artist’s budget, designing an efficient workspace, and the basic tools of the trade needed to repurpose and craft beautiful one-of-a-kind frames. She will give a demonstration on constructing a frame, glass cutting, and assembling a framed piece of art with basic framing tools. You will walk away with a list of tools and knowledge to create your own winning combinations.

This two-day workshop includes a lecture and demonstration on the use of controlled lighting for a consistent light source resembling natural light. The hands-on portion of the workshop will be a day and a half of working together on still-life setups using various artificial lighting techniques. We will go through a series of steps that will demonstrate some of the various lighting options, as well as using light and shadow as part of the compositional element. Once a satisfactory setup has been established with both the still life and the lighting, participants will be given the option to paint a color sketch of the still life from their setup or continue by working with different light and or setups. If painting, this will enable you to work through the process of painting with and from artificial light.

As a practicing painter you may have heard the quote, “Value does all of the work, but color gets all of the credit!” Though this is true, in this workshop Bridget hopes to help students discover that color does a whole lot of work, too. The workshop will start with color definitions, discussion of the color wheel, and color-mixing exercises you can work on to improve your color seeing. Then students will advance to the practical application of these skills by painting a “block-in” of color notes for a simple still life. The second and third days will focus on understanding how the color of the light source affects your subject. Students will paint a still life under a warm light source and then paint the same still life again the following day under a cool light source to study color temperature. If you are intrigued by color and would like a few more tools to think about practical application of color in your work, Bridget would love to work with you. Some understanding of value will be helpful as value will be discussed, but the focus of the class will be on color.

Steven will discuss both an analytical and emotive approach to painting the human figure with an emphasis on color and value relationships in a related atmosphere. The class will consist of a model pose in both cool and warm light. The development of form through observation and interpretation of plane shifts projecting and receding from the eye will be stressed.

Aspects of anatomy, proportion, and movement will be discussed along with the development of an Alla Prima technique that involves both scumbling and glazing. Learning to see is a selective endeavor. Understanding is an extension of our mind's eye. We will look at color as value and temperature as form.

There will be two models in one long pose. Steven will set up one in cool light and the other in warm light and discuss different lighting situations. Students will be able to choose to paint the portrait or the clothed figure.

The course will involve lectures, discussion of materials demos and critiques, on a daily basis. The artist talk or lecture will run in tandem with workshop and will be focused on the same subject matter as workshop.

This listing is for the lecture/demo only. See also: Constructing A Figure Painting - Color as Form (Full Workshop)

The artist talk or lecture will run in tandem with workshop and will be focused on the same subject matter as workshop.

Experience our full-time program in a week-long workshop.

Students begin by drawing a plaster cast or still life in charcoal, developing their ability to render accurate proportions and value relationships. As students progress, they are introduced to the fundamentals of oil and/or pastel techniques, composition and color.