Teaching Portraits

I coordinate a lot of events for my job and teach a lot of different classes.  In most of our classes we lead people through artwork that is copyright protected by Painting with a Twist LLC corporate office out of Mandeville, LA.  Not very often do we teach artwork that an artist from our studio has created.  Although once a month I do teach a class called Paint your Own Pet, where all the designs are custom made by me and pre sketched on the canvas prior to guests' arrival.  This past month we started offering a new custom class, Paint your own Portrait.  This brought a new challenge for me to figure out how to guide a group of 20 people through different designs within 2 hours.  People are difficult to paint successfully for an experienced artist and 90% of our guests haven't touched a paint brush since kindergarten.  I knew this was gonna take some work to figure out.

 Now, the corporate example we worked off of showed the portrait done with a lot of solid black lines and highlights. This style allowed me to teach skin tone without having to show them how to add highlights and shades through skin tone values.
 
 After trying our a few teaching methods on an example, I decided on a technique to try for our first class. I'm so excited our well these portraits turned out! I'm even more impressed that everyone was able to finish their paintings within the 2 hour time frame.

 Now I have two example paintings that I get to put fun rules on! I'm thinking about for the Kim Kardashian one of putting: 'Rule #3: No drinking the paint water. No paintbrushes in your drink'.  And for the more interesting man in the world: 'I don't always paint, but when I do ________'. I was also informed that he definitely needed a beer next to him.