Learn to Paint Portraits in Acrylic

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. My name is Paul Richmond and welcome to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. Here's the painting we're going to make. Are you ready? Piece of cake? You can do it in this course. I am going to take you step by step through the process of painting a realistic portrait and acrylic paint. We will start with a blank canvas. And by the end of the course, you will have a finished painting. I've painted portraits for a long time in a range of styles to from photo realism to more expressive. I want to share with you some of what I have learned. A lot of artists when they start out, are a bit intimidated to paint the human face. But if you know a few simple tricks, you can do it. It's no different than painting anything else. So we'll start out by transferring the drawing that I'm going to provide to you onto the canvas so you don't have to deal with the drawing part. You certainly can if you want to. But since this is a painting class, I wanted to get right to that. So after we transfer the drawing, then I will have you do an underpainting, which is where you just kind of walk in the lights and darks will do the XYM method next. So right on top of the underpinning, we will start adding more details, still with just one color range of lights and darks, but just one color. And then the final step will be adding in all of the different colors through a process called glazing, which is where you kinda paint in a more transparent way so that all the details that you have underneath show through. But you just bring out the color. That sounds like a lot. But you can do it. I've been painting portraits and figures, really my whole life, but especially my entire professional life. I just love studying people, learning about people. And I really think that painting a portrait is an opportunity to look a little bit deeper into somebody else, their eyes, their story, and try to bring that out onto the canvas. It's not just capturing the likeness. It's all about connecting with the model and bringing that person to life in your art. The techniques that I'm going to show you can be applied to so many other things, to certainly other portraits, but also any other subject matter that you might want to paint and acrylic, I'm going to start at the very beginning. So this class is great for beginners, but also if you're a more advanced artist and you want a refresher, kind of go back to the basics of acrylic painting. You will get a lot out of this two. Are you ready to get started? Okay, Happy painting? 2. Materials: So in today's lesson, I will go over all of the materials that you'll need, including the line drawing of the model. You can actually download that and print it out. It's in the resources section of the course. So first thing is a canvas. And I recommended in the materials list to get an eight by ten Canvas. And the reason that I did that is because I'm also providing you with the sketch that you can print out. And so I thought that would be a nice manageable size so that we can transfer the drawing right onto the canvas from the printout. You are welcome to work with whatever size of Canvas you want though. And it's totally up to you if you want to transfer the sketch that I created or if you want to draw it yourself, also, you will need acrylic paint. I went with a very inexpensive brand, this liquid texts basic acrylic. You can use any type of acrylic paint that you want. But I wanted to show you that it will work just as well to use a very inexpensive brand, especially if you're just starting out with acrylic paint, you don't want to have to buy a ton of stuff. So I got the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. And then I also have a green and a brown which is burnt umber, That's the color of brown that I chose. And titanium white. And if you have those, you can mix everything else that you need. I also got some very inexpensive brushes. I like this Xin brand, but really any brush that you want that's made for acrylic paint, they tend to be a little bit softer, which is, which is better if the bristles are too stiff, they will kinda drag through the paint and make it a little harder to work with. So I like, I like softer bristles. I also have palette knife for mixing paint. I have paper towels. This is a tablet of pallet paper. This is for putting the paint on and mixing. You can also use a Styrofoam plate. You could use one of those plastic pallets with the little wells, whatever whatever works and a cup of water. Okay. Happy painting 3. Transferring the Sketch: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, I will show you how to transfer the drawing onto the canvas and then we'll be ready to get started. If you'd prefer to freehand draw the portrait, that is completely fine too, but I just wanted to give you an easier way to get that part out of the way so we can get started with painting, since that's what this course is really about for today, all that you will need is the Canvas and a pencil. And if you want to transfer the drawing like I'm dealing, then go ahead and print out the sketch that I provided. My canvas is actually nine by 12. I went up a size from what I suggested that you buy just so that it would show up better on camera. And the only reason