How To Paint A Portrait In Watercolor

Beautiful Watercolor Portraits: v Steps to Success

We all know painting a portrait is a challenge, but the thought of painting a portrait in watercolor can be downright intimidating. Watercolor is notorious for being unforgiving, and so much so that many folks would never attempt a portrait in this tricky medium.

Only if you do information technology right, painting a portrait in watercolor can yield astonishing results! Here are some tips and tricks to get y'all started.

To kickoff painting anything in watercolor requires a footling planning and patience. Whether yous're painting from a photograph or from life, it helps to constitute your composition first. Knowing how much of your field of study you will be painting will make things much easier down the route. I've cropped this photo down from a "landscape" format to include merely my subject's head and shoulders, and to match the dimensions of my paper.

If you lot are painting from a photograph, it can be useful to transfer your image using a grid.

Step 1:

Draw out the subject lightly in a hard pencil, such as a 4H. Pay shut attention to the nighttime and light shapes in the head and face rather than the finer details. You're going to be working from general to specific and the details volition come afterward, so use a big round or flat brush, non a minor rigger or liner for these washes.

Footstep two:

Block in the darkest values first using dark washes. Avert using blackness, but instead, combine Burnt Umber and dark blue for annihilation exceptionally dark. Information technology helps to squint your eyes while looking at your subject to assistance isolate the dark values. Don't worry that these washes aren't as dark every bit they could exist; you volition accept a chance to darken them more later.

Tip: Information technology is of import to let each layer of washes dry out completely before laying downwards any new wash that might come in contact with a previous launder. This is especially important when laying down low-cal washes, as they tin can pull in dark pigment from an before wash and become muddy.

Stride 3:

Using lighter washes, block in the lighter values of the confront, leaving the lightest areas untouched. Avoid oversaturated colors past using plenty of water in your washes, and tone down your warm washes with a tiny bit of a absurd pigment, such as a dark blue, to keep them from becoming too intense.

Tip: Yous can "pull upward" whatsoever areas that may have gotten also dark by using a clean wet castor. Dab the castor against the night area once information technology has stale to push and option upwardly any excess pigment, or to alloy a new wash with a previous one without leaving a line or "tide mark."

Step 4:

After laying down your lighter washes, it'south easier to see where your commencement washes can be darker. Using a higher ratio of pigment to water, get back and re-establish the darkest values; in this case the hair and glasses. For hair, pay attention to where the highlights are located. You can often showcase these just by leaving a previous lighter launder visible while blocking in darker values. You don't need to paint every strand; the value difference will bear witness the viewer that the hair is shiny. Work into the details of the face with a smaller round castor.

Step 5:

Lay in washes for the background. Here I've chosen a muted yellowish-dark-green equally a complement to the warm tones in the face. The groundwork wash can too serve to set off the highlights in a face, in this case the lower right, where the cheek had previously been hard to differentiate from the white background.

Since this is a watercolor, leaving things loose and gestural if preferable to over-working. Let the watercolor do what it wants to practice, and you should exist able to conquer the watercolor portrait like a pro! What practice yous find near challenging near watercolor portraits? To learn more than nigh painting watercolor portraits, exist sure to enroll in Portraits in Watercolor with Matt Rota.