The Art of Collage Portraiture
November 2 - 5, 2009
Registration Form
Sutton Studios & Gallery: Map and Directions
Visitor Information: Where to Stay, Eat, and Visit
Portrait of Giles Henderson, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford
The Syllabus
Collage is a very powerful way to tell a story of someone's life, going beyond the surface, expressing in a single composition what is, or was, most meaningful and significant to the portrait subject. In this workshop you will experience first hand an overview of Jeremy's techniques and strategies for creating personal, powerful, beautiful evocative, magnificent collage portraits. Learn Jeremy's approach to using Corel Painter for collage, as well as tips on traditional media treatment of your canvas prints. Your portrait subject could be someone special to you or to a client.
My collage portraits cross the digital and traditional divide, combining digital tools with the application of traditional media onto my printed canvases. Jeremy's main digital tool for creating collage is Corel Painter. In this special one week workshop I will lead a small group of students through the entire process of researching, acquiring and organizing source material, composing the collage and using different techniques in Painter to apply imagery in the collage. Topics covered include:
- Selection Tools
- Layers
- Free Transforms
- Layer Masks
- Template Cloning System
- Cloning into Layers
- Paper Texture Technique
You will then learn how to prepare your digital painting for printing. You will complete the journey by experimenting with traditional media on the printed canvas.
Collage portrait of Bob Pritikin which includes digital paint on canvas mixed with acrylic paint, crayon, letter, stamp, fabric and gold leaf. Visit JeremySutton.com to see more examples of my collages.
Requirements
This class is aimed at intermediate to advanced students who have already learnt and applied Jeremy's Wacom and Painter settings and preferences, file naming and organizing systems, are already familiar with using Painter and applying Jeremy's "muck up" painting technique (all of which is covered in the Painter Creativity Seminars). You will need to have read chapter 6 of Painter X Creativity: Digital Artist's Handbook, have loaded in the Jeremy Faves brush category, and reviewed The Art of Collage Portraiture DVD set. The book and DVD set are included with the course fee.
You'll need to bring your own computer with the most recent version of Corel Painter and a Wacom tablet (Intuos3 6x8 or bigger recommended). The following are recommend:
- Plenty of free hard drive space (at least 10 GigaBytes of free space ideally).
- Lots of RAM (1 GigaByte or more ideally).
- DVD writer for backing up all your material.
- The latest version of your computer operating system.
You are encouraged to bring samples of your own work (digital and non-digital) to share with the class and inspiring books for the library (just make sure your name is clearly written in the books).
Portrait of Dame Stephanie Shirley, created at the Oxford Internet Institute (detail below).
Preparation
For this workshop you need to bring with you a folder of selected digitized source imagery to work from. Please include hand-writing, documents (can be any form of document, from scanned travel documents, certificates, awards, etc), musical scores (your subject's favorite music), digital photos, pictures of significant people, places, animals, objects,etc. Plan to have each digitized source image to be at least 2000 pixels in the maximum dimension (that may mean resizing web images). Save your source files as flat TIFFs (in Adobe Photoshop you can verify Image > Mode > RGB Color and 8 Bits / Channel). Before attending the workshop please make sure all your source files can be opened in Corel Painter.
If possible get your subject involved with selecting what is important to them. Ask what they'd like to see reflected in the collage. Ask them to write down (by hand) words they'd like to share.
Start a folder for collecting your source images. Name each source image file with a meaningful name so you can identify what it is. Aim to have at least ten but no more than thirty source images in total. Avoid being overwhelmed with hundreds of images! PLEASE DO THE SELECTING, RENAMING AND, IF NEEDED, RESIZING, OF ALL YOUR SOURCE IMAGES BEFORE COMING TO CLASS.
Please prepare well ahead of the class. The acquisition of material for collage takes time. Jeremy sometimes spend months collecting material. The time you invest ahead of class will pay off in what you can learn and achieve in class. Thanks for your understanding and for taking the time to fully prepare yourself for this workshop.
Class Hours
Monday - Thursday, 9:30am - 5pm
Class Fee
The course fee is $2,500, which includes my book Painter X Creativity: Digital Artist's Handbook and The Art of Collage Portraiture DVD set . Students are responsible for their own travel, lodgings and meals. To register, complete and send in the Registration Form.
Class Size
This class is limited to a maximum of six students.
Experimental Courtesy Print
The course fee includes one courtesy experimental canvas print (approximately 16 x 24 inches) of an image created during class, plus art materials used on the canvas print. The courtesy print is only intended as a study to provide a practice surface for experimentation and is not a substitute for a professionally proofed and color corrected image. No guarantees are provided regarding the quality of the courtesy print. No proof prints or reprints will be made and no prints will be printed after the class is over.
Which Resources and Materials?
Whatever level of Painter user you are, you will definitely benefit from joining my new online education center www.PaintboxJ.com. In PaintboxJ you will find new video tutorials on Corel Painter 11 added monthly, and much more. The fastest way I can help you with Painter is for you join one of my in-person workshops. In terms of my instructional books and DVDs, I recommend starting off with my book, Painter X Creativity: Digital Artist's Handbook, and introductory DVD, Learning Corel Painter X with Jeremy Sutton. The book is a great complement to all my other materials and also serves as the required text book for all my classes. The book goes deeper and broader than any DVD. It also provides convenient step lists for many of the techniques shared on the DVDs. The Learning Corel Painter X DVD gives you a good overview of the software.
Once you are familiar with the basics then I recommend the more advanced DVD sets, How to Paint from Photographs Using Corel Painter X
and Expanding Your Creativity with Jeremy Sutton - The Art of Collage Portraiture. Both these more advanced DVD sets take you through real-life case studies from beginning to end, sharing my work-flow, organizational systems, creative process, decision-making strategies, techniques and tools, plus including extensive extra brushes, art materials, tutorial images and more. In both DVDs I show how I apply physical paint onto my prints.
The interface has not changed significantly between Painter X and Painter 11 so you can easily apply the lessons from all my earlier materials when using Corel Painter 11. Likewise my PaintboxJ Painter 11 tutorials can all be easily applied in earlier versions of Painter. I do strongly recommend upgrading to Painter 11 if you currently have an earlier version. The newest Painter is the best yet. It is significantly faster than earlier versions and includes a whole new class of wonderful brushes (the Hard Media brushes).
For information on other Painter resources out there, please explore the Links page.
PPA members will earn one merit for attending this course.
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