I'm pointing that out is because when you print out your sketch, there will be a little less room probably around her when you put it onto the canvas if you print it out at full size. So don't let that throw you off. I just didn't want you to be confused. If yours looks a little different than mine, that's okay. And like I said, you can do any size you want and you can choose your own composition if you want it to do a horizontal composition and have her somewhere positioned on the Canvas that way that's fine to make it your own. Don't feel like you have to do everything exactly as I'm doing it. So an easy way to do it transfer is to take your printout for your sketch, whatever it is that you're transferring and using your soft lead pencil. So I have a six be any B pencil is going to be a softer lead. So those are better for transferring. You will just on the back of the paper, kind of just go through and color in wherever there's a line. You're basically creating your own carbon copy paper. I'm kind of aging myself here. Anybody under the age of 30 probably has no idea what I just said. But it basically allows you to just easily transfer the lines from the paper onto the canvas. I will show you in just a moment. It's not necessary to do it in the white spaces. That's why you only see me doing it where there is a line because I like to make things as easy on myself as possible. I'm very, very excited about this class and getting to paint this portrait with all of you. I thought that the model had a very classical look and the way that the image was lit just seemed like it would really lend itself well to a beautiful acrylic painting. So we are going to do this to go there. All right, I'm just about finished here. Just get this side of her hair. You'll notice I didn't draw a lot of details. Kinda just stuck with the outlines of things because I like to figure out a lot of the extra stuff with paint. I don't want it to become too much like a paint by number. Just get the, get the basics on there so you know the proportions are right. And that's good enough. Alright. And then turn it over and position it wherever you want to put her. And then here's my Pali pro tip for today. If you have some masking tape, tear tear off a piece and just put that on top to hold it in place. That way it won't slide around. And you end up with a very trippy looking drawing unless, unless that's the vibe you're going for. All right, now, all you have to do is trace your lines and magically they will show up on the canvas. I'll just show you. So it's kinda light. But that's actually a good thing because you don't want really strong lines on the, on the Canvas when you're painting. Eventually, you want all the lines to go away and just be covered up with paint. Alright, so trace the drawing. Don't worry about making it perfect. This is really just to get the essence on there. Hello, My tapes coming up. Seeing this part isn't hard at all, is it? None of it will be hard. I think a lot of artists are fearful of the portraits because unlike their subject matter, e.g. if you're painting a tree or a landscape or something, if a branches and in the exact right spot, nobody's probably going to notice. But if you're doing a face and you get a feature, not quite right, then it's probably not going to look like that person. So I'm going to show you a lot of tips and tricks for capturing the portrait and staying true to the reference. And then I also want to encourage you to know that you have the freedom to stylize it in any way that you want. Your paintings don't have to be realistic if you want to take it in a different direction. By all means, I love encouraging people to be creative. So I'm here to show you the basics. This is a good beginners acrylic painting class, and it's also a good refresher for anyone who is more experienced but maybe hasn't done a portrait and a YL or just wants to learn some new acrylic painting techniques. It's a good class for everyone, but also feel free to do whatever you want with it. Let's get this face on here. We, in our next lesson, we can start painting. Not worried too much about eyelashes because that will all get covered up when I paint her eyelids anyway. Ok, and there we go. Here's your polyprotein number two. Before you actually lift off the tape and remove the sketch, just kinda peel it up like this and look to make sure that you didn't miss anything important. I think I have everything I need, so I'm going to go ahead and take that off. There we go. Now, if you want to, you could go over the lines and make them a little bit darker. But I'm going to leave it as is. I think it's good enough for me to see. Hopefully you can see it too. And there you have it. Great job everyone. So you've got your drawing, transfer it onto the canvas. And now in our next lesson, we are going to start working on the underpainting. See you then? 4. Underpainting - Dark Values: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. Today, we're going to get started on something called an underpainting. So get ready. Happy painting, everyone. Alright, let's get started painting. I'm excited. I am going to use my brown today. This is burnt umber is the color of brown that I have. Any brown that you have will work. If you don't have brown, you could use black. You could use really any color. What