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Classes / Courses

Courses

New course every 6 weeks

6-Week Painting Course

6 classes / 6 weeks

MONDAYS,
6PM–7:30PM 
Pacific Time

$199

Join Anytime

Drawing Course
for Beginners

12 classes / 12 weeks

TUESDAYS,
6:30PM–8PM 
Pacific Time

$299

New course every 6 weeks

6-Week Drawing Course

6 classes / 6 weeks

WEDNESDAYS,
6:30PM–8PM Pacific Time

$199

Or call for a free consultation: (802) 505-7624

Online & in real time

Drawing by student, Brynn Amaya

Essential Drawing Course for Beginners

Every Tuesday, Join anytime
6:30pm – 8:00pm Pacific Time

You will learn the most important aspects of drawing from the very beginning. You will build the foundation for rendering basic objects and environments, and become ready to practice these techniques with more complex subjects in future drawings. All the techniques of the Essential Drawing Course are done in monochrome (black and white) so you can keep your focus on structure, tonality, shading, form, and texture.

Click here to see the course schedule.

Online & in real time

Character sketches by Master, Leonardo da Vinci

Character Design
3-Week Drawing Course

Wednesdays, February 15th – March 1st
6:30pm – 8:00pm Pacific Time

This is a fun beginner-friendly class that will teach you a new way to draw portraits. This course will elevate your drawing skills to the next level and help you become comfortable with facial expressions. If you want to illustrate your own short stories, go into animation, or learn how to draw faces from imagination, this course will provide you with an introduction to the character design. You will learn a technique (created by Prima Materia founder Olya Losina) for creating unique characters in any style. This course will show you how to draw a variety of personalities, fast.

Online & in real time

Drawing by master, Albrecht Dürer

The Classic Style of Pen  & Ink
6-Week Drawing Course

Wednesdays, January 4th – February 8th
6:30pm – 8:00pm Pacific Time

Advance your drawing style and achieve high contrast in your drawings. Pen and ink is the medium of restraints and precision, where time investment is key – this is why we will spend the first two classes learning the principles and techniques, and develop a feel for working with pen and ink, and the next four weeks will be dedicated to creating one drawing, to give you the time to add the details. We will go very slowly to enjoy the process of drawing, to savor every pen stroke. 

A detailed drawing like this requires you to take your time with each particular area. You have to define and refine each part before you move to the next. This is the difference between pen and ink and other mediums. In this class, we will focus on the specific strategy in pen-and-ink, so you can learn the unique approach that other mediums may not offer you to this extent. 

Online & in real time

Painting by Master, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Portraiture by Bouguereau: Copying the Great Masters
6-Week Painting Course

Mondays, February 13th – March 20th, 2023
6:00 – 7:30pm Pacific Time

“One always begins by imitating.”
– Eugene Delacroix

This course is a great – and rare! – opportunity to learn how to elevate your own art of portraiture.

We will be studying William-Adolphe Bouguereau by means of copying one of his paintings. His virtuosity of mixing the color of the flesh in such nuances that the bodies he paints seem to live and breath. Copying the Great Masters is what the Great Masters themselves had done to learn how to paint: they imitated the artists they admired. This alone should convince us that this is a good practice. If you truly want to develop YOUR style and achieve painter’s mastery, there is no better way to train your eye, enrich your palette, and develop a better technique, than by copying. Don’t let his brilliance intimidate you from your objective, which is to learn from the best. This ambition will help you become a competent artist faster.

Online & in real time

Color Mixing For Portrait & Figure Painters
6-Week Painting Course

Mondays, January 2nd – February 6th, 2023
6:00 – 7:30pm Pacific Time

  • 6 live online 1.5-hour classes
  • No experience necessary
  • Adults and teens 15 years or older
  • Access to recordings

Interested in portraiture? This is where you start!

One of the most frequently asked questions is how to mix the skin tone. It is the skill you can’t do without. However, there is no such thing as “the skin tone”. There are a large number of colors that you need to know how to make in order to be versatile and comfortable with the color of the body. In order to achieve this level of confidence, it is important to understand the principle behind the skin-tone color-mixing.

