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The Painterly Approach to Portraits

🎨 Let your portrait feel alive, not stiff. In this 2+ hour demo, Josh Clare swaps the brush for a charcoal stick, teaching you how to “paint” with it—layering structure and contrast using the tip and side of the stick for energetic, expressive mark-making.

You’ll learn how to:
✏️ Build facial structure with bold, painterly lines using charcoal
🎯 Layer value and form so your drawing has depth without becoming overly tight or rigid
💡 Use the charcoal stick like a brush—balancing contrast, detail, and energy
🧠 Develop a more expressive, less perfectionist way of drawing portraits that embraces artistic freedom

Perfect for advanced artists who want to loosen up, inject more energy into their portrait drawing, and explore a more expressive, less “polished” approach. 🕑 Runtime: 2+ hours

  • Josh Clare

    Instructor

  • Advanced

    Difficulty
Meet your instructor

Josh Clare

Josh Clare grew up drawing and was rarely without a pencil and paper, but it wasn’t until he began studying art at BYU-Idaho that he began painting. That first oil painting class included a trip to the galleries in Jackson Hole (his first visit to an art gallery or museum) and completely changed the course of his life.
Josh has been supporting himself and his family with art since 2007 after graduation and he thanks God every day for that remarkable blessing. He figures that if he can paint all day, every day, for the next 20 years, eventually he’ll paint something pretty decent.

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