we are doing is making an underpainting today. And an underpainting is meant to help you understand the lights and darks and all the shades in between where they go in the image. So most of what we are painting today won't actually show in the final piece. This is just kinda like a foundation step to help get things sorted in place. And then we'll do more layers on top of that. That's one of the beauties of working with acrylic, is that you can just keep layering is. So this is just step one. There's a lot of freedom in that you don't have to stress because it'll be covered up. It's kinda like the underwear painting that that's my polyprotic the day. Don't stress about the underpinning because nobody is supposed to see it anyway. So I pulled out some of the brown on my palette. I have a cup of water here, and I'm starting with a big brush. This is a three-quarter inch brush, is what I'm using. And I kinda like these flat brushes like this, but use whatever you have. We're going to start with the dark values. So the way that I like to do an underpainting is to just use one color and to create different shades, lights and darks. You just use more water to make it lighter. So this underpainting stage is kinda like making a watercolor painting really. Let's start with the darkest values first. So you don't need much water for that. The darkest values that I see on the image and really study it and look at, it's a little tricky in some places. It first I thought maybe it was the background, but actually there are sections of her hair that are darker than the background and also the shadow, the shadow on this side of her face is darker than the background. So we're going to start with the darkest part, which is right here on the hair. Well, I say we I mean, you can start wherever you want. I am going to start right here in the hair. Let me put it that way and don't try to blend everything and make it too smooth. And that's, that's one mistake that I see people making when they're starting out a painting. A lot of times you have this fear that everything needs to really be perfectly blended. And it doesn't, at this stage, it's okay to have it look a little more blocky, a little more imperfect. That's totally fine. So just just kinda block it in. We're probably not going to get the underpainting completely finished. In this lesson. We'll just focus maybe on the dark areas here at first, and then we'll come back to it and do the lighter areas next. Remember, don't worry about the details. You don't, you're painting doesn't have to have the same number of little strands of hair as the, as the reference. I know some of you out there are perfectionists. I can be a little bit too sometimes that's alright. Can embrace that, but I'm save it for later in the process. You don't want to burn yourself out too soon, especially on this part that is going to be completely covered up. One of the reasons for doing an under painting like this. This is a very kind of classical technique. A lot of, you know, kinda like the classical master artists would begin their work this way. And I think that the biggest advantage of it is that it allows you to really just focus on value, which means the lights and darks in the image without having to think about color. Because color is its own animal. And it's helpful to just kinda be able to separate the two and focus on one thing at a time. So if you can get this working well, monotone, then we can glaze on top of it, which is where you just kinda wash some colors over top. And you don't really completely lose the value structure that you've created. Alright, so I'm just going for the darkest dark areas right now Depending on how thick your pain is, your your paint might look more opaque or it might look more transparent. If it, if it's too transparent than that just means you might have to hit some of those dark spots with a second, second layer. That's alright. Okay. Now the next dark area that I see, the next really dark area is kinda down all along this side of her face. One of the questions you want to ask yourself when you're trying to identify value is, where do I see? When there's an edge? Where do I see the darker side? Is it here or is here? When you look at her face all along this cheek, chin, and even down the neck here, her skin is actually just a little bit darker than the background. So if you're switching brushes like IN, that's when you want to swirl your brush around in the water, make sure you get all of that paint out of there as much as you possibly can, and then dry your brush off on a paper towel. Just kinda squeeze it and try to put it roughly back into the shape that it was. When you started. At the end of the session, you'll want to clean your brushes out better than this, but this is good for now. Alright, now I'm going to take the smaller slant brush. This is a three-eighths inch slant brush. Don't worry about having the exact same thing as me though. Seriously, whatever you have, make it work. That's, that's my motto. Alright, so I'm going to continue with that dark value now down the side of her face over here. And it looks like it doesn't go too far. It kinda ends about there. Then we have her eyebrow. I'm just going to block that in for now. We'll paint more details and hairs and things as at the final stage. Block this one into another