Painting portraits is hard.. moreso in watercolors
I've been learning how to paint since March 2016. While I've seen a lot of progress since I started, it amazes me how difficult it can be to learn to draw and paint accurately. My main goal here is to document and reflect on learning how to draw and paint. Think of me as your art classmate.. you know..the annoying one that asks all the questions. So here we go:
In this post I want to focus on portraiture. One of the most important aspects of painting a successful portrait is selecting a good reference image. What makes a good reference image you ask? Well, I'm trying to figure that out, and maybe I'll put up another post about this in the future, but clear shadows and highlights help, I hear.
For my third ever attempt at a portrait painting, I chose this headshot of singer Sophie-Ellis Bextor as a reference:
from (https://www.theplace2.ru/photos/Sophie-Ellis-Bextor-md602/pic-21060.html)
Here's the steps I followed for this project:
1. Lightly drawing the outlines of major shapes on the face AND outlines of major shadow shapes, using a grid to measure things correctly.
By the end of step 1, I had this:
Some notes: I did a ton of comparative measuring, trying to find the right angles and even using a ruler to measure distances when things looked "off). I found it extremely difficult to get things "right". At this point I am hoping that I will improve in drawing accurately in time, if I keep working on it.
2 . Painting!
I added several washes of watercolor, going from lighter values to progressively darker tones. I wish I had captured more in-progress photos, but here's what I have:
so far so good (or so I thought).. Until I got feedback from several people that the measurements are off! And of course .. the measurements were off. I took my painting and the original into photo-editing to see where I was off. A bit of nip and tuck, and here we are...
The thing is, watercolor is unforgiving. Once color is down, it is next to impossible to pull that color out of the paper. And in watercolor, you can only ever paint darker over lighter color since the medium is transparent. Watercolor is also my favorite medium, so far, so I don't plan to give it up anytime soon. The glow and transparent quality really makes for lovely paintings that cannot be replicated by other media.
At least I learned a lot.
When you draw from observation, measure five times for every time you make a stroke on your paper.
All we can all do, is take what we learn to the next venture, that has to be enough sometimes.
Using watercolors is probably the hardest way to do this. I would recommend to use pencil and once you are good at it, move on to charcoal. Practicing with Bargue drawings would give you both a good reference as well as growing challenges.
Thanks for your comment! Ah yes, the Bargue plates. I have worked on these a bit here and there. Would probably benefit from doing it some more. I completely agree about the difficulties of watercolor, but then again it's so enjoyable using the medium that I find it hard to resist. I believe it is important to balance "fun time" art making with study time in the end, so I do foresee some graphite studies in my future.
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