Last weekend Andrew James R.P. to came to Portishead to tutor a portrait course that I’d organised and had been on my mind for about 8 months.

Why did I get involved? I met Andrew at his exhibition in London and queried why he taught portraiture in Umbria but not in Britain. He said if you organise it I’ll turn up so I picked up his gauntlet.

Thankfully eight other students also preferred Portishead to Umbria (was cost a factor? I’ll never know) and all enjoyed it, many thanks to you all for a great weekend.

I’ve included a slideshow of the Saturday demo by Andrew on the course page, I’ve put the fab student feedback on the page too. There was only fab feedback, (apart from not getting the heating on early enough! Lesson learned).

I’ve included my own output from the weekend below. I’m pleased with my first hour and a half portrait but you wouldn’t believe how frustrated I was with the second (in profile) which took two whole days, day two was almost entirely scraping off, repainting, swearing, scraping off, repainti… you get the picture.