benefit of doing an underpainting. For those of you that are new are two acrylic is that sometimes it takes a couple of layers of paint before, before it really starts to look finished before the paint feels solid and smooth and blends nicely. So this just adds a layer to start that process. So you're not doing your painting, your final painting on the the primed canvas, you have something as a buffer in there. All right. I'm going all the way down here. Beside her lip. Comes underneath a little there down this side and stops at the chin. Now I'm going to take the darkness right on up. The sign. Comes down here. Eyelid, eye itself, pupil, iris. Eyes are super important in a portrait. I always loved painting them really makes, that's when it starts to really feel like the person. But again, it's one of those things that you don't want to get too obsessed with too soon. Just kinda block it in. Like I keep saying, We're not going for detail here. If you mess up, you can just wet your brush and kinda scrub that area and lift the paint up if you need to. Or, you know, again, except the fact that it doesn't have to be perfect at this stage. Okay, now, I see that there's a little spot here in the middle between these two sides where the shadow gets a little bit lighter. But I think what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and fill it all in because my paint is a little bit thin and it's not as dark as it needs to be yet. So I'll actually be coming back and probably doing one more layer to really darken the shadow parts. Then I'm going to move down to the neck. Bring it right on them. Only where I see those darkest darks whenever you're painting something from a reference, I want to encourage you to keep looking up at the reference as much as possible. Because there's just something about when you get into a painting. I know for me too. I just I don't want to stop. I don't want to take my eyes off of my canvas. I wanted to just kinda keep looking at what I'm creating. But you really need to study that reference and keep me. So I just tried to constantly keep having my eyes go up and down, up and down so that I can check, check in with the reference, make sure that I'm capturing really what I'm seeing there. Okay, and after I finished this little shadow here, That's going to be it for this lesson. And then we will just pick up right where we left off next time. But before I let you go, I do want to mention brush cleaning options. So like I showed you with the last brush, you want to start by just kinda cleaning it out in your water and kinda shaping it on a paper towel. And then when you're ready to actually clean your brushes at the end of the painting session, you'll take it to a sink. And I just use Dawn dish soap that works really well. And you put a little bit of the soap in your hand and then just kinda scrub the brush in your palm until all that pigment comes out. You'll see whatever color it is. It'll come out on your hand and then rinse the brush off and then reshape it with the paper towel. And that'll keep your brushes in good shape so that you'll be able to get a lot of use and a lot of love out of Great job everyone you did it or hate. In tomorrow's lesson, we're going to continue working on the underpainting, getting into the medium and light values. See you then 5. Underpainting - Medium and Light Values: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. Today we are going to be continuing with the underpainting and we're moving into the medium and lighter values, Happy painting. Okay, Let's jump right back into this yesterday we started by blocking in the darkest values. And there's just one little spot that I missed. And that's this guy here. And I might want to reinforce some of the darks too. So I have my burnt umber out. And you can use whatever color you want to use for this. And I'm going to start by going in and just putting in some value for this. I not detailed about it at all, but just wherever I see the darkest dark. So starting starting along the top of the lid, the eyelash line area. And then I'll go inside the pupil and iris and get some darks in there. So I'm using this slant brush, but I'm just using the tip of it. So I kinda like to do that and then I can just switch and turn it when I need to. And I see some dark right here in the nostrils. So I'm gonna go ahead and put that in. I see little dark shadow here in this divot between the nose and the lips. And I see some darkness in, in-between the upper lip and lower lip. A little corner there on that side. And on this side. And this upper lip, the right side of it is pretty dark also. