Two-hour sessions, twice per week, for six weeks.  Hands-on, real learning!

Anyone can outline a face. This course is about something harder: making charcoal on paper actually look like someone — the weight of a brow, the specific curve of a jaw, the way light falls across real skin instead of a generic oval. Built for students who already have foundational drawing skills and are ready to push into likeness, structure, and expression.

This is intermediate-level instruction — students should already be comfortable with basic gesture, proportion, and value work (our Intro to Figure Drawing course is a natural prerequisite, but not required if a student has equivalent experience elsewhere).

What students will build over 6 weeks:

• 🎯 Facial proportion & structure — the underlying geometry of a head, and how features actually sit in relation to each other
• 🌓 Advanced value control — building convincing form and dimension through a full charcoal range, not just outline and shade
• 👤 Likeness — the specific, harder skill of capturing an individual's actual features, not a generic "portrait"
• ✋ Working from live models and reference — training the eye to catch subtle asymmetries most beginners miss
• 🖼️ A finished, refined portrait — one sustained piece built and revised across the full six weeks, not a new sketch every session

Good fit for: middle and high schoolers with prior drawing experience who want real technical growth — this course moves at a faster, more demanding pace than an intro class.