Celebrate your furry (or feathered!) best friend in this guided pet portrait class at The Open Art Lab. In this step-by-step session, students will learn how to capture their pet’s personality through expressive line work, thoughtful color mixing, and simple shading techniques — leaving with a one-of-a-kind painted portrait to cherish.

Celebrate your furry (or feathered!) best friend in this guided pet portrait class at The Open Art Lab. In this step-by-step session, students will learn how to capture their pet’s personality through expressive line work, thoughtful color mixing, and simple shading techniques — leaving with a one-of-a-kind painted portrait to cherish.

Start your drawing journey with the fundamentals that every artist relies on. In this first class of our 8-part monthly Sketch Club series, you’ll build confidence through line exercises, explore simple forms like cubes and cylinders, and learn how light and shadow bring drawings to life. Designed for teens (13+) and adults, this small-group class (max 8 students) offers a supportive, focused environment to grow your skills from the ground up.

In this focused watercolor study, we’ll use a simple subject—a banana—to explore the complexity of color beyond what we expect to see. Through guided observation, students will learn to notice subtle shifts in light, shadow, and reflected color, and how these nuances bring a painting to life.

A single apple can teach you an entire foundation of observational drawing. In this session, students focus on how light interacts with a simple form, using value and shadow to understand structure, volume, and dimension in a clear and approachable way.

In this expressive, process-focused class, we’ll explore the dynamic relationship between ink and watercolor by drawing directly with pen and bringing the work to life with fluid, intuitive color. Instead of planning every detail, we’ll lean into spontaneity—allowing lines to be imperfect, gestural, and full of character.

Understanding how to draw different materials is a key step in developing realism and visual storytelling in your work. In this session, students will explore how pencil can be used not just to describe shape, but to communicate surface quality, texture, and material behavior in a believable way.

In this class, we move beyond the idea of a single “skin color” and explore how a wide range of hues—cool and warm, soft and bold—work together to create a lifelike, dimensional portrait. Through observation and guided exercises, we’ll look at how light, shadow, and surrounding colors influence what we see, helping you build a more nuanced and expressive approach to painting faces.

Facial features are the building blocks of portrait drawing, and in this session, students will slow down to study each element on its own. By focusing on individual facial features, we begin to understand how proportion, structure, and subtle shifts in value come together to create believable forms. This class is less about finishing a full portrait and more about learning how each part functions on its own before combining them later.

We’ll explore how water and sky interact—how light travels across the surface, how colors shift with atmosphere, and how movement can be suggested with just a few intentional marks. Using ocean scenes as our subject, we’ll focus on capturing the feeling of a moment rather than every detail within it.

Landscape drawing is about more than capturing a scene—it’s about understanding space, distance, and atmosphere. In this session, students will learn how to simplify complex outdoor environments into clear, readable sketches that communicate depth and mood. The focus is on observation and structure rather than detail, helping students build confidence when drawing larger scenes.

In this expressive, mixed-media class, we’ll explore florals through an abstract lens—focusing less on realism and more on movement, color, and feeling. Using watercolor as our primary medium, we’ll build soft, flowing compositions that capture the essence of florals rather than their exact form.

Portrait drawing starts with understanding how the face is constructed, not just how it looks. In this introductory session, students will learn the foundational principles of portraiture by breaking the face down into simple, measurable relationships. The focus is on structure, proportion, and placement rather than detail, helping students build confidence before moving into more advanced portrait work.

This relaxed session is all about bringing everything together through your own creative lens. Students are invited to bring a reference image that feels meaningful to them and use it as the foundation for a personal drawing. Whether it’s a favorite landscape, a beloved pet, a study of flowers or plants, a travel memory, a book cover, a movie poster, or a personal photograph, the goal is to translate something you care about into your own visual interpretation.

This final class serves as a culmination of the Sketch Club series, giving students dedicated time to complete a more refined, portfolio-worthy piece. In this open studio-style session, students will choose their own subject matter and continue developing it with instructor support, focusing on strengthening areas such as composition, structure, and rendering.