Often, beginners rely on pre-made skin-tones, but that leads to generic-looking and chalky faces / bodies. Some painters in their guess-work turn to various brown pigments and try to lighten them with some white, etc. Unfortunately, those mixtures tend to look muddy and naive. Instead of struggling with it, treat yourself and come learn all the shortcuts in just one six-week course.

Past Courses

Handmade Postcards… Mini Works of Art
3-Week Painting Course

Nothing says you care like a handmade gift. People have all the stuff they need and they can buy anything they want, but a handmade postcard from you shows that you’ve taken time to create a memory – that’s the purpose of this 3-week course. 

As an artist, you don’t need to buy traditional greeting cards ever again: create your own set of small-size masterpieces this Holiday season. These postcards will be kept, cherished, most likely framed, and maybe even collected! 

The Alchemy of Turning Coal Into Diamonds
1-Day Class

Four Secret Recipes That Will Transform A Bad Drawing Into Amazing Work of Art.

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

We’ll be repairing perspective, foreshortening, and other technical deformities as if by magic. No erasing, no painting over! 

  • Inject intention into a meaningless artwork, suffering from anemia. 
  • Bring life to the lifeless; 
  • Resurrect the dead; 
  • Breath excitement into a work that lacks interest. 

Learn strategies for how to transform the drawings that you feel reached the point of no return i.e. did not turn out. 

There are no bad drawings, there are unfinished drawings – this is going to be a practical session where you learn that any drawing can be improved and made to be your best work, good enough for exhibiting, selling, or including in your portfolio.

Let’s enter the New Year with only good work! This is a new spin on New Year’s Resolutions: resolve all your unwanted drawings! If you only attend one class this year, this is it! Don’t be left out! 

It is recommended you bring a failed drawing that has been “finished” but for whatever reason feels unsatisfying, and you have no idea how to fix it. (Note: do not bring an unfinished piece, but rather the work that you truly tried to resolve).

Make It Work: Fashion Design
6-Week Drawing Course

If you ever thought of a potential career in fashion design, are interested in creating fashion illustrations, entering a t-shirt contest, or adding to your portfolio of drawings, in this course you will learn how to “make it work”.

You will begin to discover your personal taste by playing with colors, combining textiles and patterns. We’ll focus on experimenting with the form, silhouette, and proportions. In order to develop your creative thinking, we’ll utilize non-traditional materials. With practice, your drawings will become more elegant. 

Learn How To Paint Precious Metals like the Masters
6-Week Painting Course

Convincingly painting silver and gold is considered a Master’s skill. It’s true, achieving a believable metal look requires more than just the right colors – you can buy gold and silver paint, and still not be able to get the appearance of metal at all. Understanding the physics of light and application of highlights (referred to as “the ability to see”) are critical. Metals are very unforgiving: miss any of the mind hacks and your metal object will look fake. Word of caution: the metallic paints won’t save you. We’ll teach you how to paint metal – gold and silver – using only five basic colors: red, yellow, blue, black, and white, and applying these five key ingredients: color mixing, tonality, the physics of light, reflectivity, and highlights. Without either one of them, the metals will remain flat and unconvincing. 

Learn to paint and draw silver and gold – a skill that is considered to be only possible to the “professional level”. Throughout the 6 weeks, we will follow in the steps of the Old Masters and use their technique of painting metallic objects realistically – without metallics.

Journal entry by master, Vincent van Gogh

Journaling & Sketching
6-Week Drawing Course

When you travel, you most likely rely on your photo camera to record the most beautiful places you see, but what if you could capture them in quick hand in a sketchbook? Sketching while traveling can be one of the most satisfying experiences of your trips, especially if you learn to jot down these scenes quickly and effortlessly. 

No artistic skills are necessary. This is a perfect course to START learning to create art! Any pre-existing drawing experience is a plus and will make taking this course a double-pleasure. Not sure about your ability to learn quickly? Hey, we’ve taught more than a few old dogs new tricks.

Painting by student, Cynthia L.

