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There is no better place on earth to teach portrait and figure painting than Florence Italy.  The city is rich with iconic paintings and sculptures for artists to study. It is where the Renaissance began and the great art from that period resides. Usually when I teach a workshop I bring along books or digital images to illustrate principles but in Florence students get to view, up close and personal, works from Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Bernini, Del Sarto, Donatello, and so many more. 

A tour of the Pitti Palace.  The perfect place to study gesture by the masters.

     Studying the limited pallet of Zorn             David by Donatello

I based my lessons on all that I saw and learned from last year’s visit to Florence.  The idea of the workshop was to simplify the figure into visual poetry, focusing on gesture, construction, and light while leaving off distracting details.  We worked from short poses to longer poses as the week progressed.  I am a strong believer in a good start.  Without a good beginning of interesting shapes and simple value structure artists will spend all their time correcting. We began in charcoal then progressed through limited palettes to full color palettes with the longer poses.  The studio was beautiful and we lit the models with cool and warm lights then used different palettes to express the light.  It was a lot of work and a lot of information but the group of women who took the workshop were enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and an all round fun bunch.  They had good questions and great attitudes and produced a lot of nice work during the five days.  I thank each and every one of them for coming along on the adventure.

  The students are blocking in a value structure of the model using a complementary color to the light.