The League has two different Friday portrait classes this summer. Which one would you rather be in? Would you rather…. Combine drawings from live models with studies from art history? …or study a variety of ages, expressions, and faces? Would you rather…. Add meaningful elements from imagination and intuition? Or measure and exaggerate to pull …

What would you do if you loved to draw, and then you went blind? For two years now, Kathy Paul has been a regular in my drawing classes. When she started in figure drawing, I admired her uncommon and interesting way of recording the forms. Then on March 3, 2019 Kathy suffered a stroke in …

I’ve been posting drawings with hands as expressive elements. Today a work by Prinston Nnanna appeared in my inbox. Prinston is a Brooklyn-based artist who works with charcoal, coffee, and acrylic inks. According to his website, his goal is to “depict the elegance of the Black figure at the same time as reconstructing the image in …

Hands do a lot of the talking for us. AJ Power reminded me of this when I dropped in on a recent Comics class. He was inviting students to illustrate the moods and interactions between characters by drawing their hands in gestures. That hit me as one of those obvious yet totally overlooked aspects of …

Teaching an online class with the League this fall: Jonathan Harkham. Jonathan is another professional artist/instructor we found at the New York Studio School where he is an alumni and instructor. Currently under quarantine in his LA studio, Jonathan has shifted his attention from painting friends and live models to painting a series of 80’s …

Here’s a little video explaining why Expressive Portraits is my favorite online art class at the Seattle Artist League. Last quarter, participants studied how to sketch a face quickly, and how to add expressive descriptions of what makes a face not just accurate, but interesting. We looked at portraits by Alice Neel, Rembrandt, Lucian Freud, …

I’ve been teaching an expressive portraits class on Friday nights. In the first few classes we talked about common pitfalls including the blueberry pancake effect of features floating in the middle of a round face shape. We practiced how to measure proportions quickly, how to see the three dimensional aspects of a face, what makes …

Portrait of Anu Garg, author of a word a day, A Word A Day: A Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English, and more. Anu is a brightly smiling person, but sitting still-ish for any amount of time (15 minutes?) tends to make people look serious. I want to draw …