Live Portrait Painting

Taught to paint inside the walls of Boggo Rd Prison in the 80s, Mark Flewell-Smith shares his tips & techniques for painting portraits. Learn how to find the likeness in an image, how to transfer this to your canvas and how to build out a show stopping portrait.

All materials are provided for this 3 hour session, including an exclusive pre-sketched canvas to create a black and white acrylic portrait.

Mark will start the session with a brief introduction before starting to sketch and paint a portrait from an image, stopping regularly to assist students to paint along, building the highlights from a black canvas. You will see examples of portraits created in 3 hours versus those that are built over 3 days or 3 weeks, learning the techniques to continue towards realism if you wish.

Mark has dedicated 4 decades to his refining his craft, trained to paint as part of an art program in Boggo Road Gaol in the 1980s. His teacher, the late Wayne Weaver, fought for his fellow inmates to learn the skills of the masters and encouraged them to use their skill to communicate their stories visually.

Experience a grass roots, raw and bare painting workshop that gets to the core of why we art.