Portrait Painting With Acrylics Or Watercolor

Portrait Painting With Acrylics Or Watercolor

Painting people with acrylic or watercolor paint is easy, but can take patience and practice. Although every artist is different I will explain the way that I paint and the techniques that work well for me then you will have the opportunity to follow my Free lesson and get started painting the human eye.

Drawing The Features Correctly

The first and in my opinion, the most important step is drawing the subjects features and head shape correctly. It does not matter how you master this, just get the features correct. One method is to use a grid. Place a grid over the photo then draw grid lines on the canvas and simply copy what you see onto the canvas square by square. You may even be talented enough to freehand the drawing. I will let you in on a secret, but you have to keep it to yourself. If you have the photo on your computer, just enlarge it, reverse or mirror image it, then trace with tracing paper. Now just put the tracing paper on the canvas and reproduce the exact image without knowing a thing about drawing!

Skin Tones and Colors

I generally use several thinned down layers of color to obtain the correct shadows and colors. In essence I guess my technique could be classified as watercolor portraits. Now create a skin color and block in the entire skin area. Using white, yellow, reds, and burnt sienna creates most skin color. Obviously adjust the amounts of each color depending on the actual colors and tones. The paint should be very thin like a watercolor. Use some of this color and add burnt sienna to paint in the outline of the eyes, nose and mouth. Make sure that you use a very fine, thin brush so that the lines will be thin. Add some burnt sienna and crimson or other red to the skin color where you want the shadows to be. Study the photo or model and see where they are. Add more thin layers and blend them into the flesh color until the shadows are distinct.

Add Final Details

Add details of the eyes, nostrils, lip color and eyebrows. Final details can be added by using pure white. Such details may be upon the eyelids, on the nose, upper lip or anyplace you want to look moist or where the light is catching it. Painting people does take practice. Do not get disappointed if do it yourself portraits are not perfect. If you have a desire to paint people you will get it with enough practice.

The Original article Portrait Painting With Acrylics Or Watercolor was first published on Ezinearticles

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