Portraits With Sabine 2026

Painting and drawing portraits is such a fascinating activity. In addition to the creative dimension of making the artwork, working with portraits also connects us to the person depicted and to the wider aspects of being human.

In this course we unite a wide range of learner interests! Join us if you paint portraits at home and you want to do this in the company of others, show what you do and chat about your process and your results.

If you have never worked with portraits before, Sabine will teach you a unique portraiture technique: We start with making our own tracing templates from photographs of faces. Some photographs are suited for this process and others not – so we learn which ones are, and how to choose them. Learners can bring in photographs of people whom they want to paint.

At this stage we can already capture the likeness of a person. We then process our tracing templates further: We use hatching to study light and shadow in a face and then continue to paint the portraits with watercolours.

Sabine will provide plenty of demonstrations for each step and will help each learner individually.

A face has different tones of colour: In a person with light complexion, there are yellows, pinks and purple/greens and we can blend these colours in our wet-in-wet watercolour technique. In a person with dark complexion, we see lots of highlights that are blue or mauve in colour, and there are also orange tones instead of reds, and additional burgundy.

In our course we also offer the opportunity to draw a portrait from live observation. Sabine will demonstrate how to draw head and face form observing a person using pencils. She will use lines to construct proportions and shape. If learners want they can try this out too.

Achieving likeness in a portrait is difficult and needs to be seen as a process that needs practice. It can be a very rewarding undertaking to practice making portraits even if not every picture fulfills all likeness criteria.

This course will be offered again after the half-term break or term holidays. Learners might decide to join once to acquaint themselves with the processes on offer. But, the course can also be booked repeatedly to keep improving and growing your portraits painting practice.

Learners need to bring pencils, fine-liners, watercolours and acrylic paints.

However, for the first session, only the following things will be needed:

- A4 photocopying paper (or slightly thicker paper if they wish)

- pencils (HB, 2B and 4B) and a pencil sharpener

- a water-resistant fine-liner

Autumn block two commences after October half term on 5th November.