Paint an acrylic portrait in fifteen 10-minute video lessons!

In this video series, artist Paul Richmond breaks down the fundamentals of painting acrylic portraits into 10-minute exercises that will help you learn the tools, techniques, and skills of this popular medium.

Students will create one original painting from start-to-finish during this course, each lesson containing another step in the process.

You will be amazed at how much your painting skills will improve in a short time with focused, daily practice. Paul's gentle, lighthearted approach will make learning fun and keep you coming back for more. No artistic experience is needed. This course is great for beginners and will introduce you to the medium of acrylic painting while covering the techniques of capturing the portrait. No prior experience is needed. This is also a good refresher for more experienced artists who want to practice portrait painting.

Acrylic paint is an accessible artistic medium with tremendous potential. Learning the basics is important because it gives artists a foundation to build on. This course will start at the very beginning and walk you through the steps and techniques of creating an original acrylic landscape painting.

At the beginning, we will go over all the materials and how they will be used, including a pdf of the drawing we will be painting, sized to print at 8" x 10" to match the size of the canvas, available in the Projects & Resources section of this course. Please print this out and Paul will demonstrate how to transfer the portrait to the canvas.
This is followed by a monotone underpainting - covering the entire image with different shades of a single color to work out the value structure of the image.
Next we will paint the image in shades of black, white, and grey.
Finally we will glaze in color and add additional layers of detail until the painting is complete.

Students can apply the skills learned in this course to create more acrylic paintings of any subject matter and in any style. The sky’s the limit once you learn the basics!

Paul has been teaching students to paint for over twenty years. This class covers the most effective techniques he has discovered for helping artists learn how to create beautiful acrylic portrait paintings. This class is great for beginners and also a refresher for anyone who wants to get back to the basics of painting.

Materials

Download the sketch of the model in the Projects & Resources section. Print it out at 100% size to be used in the first lesson.

You are welcome to work with any acrylic painting materials you'd like, but here's a list of everything Paul will be using in this series:

8" x 10" stretched canvas
Acrylic paint - primary colors (red, blue yellow), white, and black are all that’s necessary. Additional colors if possible: brown, green,
Acrylic paintbrushes - variety of sizes
Paint tray or palette paper
Soft-lead pencil (4B or 6B)
Cup of water and paper towels

About the Instructor

Paul Richmond is an internationally recognized visual artist and activist whose career has included exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States as well as publication in numerous art journals and anthologies. His work is collected by individuals around the globe. As an illustrator, has created over four hundred novel cover illustrations. He is a co-founder of the You Will Rise Project, an organization that empowers those who have experienced bullying to speak out creatively through art.

Jared DeFife

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