The process of a watercolor portrait from Start to Finish! Origina...

Hi all beautiful people!

Today I wanted to walk you through my latest watercolor portrait.
I've been mainly focusing on my oil paintings lately and it feels super nice to work with a faster medium like watercolor every once in a while to change things up!

This portrait was based on a photo of a friend but it looks nothing like her. I like to do that from time to time, just use pictures as a reference to get a sence of the light situation or to have a structure to base my ''imagined'' face on.

It's refreshing to be able to not care too much about likeness, but mor about the medium itself.

A few of the stages from the portrait I will be talking about..

One of the aspects of watercolor that I really enjoy is that it helps me to train my understanding and design of ''shapes''. When I say shapes, I mean that everything we see is put together by one or several shapes. How these shapes and planes relate to each other by values and color will determinate the light effect and feeling of form we achieve.

This also applies in oilpaint of course, but because watercolor is such a loose and ''uncontrolable'' medium, knowing your shapes and planes really helps you to handle it.

So let's start!

Step 1:

1..jpg

Step 1 is making a drawing. Like you can see I haven't put any values in with my pencil, I'm just drawing in the ''shapes'' that i will fill in later with paint. One thing I find very helpful when I paint watercolors is to also draw in the shapes of the highlights. This lets me know where NOT to put down any paint but leave pure paper to achiece that nice clear white. Look at her nose for example and you can see I have drawn in the shape of the highlight.

Step 2:

The first thing I do is put down a light wash of a general skin color. This is a mixture of bright red, ochre and a tiny bit of ultramarine blue. I avoid painting over the areas that I have marked off as pure paper areas.

Step 3:

In step 3 I make a light shadow shape value and fill in the shapes that i know will have this shade or a darker color. It's always importrant to work from light to dark as we can always add darker values and more paint on top of a lighter layer. To start removing paint that is proving too dark on the other hand, that can be a pain..

Step 4:

A darker shade of the shadowshape mixture is added in addition to a slightly warmer and darker color in some of the areas in the lightshape. This shadowshape mixture was ultramarine blue, a little black, yellow ochre, alizarin crimson and some green. Remember that when watercolor dries it becomes much lighter than it first appear when wet.

Step 5:

Now I am addig the reds. Adding red will in most cases show you if the overall hue ( color temperature) is too cold or too warm. In this case i see that I can still push in some more color in the face. I add red notes on her nose and cheeks.

Step 6:

Now it's time to add the hair. I Start with a cool mixture of black, blue and red to make a light purple. This is because this is the color of the lightest areas in her hair. As I add more paint I will leave these areas out and build the darker values around them.

Step 7:

I add some warmer notes to the hair to give it more life. I also go over my lightshape to put more color in her face. At this point I can see that my shadows have become too light ad I am loosing a lot of the lighteffect. To darken them will be my next step.

Step 8:

The painting is starting to come together but I want to add some final darker notes to bring up the contrast just that little bit more. As you can see I've worked more on the hair and filled in those shawow shapes with som darker values.

Step 9:

In the final step I am adding in my darker darks. This is till not pure black, but black mixed with some red, yellow and blue. This is to give the darks some reflection and warmt. Often if we use pure black it can come off as a bit dead looking.

The process of a watercolor portrait from Start to Finish! Original work by @mayasky