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This course is designed to help you further develop your portait painting skills, focusing on both creating a likeness and increasing the expressive aspects of your portrait skills. These two elements will be explored together over this three-day masterclass; you’ll first make several charcoal studies, followed by a brief oil sketch and finally, a fully developed portrait in oil. You’ll focus on accuracy of observation and measurement, while also making a fresh, energised and expressive response to the model. By the end of the masterclass, you will have developed your existing skills and knowledge of structure, tone, colour, composition and express use of paint and charcoal, and you will have completed one portrait painting and a number of briefer sketches and studies.

Throughout this masterclass, you’ll receive regular one-to-one guidance from Andy James. A self taught artist, Andy has been painting for over 25 years, capturing incredible likeness and energy of his subjects through his sumptuous, rigorous and painterly approach. Andy has worked on many prestigious commissions of well-known public figures. He was the winner of the Carroll Foundation Award, the Changing Faces Award and of BBC’s Star Portraits, and served as the Vice President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters from 2008 to 2014.

This two day portrait course will offer an opportunity for intensive study under the tuition of Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco. The course will allow students the freedom to work from two models. Under Ilaria’s guidance students will work on composition and colour mixture. Each student will be encouraged to work in their own individual way: together you will find strategies and techniques to make progresses. The tutor will also be working alongside the students demonstrating her technique. This exciting course is an intensive two days that offers a high level of tutor contact time.

Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco was born in Italy, from a family of Florentine Renaissance painters. She studied illustration and painting in Italy and in London, where she has lived since 1999. Her work has been selected for the BP Portrait Award and the Threadneedle Prize, as well as the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Competition. She shows regularly in UK and Italy and her paintings are also in private collections in US, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.