Grace Barry

Mark Tennant is known for creating vibrant paintings that capture people in relaxed, everyday moments such as walking on the beach, sitting in cafes or spending time outdoors. His work often focuses on natural light, movement, and atmosphere, giving ordinary scenes a warm and cinematic quality. Through loose brushwork and expressive colour he transforms simple daily experiences into elegant and memorable images that feel both modern and timeless.

Some examples of his work:

Jeanne Edwards is a painter whose work focuses on people in ordinary, everyday moments, often showing them in relaxed and natural settings. Her paintings capture human behaviour in a realistic and relatable way, turning simple scenes into meaningful studies of daily life. This connects strongly to the brief of capturing humans in everyday environments.

Jeanne Edward’s creates a lot of paintings at cafes capturing people talking, walking past, working and just enjoying a coffee. Throughout the project I mostly enjoyed going around town and finding a cafe to sit and observe people to draw. I mainly captured people just sitting talking to a friend enjoying a coffee, or people walking past. I think some of my best sketches, particularly my quick watercolour studies, came from observing people at a cafe.

Some examples of Jeanne Edward’s work:

Today I turned another one of my sketches into paintings. My proportions were off in my sketch the head was way to big but I thought I’d just fix it in my actual painting but it still somehow ended up way too big. I still used blocks of colour but I didn’t make it as messy and busy as last time which I quite like. I also do like the yellow wash I did underneath but I think I should have done a pink or a red to make the skin tones come out nicer

Life drawing with Sylvia

Quick sketches at work

Hashim Akins is a contemporary portrait artist known for his bold approach to the human face, often exploring identity through simplified visual forms. His work stands out for rejecting smooth blending in favor of strong color blocking. Instead of gradual transitions, he builds faces using distinct planes of color, giving his portraits a sculptural, expressive quality where light and shadow appear as contrasting shapes rather than soft gradients.

I’d like to capture this in my paintings. I think I need to mix up a lot more colours than I am at the moment so there’s more of a contrast

Examples of some of his portraits:

Turning sketches into paintings. I think I’ll start focusing more on doing sketches with oil pastels or watercolour to capture the colours since I found it hard to paint with just a pen sketch. I would usually blend all my colours and make them fade into eachother but I’m enjoying doing blocks of colours at the moment and I want to experiment a bit more with it

Quick oil pastel, pen and pastel pencil sketches from the smoking area

These are pen drawings I did on my lunch break at work