In my first tutorial and demonstration, I'll give an introduction and class overview including materials, process and procedures. From there, we'll find solutions to one of the greatest challenges of portrait drawing: managing complexities so that successful drawing becomes accessible to any serious student.

When we carefully observe our subject, we tend to look at their features and anatomy in isolation, which can quickly lead to drawing parts of the head that don't relate to each other properly. In this lesson I'll demonstrate how to simply find the placement of the features and anatomy from any angle.

As we introduce light and shadow into our drawings, I'll demonstrate how to keep the process manageable by limiting shadows to only one value so that we can concentrate our rendering in areas of light. We'll take a careful look at how to render convincing form in the light with simple relationships of planes and highlights.

Sometimes, the best way to depict light is to create great shadows! In week 4, we'll take a close look at how to render form in shadows with a special emphasis on plane changes created by bounce light and secondary light sources. I'll include demonstrations with techniques to mass in the shadows simply and clearly, and how to render features within them.

This is our intensive demonstration week! I'll do two in-depth demonstrations of a younger female and older male model, showing the entire process of rendering form through light and shadow. We'll review the tools techniques and processes that will get us results!

Portrait drawing is potentially complex and even confusing but there are many simple principles that can make it manageable for you. In this week's presentation, I'll show you how the simple design of edges can create a tremendous layering of depth in your portraits, and I'll demonstrate how they can convey a great sense of purpose and likeness to your subject as well.

Some professional portrait artists prefer to use ambient light or skylight for their portraits. For week 7, we'll look at which qualities of light work best for a variety of portrait settings, as well as the pros and cons of each.

For this lesson, I'll demonstrate the key principle for creating a likeness. We often believe that if we can render the tiny subtleties of the features just right, we'll achieve a likeness and spend hours rendering with poor results. The way to actually achieve a likeness will be surprisingly simple!

Portrait Drawing requires a firm commitment but also great enthusiasm and fun. My final lecture and demonstrations will show you how four simple principles of composition can make the difficulties of portrait drawing cease to be a frustration and turn into a great joy!