Enrich Your Art With Metallic Pigments
6-Week Painting Course

This technique will get YOUR paintings noticed. In this course, you will learn that you can replace the traditional primaries with metallics. But can you imagine a colored painting that has no primaries at all? Traditionally, red, yellow, and blue represent the colored spectrum and provide the artist with a full gamut of colored mixtures. But when you use bronze, silver, and gold, you compensate for the narrower colored range with a lot of shine and reflection, which is fun all in itself, but there is a secret to this strategy.

Drawing experience is helpful.

This course is for those bored with typical realism and of their paintings looking too traditional, who are tired of standard art classes, and who want to learn new techniques and expand their body of work with paintings that stand out.

Click here to see a video of one of our student’s metallic paintings and how the colors of the painting change depending on the light and the angle you’re viewing it at.

Painting by artist, May Miturich

Introduction to Watercolors
6-Week Painting Course

Watercolor is very much a technique-based medium. What we call “technique” is the understanding of the special watercolor properties that you have to know in order to make the best of this exquisite material. This 6-week course is designed to provide you with such information. Beginners welcome – no art experience needed.

If you’ve always wanted to learn how to paint in watercolors for plein air, commissions, or to explore new mediums, this is a course you don’t want to miss!

Drawing by Old Master, Guercino

Seven Wonders of Washes
6-Week Drawing Course

A wash is a thin layer of paint added to a drawing to give the artwork depth, the sensation of light, and more definition. The elegance of a wash always attracted the great masters, but in addition to adding beauty, washes can also provide substance, context, and rhythm. It’s a magical “tool” in the hands of the artist because it can transform a simple pencil drawing, pen-and-ink sketch, or charcoal study into a beautiful work of art.

Join us to learn how to master this important skill that will serve you well in both drawing and painting.

Pastel painting by student, Sandi W.

Techniques of Soft Pastel
6-Week Drawing Course

Always wanted to learn how to use soft pastels? Interested in incorporating color into your drawings? Then take this journey into the colorful world of soft pastels!

Pastels have a depth and richness to them that is unique to this medium. We will begin with the fun of blending colors before moving on to an easy and exciting subject of land, skies, and clouds, and then – to defining shapes in a still life. We will concentrate on the colors of each object and where they are in relation to each other. Before any detail is added, the artwork is filled with life and drama simply by applying color. As the shadows and lines bring the artwork into focus, each artist is encouraged to find their own rhythm and style.

Painting by artist, Joan Miró

Abstract Inspired by Joan Miro
6-Week Painting Course

Why Do Artists Make Abstract Art? Painters create abstraction not because they can’t paint realistic still lifes and portraits, but because they want to explore a different aspect of painting – SELF-EXPRESSION. This Abstract Art course will help you transform your interest in abstract art into the skill to express yourself in a style of your own. 

Drawing by student, Jeremy H.

Perspective: The Enigma Behind Mastery
6-Week Drawing Course

Perspective is all around us, but it makes itself invisible to the untrained eye. When artists come to depict any scenery, they get stuck because they lack the ability to see the big picture – they are not able to see the structure that everything is based on. Knowing the fundamentals of perspective makes it surprisingly easy to create interiors, outdoor scenes, streets filled with people, and imaginary scenarios where everyone and everything is in proportion. This skill of perspective drawing is definitely undervalued but we at Prima Materia consider it one of the key abilities for fine artists, illustrators, animators, designers, architects, and life-long learners.

Painting by American artist, Wayne Thiebaud

Cake in Impasto
2-Week Mini Painting Course

This class is going to be a piece of cake! Inspired by Wayne Thiebaud, an American artist that made a name for himself by painting sweets, candies, and cakes in vibrant colors with thick paint. His signature style is the colorful glowing halo that surrounds his desserts, which he called “halation”. If you look him up, you’ll see he obsessively painted his favorite subjects and in this class, you’ll understand why he just couldn’t get enough.

Charcoal drawing by master Da Vinci

Drawing Faces With An Unusual Technique

In this class, we’ll show you how to draw a face with a very unusual, rarely used but very effective and fun technique. You will create an expressive drawing of a face in 3D with delicate lights and shadows using your fingers! You may not expect to create impressive art using your hands, but did you know that Masters like Leonardo Da Vinci did exactly that? You’ll experience a new way to draw a face that looks surprisingly real.

