 Morning class and welcome to the Essential Guide to Portraits. This is a follow along video course showing you step by step every single brushstroke that I make when I'm creating a portrait. The portrait that we're going to be producing is a black and white portrait which is so key to the foundation when you're first learning about portraiture. When I first started portraits I used to pick colors here, colors there and kind of have a go at the cameras and see what happened and I usually ended up in a mess rather than having a solid portrait that I was really happy with. I want to show you how I discovered a classical approach to painting and how this is such a good way to learn about oil painting even if you've never used oil before. By building up the portrait layer by layer I learned how I can adjust the drawing in the initial stages, how I could then start to tweak the tones and be able to see how my lights and my darks are all working together and how when I put this all together the painting kind of happens in front of me and it doesn't seem it kind of comes with ease and this is what I want you to be able to achieve when you're working along at home. When you understand black and white, understand lost and found edges, how to build up oil in layers, the principles of fat over lean, you'll be so prepared when you start to bring in color to your palette everything will just fall into place. I've designed this course so there's two parts there's video tutorial which follows me and I've tried to arrange the camera so it's as if it's from my viewpoint as close as I can get the camera to the canvas so you can see every single brush mark that I make. This was really key because when I was trying to learn myself I could never find any tuition, any videos that were as close to the canvas as I wanted to get to so I was trying to make it so close there's no way they could have missed every brush mark that I make. I've also made a follow along PDF which goes through step by step every single part of the portrait. It's handy to work between the two so that you can watch it on the video to start with and then refer back to the written word and the photograph just as a reminder for key points in the work. So crab and broom maybe a couple of biscuits for this one because portraits can be a bit tricky at times but using this approach I'll show you the exact steps I use for my portrait painting and you can achieve some really brilliant results. See you on the side of the course and we can go on this portrait journey together looking forward to seeing your results.