This workshop will focus on the basics of portrait painting, working from a live model with a limited palette of just three colours plus white, famously used by Swedish painter Anders Zorn to create beautiful skin tones.

It is a painting style best practiced in a quick wet-into-wet fashion where every brushstroke counts. The workshop aims to help artists develop their paint and brush handling toward achieving expressive, yet realistic portraits in a more immediate way.

Mark will demonstrate and guide you through his simple structured approach, breaking everything down into easy to follow steps that will cover everything from mixing all the colours you need from a limited colour palette to working tonally, blocking in the larger elements and leaving the finer details for the final stages of the painting.

What to bring:

• One pre-primed canvas or board. ( pre ground your canvas with a thin wash of acrylic or oil paint made up of burnt sienna lightened down to a light to mid tan with titanium white, must be dry on the day)
• A selection of long handle short flat hog paint brushes in a range of even sizes from 2 -12, also a small round size 1 synthetic or hog brush
• Palette knives – R&M sizes 1 and 5 or similar
• Zest-It oil painting dilutant or similar low odour thinners
• Thinners and linseed oil or alternatively just W&N Liquin original
• A dipper pot
• A good size flat mixing palette
• Oil colours as follows:-
  • titanium white
  • yellow ochre
  • cadmium red light (cadmium red will suffice)
  • ivory black
• A good size jar/pot to hold enough low odour thinners to clean brushes, cloths or a couple of kitchen rolls.