This past week I spent putzing with portraits. If you’ve followed along on my posts you’ve seen a couple of my previous posts where I’ve attempted to draw or paint a portrait.
One of the first I did was back in 2017 from a selfie Ilene and I took while attending a Tacoma Rainier’s game. The photo really doesn’t do it justice as the skin tones are a bit off here but on the actual painting they look just fine.
I’ve also done some pen & ink sketches over the past couple years and been OK with them. Either way, painting or pen & ink you’ll see a trend and that’s where they are pretty much caricatures rather than more realistic renditions.
That all changed this past week when I discovered a workshop on Skillshare about portraits by Sade J. So I rolled up my sleeves, pulled out a couple of shades of watercolor and gouache and below are the results.
The first exercise I needed to do was what’s called a value study. Essentially looking at the shading and highlights of a person. In any painting it’s value–the contrast between lights and dark, that brings it to life.
Ilene was the subject of this study. Using pastel paper as a middle shade the idea was to add, in this case, strictly the lightest highlight and darkest shadow. I free-handed her portrait from a photograph and then added Daniel Smith Payne’s Gray watercolor for the shadows and Winsor & Newton Permanent White Gouache for the highlights.
On this portrait I only used three values (white highlight, the gray color of the paper as the medium value, and Payne’s Gray as the shadow) so I decided to do another portrait and add a fourth value to stretch myself a bit. For this portrait I used a photo of myself as the subject.
Now this portrait was NOT a free-hand drawing as I concerned with working the highlights and shadows not a sketch; so I just traced my image from a photo. I used a sepia colored paper and used the same watercolor and gouache colors as before but added a lighter color (an actual gray) of the Payne’s Gray to get the fourth value. You can see where I used it in the hair and beard.
Now that I’m comfortable with highlights and shadows on faces I’ll be working on skin tones this week and using regular bleached watercolor paper instead of colored paper. Fortunately Sade, the watercolor portrait instructor, has many different photos to work with and subjects of many different skin tones to use for practice.
I’ll let you see the results of of my work this week next Monday and you can see how I’m doing!
In the meantime, go do some art!