SELF CARE

A four-week oil pastel portrait intensive

Charcoal teaches you to see. Color teaches you to feel.

This is the deeper version — four weeks, one portrait, built layer by layer until it's a thing you'd hang on a wall. Where the charcoal class is a single evening's revelation, this is the slow burn: you take one self-portrait and live with it across a month, watching it gather light, shadow, and finally color.

We work small and on purpose. Six colors. That's it. From six sticks of oil pastel you'll mix every tone your face is made of — because a portrait isn't found in a box of forty colors, it's found in how you layer six. The limit is the lesson. You'll work on aluminum panels built for this, the kind of surface that makes a finished piece feel like a real painting, because it is one.

Four weeks, four moves. Week one you draw the foundation. Week two you build the values — the architecture of light before color complicates it. Week three the color arrives, and the face turns warm and alive. Week four you finish, refine, and step back from something you made over a month of looking at yourself honestly.

Eight people, no more. This is a small room by design — close enough that you get real attention every week, and a group that watches each other's portraits deepen alongside their own. You keep your pastels. You carry home your panel in a box made to protect it. And you leave knowing how to do it again.

Materials included. All you bring is the willingness to spend four weeks with your own face.