No experience? No problem! This class is a fun and beginner-friendly class, where you will learn a lot of new tricks. The instructor will lead you, step by step, through this process.

Painting by instructor, Nikusha Beatty

Portrait in Pieces
6-Week Painting Course

Create a contemporary portrait with contemporary tools. Make a Pop Art painting with the special technique introduced in this course. This technique will combine drawing, masking, tracing, transferring, and painting in one artwork. Utilize your knowledge of tonality, color-mixing, and composing that will help you produce a piece that appears to belong in a modern museum. You will learn how to animate a portrait with a 5-step process. With this method, you’ll create an effect of shattered glass or mosaic with acrylic paint on canvas. There are many ways of creating contemporary art, but this one will be about using familiar tools in new ways.

If you have any questions or doubts about your qualifications, call us at 802-505-7624.

Self Portrait by Vincent van Gogh

Sculpting With The Brush:
How to Be Van Gogh
6-Week Painting Course

Van Gogh, known for his mesmerizing swirls and textures, is also the Master of form, unsurpassed at creating dimensionality on canvas. In this course, you will learn how to virtually transform your brush into a magic chisel – the ‘sculpting tool’ that builds volume and space with pigment and color. There are many ways to use paint to “sculpt with the brush”, such as building the actual volume – creating a tactile texture like in a barelief, but that is not what we will do. The magic of Van Gogh’s brushwork is that there is no real volume: the entire effect of 3D is based purely on the visual perception of optical dimension.

We will closely study Van Gogh’s ways of making the form three-dimensional. Learning to recreate Van Gogh’s robust brushwork, rich, luminous color, and potent, generous paint application, and especially his ability to sculpt with the brush, will help you transform any object you will be depicting into a weighty, voluminous form inside a convincingly deep space.  

Drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci

Drawing Drapery on the Human Form
6-Week Drawing Course

In this 6-week course, you will learn how to make a masterful drawing of folds, looking at the great masters’ artwork such as Bernini, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo to understand the technique behind such convincing artworks. You will follow in the Masters’ footsteps and create realistic drawings that will express two types of fabrics on two figures: heavy fabric draped over the body and sheer fabric draped over the face, in addition to making helpful studies where you will learn the anatomy of folds.

If you’ve ever struggled with movement and action, drapery is the subject you need in almost all artworks. You are going to learn how to make drapery live, move, and breath – and help you up your game.

Sketches by artist, James Chiahan Lee

The Art of Ideas: How To Use a Sketchbook
6-Week Drawing Course

When you get your first sketchbook, you become a hunter for ideas. “Pray comes to the hunter”, says Olya, definitely meaning the sketchbook. When you have a sketchbook, you start getting a lot of ideas. You never know when your best idea will strike you, so you want to carry your sketchbook everywhere. Everything suddenly becomes worth your attention, and you begin to fill it with random drawings – some of which may turn out to be your body of work in the future!

A sketchbook is a fundamental tool for artists – it’s a must-have for any creative. In this course, you’ll learn how to use it effectively to lay the foundation for all of your future work.

Color Mixing & Color Theory 101
6-Week Painting Course

Painting starts with color-mixing, and this course is the most important course for anyone who wants to try painting. In this course, you will acquire the system for how to set your palette and mix any color you want. Color mixing is like science; anyone who understands it, gets off to a good start.

When you want to learn painting, you must get to know your pigments, their properties, handy shortcuts, and professional tips on the do’s and don’ts of paint mixing. 

This course will be devoted entirely to that!

Drawing by student, Ray Brown

Introduction to Charcoal
6-Week Drawing Course

Charcoal is a true learning medium, perfect for those new to art because it’s the best tool for students. Students in the old academy would draw endlessly with charcoal. It is a forgiving and versatile medium – the ease of erasing and blending makes it a joy to work it. In the end, it gives you a remarkably realistic appearance when a charcoal drawing is taken to completion. 

If you’ve tried charcoal and found it messy – this course will show you how to control it. In each class, the instructor will lead you through demonstrations that cover 6 independent charcoal drawing techniques, such as blending, creating texture, using the eraser as a drawing tool, drawing on paper versus canvas, and more.

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