HT School hosts a portrait making workshop 

As part of its annual roster of skill development events, HT School recently organised a portrait-making workshop titled ‘Junior Da Vinci’ on 29th April at the HT House, Delhi.  

The session, conducted by Mohit Suneja, Illustrator, Hindustan Times, was attended by 20 students of Classes IX-XII from eight schools across Delhi-NCR. The participating schools were Sanskriti School, Chanakyapuri; Bosco Public School, Pashchim Vihar; St. Mark’s Sr. Sec. Public  School, Meera Bagh; Mayoor School, Noida; Suncity School, Gurugram; GD Goenka School, Model Town; Happy English School, Sharad Vihar; Bharat National Public School, Ram Vihar and Delhi Public School, Vasundhara.  

The theme of the workshop was Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav “75 years of Indian independence”. The workshop began with a small introduction to the Indian independence movement and the concept of portraits. Various methods and explanations of different drawing techniques were shared with students. They were provided with image references of a few freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Mangal Pandey etc. which they had to drawn. They were also provided with art materials to paint with their choice of mediums. They were given a live demonstration of how to use the tracing paper effectively to create a lively portrait on the drawing sheet. 

Within this 2-hour workshop, many students displayed their talent and executed remarkably beautiful lively portraits of their favourite freedom fighters with various interesting drawing techniques by using pencil shading, watercolours, pencil colours etc. During the workshop, the students freely interacted with Mohit Suneja. There was a free exchange of ideas and students were also individually guided. “Interacting with the students was such a delight and they were more than happy to get their hands dirty and learn something new and exciting. They were keen to explore new areas and were intrigued by the nitty-gritties of the the process,” said Suneja. 

“It was an interesting experience. I learnt about my strengths and weaknesses. I realised that I needed to improve my speed and that my confidence also needs a boost which can happen with more practice,” said Arhan Basu, student, class X, Suncity School. 

 The workshop delved into details of how to create a portrait with nuances. Some of the specific pointers that were shared by Suneja focused on making the portrait more realistic and almost human-like, making the eyes as captivating as possible, working with pencil shading and colours more efficiently to bring the images to life as well as highlighting the expressions and moods of the subject. He guided students on how to find one’s style and how to work with different rendering techniques creatively to bring the artist’s personal style to life. 

The students who were very eager to learn and apply the techniques went home enthused and enthralled with their learning discoveries of the day.