Sculpt a Face with Light and Dark

This is the session where your drawings truly come alive. You’ll learn how light falls across the planes of the face. That includes where highlights glow, where core shadows deepen, and how reflected light softly bounces back into the darkest areas.

Understanding value (the range from lightest light to darkest dark) is the single most powerful skill for creating portraits that feel real and three-dimensional.

Working in graphite, you’ll create a beautifully rendered portrait study that showcases dramatic light and shadow. Watch as a few carefully placed tonal shifts transform flat shapes into a face with genuine depth, mood, and presence. This is the week that changes everything!

Go Bold with the Power of Charcoal

Put down the pencil and pick up something with real drama! Charcoal is expressive, forgiving, and endlessly satisfying to work with — and this session is your chance to discover why artists have loved it for centuries.

You’ll learn the unique techniques that make charcoal so special: sweeping tonal passages, velvety darks, and the ability to lift and blend for beautifully soft transitions.

You’ll create a striking charcoal portrait that has a richness and atmosphere graphite simply can’t match. Don’t worry about getting messy — that’s half the fun! By the end of class you’ll be amazed at the mood and emotion you can capture with this wonderfully tactile medium.

From Flowing Locks to Finishing Touches

Hair can make or break a portrait — draw every strand and it looks stiff; ignore it and the face floats in space. This week you’ll learn the secret: think in masses, not individual hairs.

You’ll discover how to capture the overall flow, weight, and texture of hair with confident, expressive marks that feel natural and alive.

You’ll also explore the art of edges — learning when to keep things crisp and defined versus when to let them soften and disappear. It’s this interplay of sharp and soft that gives a portrait its sense of focus and atmosphere. These finishing techniques are what take a good drawing and make it a truly polished piece.

Add Colour and Watch Faces Glow

Time to make the leap from drawing to painting! This exciting session introduces you to the world of watercolour portraiture, starting with the most magical challenge of all: mixing realistic skin tones.

You’ll learn how just a few colours can create the warm glow of sunlight on skin, the cool shadows beneath a chin, and everything in between.

Working from a line drawing, you’ll build up translucent washes of colour layer by layer, watching a face come to life with warmth and luminosity. The combination of your drawing foundations with the beauty of watercolour is genuinely thrilling — this is where the course takes a gorgeous new turn!

Deepen Your Palette, Deepen the Story

Now that you’ve got the basics of watercolour portraiture under your belt, it’s time to push further!

This session dives into the techniques that add real sophistication to your painted portraits: building depth through layered glazes, using colour temperature to sculpt the face, and finding the perfect balance between detail and looseness.

You’ll create a more refined watercolour portrait that showcases richer tones, subtle colour shifts in the skin, and confident brushwork. The result is a painting that captures not just a likeness, but a genuine sense of mood and personality. Prepare to be amazed at how far your skills have come!

Your Grand Finale — Elegance in Simplicity

This is your moment to bring everything together! In this culminating session, you’ll create a stunning watercolour portrait using a limited palette.

With just a handful of carefully chosen colours, you will produce gorgeous harmony and a sense of effortless elegance. You’ll discover that restraint is its own kind of mastery, and that fewer colours often means more impact.

Drawing on every technique you’ve learned over the past nine weeks — proportion, structure, value, charcoal expression, and watercolour luminosity — you’ll create a finished portrait that you’ll be genuinely proud to frame.

This session is a celebration of your artistic growth and a launchpad for the portraits you’ll create next!