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that to you a little bit on the right side of the lower lip. Okay. Now I very quickly when I come back and do one more layer of dark on the shadow side of her face. Only this time I'm going to leave the area right in the middle on untouched so that it will be a little bit darker here beside her nose. And then over on the edge of her cheek. Just push that dark a little darker. If your paint that you're using, it was already dark enough. You don't need to do that the stuff. So see how I'm just kinda like brushing that into what's there. So it blends a little. It won't be perfect. It'll look kinda brushy because this is a, not a, not a very precise technique yet. We're just getting paint on there, so it's okay to see brushstrokes. You can still make it very smooth if you want to later. Coming right along the edge here. There. Looks good. And then just leaving that little sliver like that. Alright, I'm going to clean up my brush now and go for a bigger one. So we've done all of our darkest darks. Now I'm going to go down to one shade lighter, but still, still pretty dark. That background is very close to the darkest value, but it's just a hair lighter. So I'm using a little more water with my paint. You see I just kinda dip the brush in the water and wet the paint until I feel like it has the right consistency. If you're not sure, you can always have a spare piece of paper next to you and test the color there. There's your polyprotein for today. Always have something you can use to quickly test the color beside you if you're unsure of what it's going to do. Alright? Now I'm just going to block in that background. I like to get the background established pretty quickly because when you are painting, well, anything really. But in this case, when you're painting a portrait, the value, meaning the shade, how dark or light it is. And also the color of the background has a huge impact on the tones that you see in the face itself. Our skin is very reflective. It's very influenced by what's around it. Because it caves into peer pressure. Sorry, you will have to put up with some of my bad jokes as we go through this class. That's a little bonus. Whether you, whether you like it or not, too bad. All right. Anyhow, let me just block in that background and it's okay to just brush right over top of the part you already did once the paint dries on here, it'll it'll stay, you won't hurt it. And this is all very preliminary anyhow, like I said, this is like the underwear of your painting. Nobody is gonna be seeing Well, I mean, I guess you get to see mine. That's all right. It is kinda fun to document your process. You might want to, at the end of each lesson, even take a photo of your painting to say you can look back when it's all finished and kinda remember how you got it there. Okay. I've got the background blocked in and other places where I see that kinda middle value are in the remaining parts of the hair. So I'm gonna do the same thing there. Just thin it out with some water, paint that area and see how it shows up a little bit lighter than the darker tone that we put on there first. So when you're first starting out, if you can even just break down the image into three different values, dark, middle, and light. That's going to be a great way to start. But then you can go into each of those sections like the dark area, the middle area, and start to break it down further. See what else you see in there. Because there can be multiple different shades of middle value, multiple shades of white. Alright, I also see that middle value, this just kinda like a little shadow all along her jaw. And then kinda on her neck. I squint my eyes a lot when I'm painting, you probably have noticed me doing that already. I probably do it even more than is necessary to be honest, it's just such a habit now. But it really advance. The reason why you might want to try doing that is that when you squint your eyes, you kinda blur all the details, um, and it makes it so that you really just focus on the big picture. So polyprotein tip number two for today. Don't get too hung up in details too quick. Squint your eyes and focus on the big picture first. And then you can always come back and make it more detailed later. I see some of the shapes in the ear are designated with that middle value that I don't really see a lot of like real dark values in the year, so we'll just stick with the middle value there. I see a middle value above her eye. You see how I'm, I'm still using this really big brush because that's another way of preventing yourself from going too detailed to quick. I'm just very quickly trained to walk in. I keep saying that, but that's a really good way to think about it. The main shapes and planes of the face. If you think about it like that, instead of painting the features, we're not there yet. We're just trying to get the basic structure of the face. Before we get into all those details. Still working with that meat, medium value, middle value, whatever you wanna call it. Wherever I see it. A little bit along the side of the nose. Under here. On her lips. You probably saw me just paint over that whole i2 and maybe that made you freak out a little bit. Don't worry. The whites of the eye can actually be quite dark if it's in shadow. So don't, don't be afraid to go as dark as necessary. The beauty of acrylic, you can always go lighter on top again if you need to, you can always paint highlights back. That's one thing that makes it very different from say, a watercolor painting, where you are, once the white of the paper is covered, you're kind of, you're kind of stuck. But with acrylic, you can just keep layering until you get it exactly how you want it. Right now I'm just kinda looking at the structure of her face over here. There's this shadow that goes down and actually goes all the way to the jaw. This little shadow that comes up over here. We're definitely simplifying things, but that's okay for now. You just want to get the essence of it. This is like, like