Portrait Drawing in Color

with Christopher Ganz

When: Saturday, August 9 from 10am - 3pm

Where: Artlink, 300 E. Main Street, Fort Wayne, IN 46802

Tickets: $90

This workshop will present vibrant ways of using color on tinted paper to add greater form and expression to portrait drawing using live models. An overview on the form of the human head and features will be given, followed by a series of drawings observing the head using a live model from different viewpoints. Longer poses will then follow concentrating on a consistent observation of the human head from a straight on view, a three-quarters views, and the profile view.

The use of color paper to create mid-tones, and temperature/color contrasts with pastels will be a particular focus of the workshop. Other techniques that will be introduced include the integration of positive and negative space, ways to observe shapes and forms, and the use values/colors to create the illusion of light moving across a volume. Instructive presentations, demos, and videos will also be included in this course. The poses will be between 15-60 minutes in length and the workshop will have two different models.

About the Instructor

Christopher Ganz is a professor of drawing and printmaking at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Ganz received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1995, and a Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2001. His work has been displayed across the nation and at international art fairs, and his work is represented by Gallery Victor Armendariz in Chicago.

Seminal influences on the work of Ganz include Dore’s engraved illustrations for The Divine Comedy and super-hero comics. Later on, Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio would inspire his wok, as well as contemporary artists such as Mark Tansey and Lucian Freud. The novels of Melville, and Dostoyevsky, and contemporary authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Umberto Eco are also sources of inspiration.