Portrait Drawing with Tom Quinn
Six Tuesdays, October 21-November 25, 1-3 p.m.
$168, there is a supply list with this class
It’s a common belief that no subject is more difficult than a human likeness. Actually, a good portrait calls for the same skills of observation and experience as a landscape or a still life. An artist who attains confidence at drawing portraits will have the confidence to draw anything. We begin with the anatomy and proportions of the human head, and move on to the skills of creating a convincing likeness.
Week 1. Introduction to portrait drawing. Common mistakes. Demonstration of drawing from photo and one-on-one advice.
Week 2. Drawing from a plastic skull and plaster casts of the human eye, ear, nose, and mouth.
Week 3. Charcoal drawing with students taking turns posing
Week 4. Charcoal drawing on brown paper, with white highlights
Week 5. Line drawing with ink markers
Week 6. Charcoal drawing with students taking turns posing.
Meet Your Instructor
Tom Quinn
Originally from Great Falls, Montana, Tom Quinn grew up surrounded by art — mostly nostalgic celebrations of the Old West by the likes of Charles M. Russell and Fredrick Remington. He found there was more to art by the time he attended Gonzaga University and spent his junior year in Florence, the home of Michelangelo and Botticelli. There he became enamored of the serene beauty of Renaissance painting. After receiving a degree in art history, he went to the Art Institute of Seattle to pursue a career as an illustrator. At the time– the mid-eighties — there was a whole school of illustrators whose work was semi-primitive and had an ironic twist. The style died out by the nineties but Quinn considers it well worth reviving. Now living in Spokane, Quinn has done several murals in addition to his easel painting, his illustrated four books and several magazine articles, draws caricatures at parties and conventions, and teaches drawing and painting at the Spokane Art School, Corbin Art Center and the Institute for Extended Learning. His work has been exhibited in galleries in Spokane, Seattle, and Portland. He works mostly in acrylic and oil with hard edges, intense colors, and finicky detail. He likes to show what’s absurd but not impossible, to take the ordinary out of context, and to turn the familiar into the strange.
