Winter Intensive: Portrait Painting Workshop

January 4–15, 2027 | Sarasota, Florida
Ten days of painting from life with Charles Miano

While winter settles over the northern landscape, come south to the warmth and light of Sarasota, Florida. Step into the atelier, take your place before the model, and devote ten days to the enduring art of portrait painting.

Join Charles Miano at Miano Academy of Art for two weeks of close observation, discovery, and work by hand. Working with the Miano Academy Foundation Palette of five colors, you will discover how a few carefully chosen pigments can evoke luminous flesh, delicate shadows, and the quiet presence of another person. Demonstrations, personal guidance, and sustained painting from life will deepen your understanding of color, light, and likeness. Open to all levels, this workshop welcomes both those beginning their journey and experienced painters seeking renewed depth in their work.

Week One: The Foundations of Color and Light

• Set the stage: Learn to arrange and illuminate the model, finding the light that reveals form and lends the portrait its mood.

• Compose with intention: Consider the placement of the head, the gesture of the pose, and the surrounding space as parts of one harmonious design.

• Learn the art of the beginning: Practice short portrait starts, capturing the essential impression through clear color masses and expressive brushwork.

• Discover richness within simplicity: Explore the Miano Academy Foundation Palette of five colors, learning to mix and organize a harmonious range of flesh tones.

• See warm and cool relationships: Observe the subtle shifts of color across the head, from illuminated flesh to the quieter hues of shadow.

• Build a sound structure: Study head construction, anatomy, and proportion, with brief three-color grisaille exercises supporting your understanding of value and form.

• Cultivate the painter’s touch: Explore how brushwork, values, and edges bring color into living form.

• Begin the sustained portrait: Divide each day between short studies, focused instruction, and the long pose, carrying discoveries in color into your developing painting.

Week Two: Bringing Forth a Living Presence

• Deepen the portrait: Develop the long pose with patience and purpose, preserving the life of the first impression.

• Refine the color harmonies: Explore subtle variations in flesh tones, reflected light, and the relationships between the sitter and the surrounding colors.

• Create luminous flesh: Learn how value, temperature, and chroma work together to suggest the warmth and vitality of skin.

• Seek light and likeness: Bring the sitter’s features into greater focus while keeping the portrait united under its illumination.

• Explore the sovereignty of light: Let light govern the painting’s colors, values, edges, and emphasis, drawing its many passages into a harmonious whole.

• Reveal movement and expression: Observe the inclination of the head, the rhythm of the pose, and the fleeting subtleties that suggest thought and feeling.

• Draw upon a living tradition: Pursue a classically inspired portrait shaped by your own encounter with the person before you.

• Finish with sensitivity: Refine selected details, soften or strengthen edges, and bring the portrait to resolution while preserving freshness and vitality.

Winter in Sarasota

Leave the snow behind for Gulf breezes, sunlit shores, and days devoted to your art. Within the atelier, find the pleasure of shared purpose: brushes at work, discoveries exchanged, and the model returning each day as your portrait slowly comes to life. Beyond the studio, Sarasota’s beaches and evening skies offer their own lessons in light and color.

Give yourself the gift of time to look closely, paint thoughtfully, and rediscover what first drew you to art.

Come south for the winter light. Take your place in the atelier.