Celebrating Project Portraits
...and welcoming Project Food!
April and May have been all about Portraits and Faces
I created a whole series of Videos to take you through the Portraits theme, and to help you craft a project for yourself:
We also had 3 Live sessions of ‘Loose Lines & Warm Ups’ where I jumped on to draw, and members of the community were able to draw along.
The idea behind this is that you keep up the momentum will short bursts of drawing. You can catch up with the Lives for free, anytime. All paid members of the community will have access to the images used as reference. All previous images can be accessed here:
For me, two months of quietly focussing on drawing a lot of faces has been great. I have felt an ease kick in, and therefore more fun! Hence this page:
I have come to the end of 2 months and realise I have sketched a LOT of faces, and love it more than ever. I used ink, colour pencil, paint and oil pastels, and now I am finally starting to see ‘my style’ emerging across all the mediums, and I am starting to recognise my way of making marks and line across all the work. That feels SO exciting!
Work from the Community
Take a look at the amazing self Portrait created by
for her response to the Project:
And this by Citla! Frida Kahlo reimagined for today
project blew me away – SUCH a unique way to re-imagine an artist that we know so well. 
Read all about Citla’s project in detail in this post.
💻 ZOOM Project Share: Saturday 31st May: Paid members register here.
I’m excited to meet with you all and share the work we have created. Members, please come along even if you haven’t quite managed to ‘finish’ - let’s share the learnings, challenges, tips and tricks! And most importantly, celebrate!
Saturday, May 31
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM GMT+2
Project Food will run a little different
Project Animals and Project Portraits were both great for kick off with this new way of working together. I’ve been thinking about how we might tweak the approach, to created a tighter, more supportive space. I’m finding the Chat channel a bit tricky - it is easy to miss threads of conversation, and also easy to miss work being shared. It’s not the ideal channel. I don’t want to open another channel such as discord or slack - so instead I am introducing more frequent opportunities to connect on Zoom.
Introducing Studio Sessions
Each Project runs for 2 months
We will meet on Zoom every 2 weeks during this project, to share progress and work together.
Project Food will have 4 Studio Sessions in total
We will all work through the SAME project! (You can of course adapt as you go, but essentially we will work on ONE idea.)
I will provide reference images for each Studio Session
AT the end of the 4 sessions (2 months) you will have a bank of food images for the project completed.
In the Studio Sessions, I am there to give ideas, suggestions on how to bring your project to life.
It will be chatty, relaxed, and a collective group project.
If this approach is liked and well received, I will continue it for the next Projects. Everything I am trying this year is pretty experimental, so all feedback is welcome, and I will tweak as I go!
In order to make space for the Studio Sessions, I will be retiring the Free Co-Swatch Sessions. These have been running for a year and half, and have been amazing, but I feel the Projects need the in-person connection time, so will now take priority.
Upgrade now to join Project Food for June & July!
Access Project Animals & Project Portraits: You are welcome to work on these instead of Food! Come along, join in, and make it work for you!
Access all the references for the upcoming Lives, and past Lives
Access the archive of process videos, materials posts and unlock ALL the sketchbook tours.
In the next post, I will share details of the dates for all Studio Sessions, and upcoming Lives, and I will break down the way the Project Food will work. Look out for it!
Hey Raj! Loved project one and to share some feedback, it’s been great and really well paced - love the flexibility to fit around life, without feeling like I’m behind or rushing, and great guidance from your feedback and videos! Especially love the live calls, they have been super and brought community to the projects :)
Orla Stevens
Thank you so much for sharing my project! I know this will be one of the turning points in my art journey 🩷 thanks for also putting so much effort into doing the research and bringing so many good examples and ideas!
I am so excited about the Studio Sessions! I think they'll be just what I need to make time for my projects, which is weirdly hard to do on my own even though I really want to work on them! Such is life, I suppose 😂 Looking forward to the Project Food!