Why 6 and 9 Day Charcoal Portrait Courses Are Ideal for Building a Strong Foundation

Acquiring new skills takes time. Be it riding a bicycle or sketching with charcoal, there’s a level of focused learning that you cannot do without. But if you’re stepping into the world of charcoal sketching and are looking to take your charcoal portraits to the level of a master sketcher, you will need a strong foundation that can free you up to sketch anything you like, real or imagined.

Our 1-Day Technical Course orients you to the craft of charcoal sketching, while the 3-Day Technical Course teaches you to capture the beauty of objects, animals, and landscapes. But for those who want to sketch the living expressive forms of human faces with the flair of a master, our 6-Day Portrait Course and the 9-Day Master Portrait Course are unmissable. They are the core offerings at Science of Sketching, designed to drill the fundamentals of charcoal art, build strong foundations, and take your craft of charcoal portraits to new heights.

The 6-Day Portrait course is designed as a deep dive in the world of portrait sketching. Across nine 2.5 hr sessions, the course provides a structured, personalized journey to sketching human faces. With daily practice, personal guidance, and constructive feedback, the course will ingrain in you the foundations of technique and provide a thorough knowledge of the human face.

Starting with an anatomical understanding, the course literally teaches you the very bones of your subject and guides you in building up the edifice of the human face step by step. Through the sessions, you will come to learn how the play of light and shade, the nuance of volume, and proportions of the face from different angles all come together to breathe life into a charcoal portrait sketch. Slowly, you will be able to render the features – eyes, noses, lips, and ears – realistically, and recreate the beauty of the human face with nothing but charcoal, a brush, and the white of the page.

Alternating between one and two sessions per day, you will have ample time to learn and focus as well as relax your mind. By the end of the 6-Day Portrait Course, you will not only have finished charcoal portraits that you’ll be proud to call your creations, but also gain a new way of looking at the world.

The 9-Day Master Portrait Course is an even richer study into charcoal portrait sketching, designed to help you become an independent practitioner of the art. Along with everything that you learn in the 6-Day Portrait Course, you will also receive a dedicated Technical Class – a highly personalized offering reserved for those who want to commit to portrait drawing at a deeper level.

Through 13 immersive sessions, the course helps you refine your understanding of facial structure, light, proportionality, and tonality, and encourages you to meditate on the form and character of your sketches. The thoughtful repetitions that the course demands are indispensable to gaining mastery, and the feedback you receive will be critical to capturing the mood of the portrait and those subtle expressions that come to reflect one’s style and emotional depth.

By the end of the 9 days, you will have an intimate and intuitive understanding of human faces not just technically but as living expressive forms of nature. More importantly, you will have the confidence to pick any subject you like and create a realistic portrait of it.

Mastering the art of charcoal drawing is a lifelong process, and our 6-Day Portrait Course and 9-Day Master Portrait Course share in that philosophy. It is also a creative art that anyone can learn, with or without prior experience. The course is open to both returning artists as well as complete beginners. All you need is the curiosity to want to learn more about the art – the rest will follow on its own.