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.

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

  Supplies:
  

  • Access to a printer (for printing reference)
    
  • Acrylic or oil paints – 
    • Must-have colors: A complete set of pigments plus large tube of white (if you would prefer to purchase individual tubes, a detailed list of individual pigments will be sent to enrollees. 
  • Stretched canvas, 16×20 inch
  • Roll of paper towels or cotton rags
  • Palette paper
  • Masterson palette holder
    
  • Masking tape, to tape paper palettes down
  • Gloves
  • Brushes
  • Cup for water
  • Optional: Palette knife
  • Optional but highly recommended: table easel or standing easel

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

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

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.

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

  Supplies:
  

  • Access to a printer (for references, handouts and color charts)
  • Acrylic or oil paints – 
    • Must-have colors: A complete set of pigments plus large tube of white (if you would prefer to purchase individual tubes, a detailed list of individual pigments will be sent to enrollees. 
  •  Canvas pad, 12×16 inch
  • Palette knife with 3-inch metal blade and slightly rounded tip and wooden handle is recommended (a cheaper plastic palette knife is fine as well)
  • Roll of paper towels or cotton rags
  • Palette paper, disposable, with no thumbhole. As an option, you can get an 18-inch roll of Reynolds Freezer Paper for the palette. Also, a Masterson palette holder with airtight lid is a good investment that will allow you to keep your paints fresh for weeks.
  • Masking tape, to tape paper palettes down;
  • Gloves
  • Brushes
  • Cup for water

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).

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Drapery on The Human Form
6-Week Drawing Course

Are you a beginner or a master when it comes to fabric? What’s your first reaction when I say: “Draw this image”. Is it overwhelming to represent this chaos? 

To draw fabric, you have to understand fabric. Have you ever tried to capture the flow of drapery, or wondered how the Old Masters so successfully represented the material? Why didn’t your fabrics look real? Fabric is unique in its characteristics because fabrics span the states of fluid and solid – they are in between. And like in all things, there are no lines; it’s all tonal value. It’s 100% about sculpting the form that the fabric creates. When you first look at the fabrics, the way the bed sheets are crumpled – it is challenging. Some fabrics move in a very specific manner, more like a liquid, while other fabrics resemble faceted mountains. Learn the anatomy of fabrics and what governs its visual behavior. This straightforward approach to depicting drapery will remove the overwhelm and up your game.

In this 6-week course, you will master drawing of folds, by looking at the artwork of the great masters: Bernini, Da Vinci, Durer, and Michelangelo, and understand the technique behind their mastery. 

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!

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.