Drawing and painting portraits of children – aged between 3 and 13 years – presents a number of challenges:
- The proportions of children’s faces don’t follow simple rules. The eyes are oversized, the nose is smaller, the brow is much larger, and so on.
- Children don’t have anatomical cues like adults do. Baby fat covers and obscures the bone and muscle structures.
- Children haven’t aged, so they have no wrinkles, smile lines, or creases and bags around the eyes, which usually provide useful landmarks when painting portraits.
- Blending is very important with young skin
Modules 1 & 2
Each 6-week module covers different aspects of the child portrait. Please see tabs to the right for a breakdown of what’s covered in each.
Drawing & Edges
Drawing is the first stage of any painting, and developing good drawing and measuring skills is essential. Finding landmarks in a child’s face on which to build a scaffold for our painting is particularly difficult, and requires extra help and attention. You will be introduced to different ways of measuring and learning how the proportions of a child’s face differs from an adult’s.
Colour & Value
How we handle colour and value in a child’s portrait is of utmost importance. You will be shown how to render subtle three-dimensional form using different exercises and techniques, and to understand the nature of light and shadow, and its interplay with the forms of the face.
Colour theory will be explained as well as mixing delicate skin tones for children’s faces, and how to choose the right colour palette for your portrait.
Working from Photographs and from Life
One major stumbling block when painting children is that they rarely stay still for very long, and the younger they are, the bigger an issue this is. So naturally, the use of photographs comes into play. Using photographs as a reference for a painting is something that most artists do. However, we must be careful to use it as a reference only, and not try to copy it. Working from life introduces some new challenges and corresponding techniques to deal with them.
Painting Techniques & Studio Practices
As well as learning about portrait painting, many painting techniques and practices will be discussed, explained and demonstrated, including:
- Dry brush technique
- Paint handling and brushwork
- Blending, handling transitions, and edge quality
- Sfumato and impasto
- Caring for brushes
- Understanding and utilising solvents and mediums