We’re running a live, free to enter, portrait painting competition with over £3,000 of prizes in August 2025 and you could be one of the participants.
Want to pit your artistic skills against the best of your peers in a live paint-off at our studios in Stroud?
On Friday 15th August 2025, ten artists will gather at our studios in Stroud and paint a portrait from life for 4 hours. At the end of the session, a panel of three professional artists (Stephen Bauman, Lizet Dingemans and Cornelia Hernes) will judge the portraits and award a winner. The winner will get a £2,500 cash prize and feature in a future issue of Artists and Illustrators Magazine.
I had a great time: it felt just like painting with old and new friends. With no cameras, and the day organised around the artists, we could all focus on observational painting.Anastasia Pollard, 2024 participant
In addition, there will be an online, public vote after the event and the winner of that will win a £500 cash prize and £250 of vouchers from our friends at Cass Art
Entry is open to anybody. To be considered as one of the ten artists, simply fill in your details below and submit an image of a portrait you’ve painted from life. The deadline for entrants in 12 noon UK time, 7th June 2025.
More information and FAQs
As artists ourselves, we’re running the sort of competition we’d like to be part of:
It’s a live painting competition, open to anybody.
It’s run by artists, for artists.
The 10 entrants, and the ultimate winner, will be chosen solely on artistic merit.
The judges are professional artists who we admire
The judges will prioritise accuracy of likeness, technical skill and emotional power in the painting
It will feature professional models, with professional lighting.
You will be working from life - no photographing the model.
Entries close at 12 noon on 7th June 2025. The competion is completely free to enter.
Note that you may paint in oil paint or acrylics only.
We have three professional artists as judges. In alphabetical order, they are:
Stephen Bauman is a classically trained artist and spent 12 years as an instructor in the drawing and painting program of the The Florence Academy of Art. In addition to that he was the director of the Anatomy & Écorché Department for 6 years, first in Sweden and then in the USA. In 2020 he left the academy to focus his efforts on his art career and teaching.
Lizet Dingemans is Head of Art at Raw Umber Studios. She was born in Helmond, the Netherlands. Unsatisfied with the art education there, she went to Florence in the summer of 2011 to study Fine Art at Angel Academy which gave her the inspiration to continue her art career in London as a student at the London Atelier of Representational Art (LARA).
After graduating she decided to stay, and is now a full-time artist and teacher. Her work has sold in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. In 2016 her work was acquired for the MEAM Museum in Barcelona, Spain.
Cornelia Hernes has throughout her career gravitated towards rendering the human form and emotive expressions in the genres of portraiture and mythological motifs. In addition, her still life paintings are recognized for their soulful and atmospheric qualities.
Cornelia earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts from The University of Victoria, BC, Canada in 2003, which exposed her to the paradigms of conceptual art. In the summer months of 2002-2004 she studied with the renowned artist Odd Nerdrum in Norway. Following her BFA degree, she pursued a classical realist art education from The Florence Academy of Art in Italy. This pivotal training resonated with her intrinsic interest in classical art. From 2007-2020 Cornelia was a Principal Instructor at the Florence Academy of Art branches in Italy, Sweden and in the USA consecutively.
Entries close at 12 noon UK time on 7th June 2025. The 10 participants will be notified by 21st June 2025. The competition itself will be held on 15th August 2025, from 10am - 5pm.
The competition is being held at Raw Umber Studios in Stroud. You can get directions here.
On the day, all ten artists will paint a model from life for 4 hours. There will be two models, so 5 artists per model, and the models will be professionally lit. The day will start at 10am and finish by 5pm.
On the day, you will be painting from life. This presents its own advantages and challenges. For this reason, you will not be allowed to photograph the model.
We will be filming the competition day, so you might appear on YouTube, social media etc.
To enter, simply fill in your details below and submit an image of a portrait you’ve painted from life. The deadline for entrants is 12 noon, 7th June 2025.
We’d like to thank our supporters. In alphabetical order, they are:
We use essential cookies so the site works, and tracking cookies to understand how people use it. Some of the latter are provided by third parties. See our privacy policy for more info.