I keep saying, you're building the foundation. This is not the detail phase, but you want to start thinking about it as if it were a sculpture instead of a flat painting. Think about what are the recessed areas of the face where the areas that are coming forward. The last thing you wanna do is think of it as a face at all, because that's when you start using your own mental concept of what a face is supposed to look like instead of painting what you see. So when you're painting these different parts, I don't even think I'm painting an eye right now or I'm painting and nose or whatever. I just think I'm painting shapes, shapes, and values. Alright, now for the last parts, that there's really nothing in this image that's pure white except for maybe the sparkle in the eye and a few little highlights. So I want to get all the white of the canvas covered. So I'm just using mostly water now with whatever little bit of pigment is remaining on my brush. And I'm just kinda filling in all the rest of the parts. There's obviously a lot of subtle stuff that we're not capturing here yet in this underpainting. And that's okay. This is just for, for big things. Now, occasionally, if, especially if you're using cheap brushes like I am, you may end up with a little hair that comes becomes off. I have one right here in her lip. We don't want that, so just take another brush and kind of scoop it out of there. Let me put a little bit on her teeth to you. Okay. There we go. And darken the lower lip. I just want to make sure that her mouth is distinct enough. Maybe go a little darker up here. So the good time to just stop now and compare what you've made with the reference and see if there's any place where you want to push the darks a little more or go a little bit lighter. If you need to lighten an area, you can take a clean brush. I'll just call mine out really quick. And if you just have water, you can actually come in and just kinda scrub a little bit and lift up the paint to create highlights in your underpainting. Just like that. And if if it doesn't lift up enough, once you have put the water on there, just take your paper towel while it's wet and you see you can just lift it right up. That's a nice way to get bring out some highlights in your underpainting. I want to pull a little more highlight on the side of her nose there to you. Alright. Perfect. Great job everyone. You did it. Okay, We have paint on the canvas. That's a really good first step. Now, in our next lesson, we are going to start going back over top of that first layer we using something called the grid XYM method. See you then 6. Grisaille Method - Background: Hi everyone. I'm Paul Richmond and welcome back to learn to paint portraits and acrylic. Today we are going to be introducing something called the grid XYM method and painting the background. Happy being, okay, we have our underpinning all finished, so now it's time to start on the next layer. The next layer we will be using something called the XYM method. It's a big vocabulary word for today. Basically what it means is it's another layer of monotone painting, but it's more opaque or more solid than the underpainting. The underpinning was a bit looser and more washy with the grid method. Now we are going to be mixing some different shades but all of the same color. And then we'll get to the color step. After that. We'll have a few lessons where we do the design method first. And then finally, we'll get to play with color. I know that's what you're waiting for me too. This will help us a lot and you'll see why I like to use just black and then different shades of gray all the way to white. When I do this, I do not have a tube of black. I did. That was not one of the colors that I asked you to get. So you can mix black easily by just using burnt umber, the dark brown, and then a dark blue, light, ultramarine blue. So it kinda put out equal amounts of both of those. If you have black and want to use that though that's completely fine. I'm not as a snob or anything about that. So some people will say you should never use black. But it's fine for this especially. I kinda like it for the darks to have a little bit more of a richness to them in my, in my work in this way, it's just kinda has a little bit of a little more color to it, but since we're adding more color later, it truly does not matter. Alright? Now, the thing with acrylic paint is that it does dry pretty quickly. So I'm not going to have you mix a whole bunch of different shades right away because we won't get to all of those different values in this one lesson today. So we're just going to do enough to start working in some of the darker areas. So what I've done is I've mixed my darkest value. I'm going to leave that in a pile, maybe divided in about half depending on how much you have. And then here's the other end. I'm going to put out some white. And you don't need much of the white. You can see how I'm using the palette knife here to kinda move the paint around, scoop it up, mush it together. That just makes all the colors blend nicely. If you don't have one, you could use like a plastic knife. You can use a spatula or a lot of artists just use the Brush tool that works. Alright, so trust me, when I say this, you don't need much white, especially because we're mostly just sticking with dark values for today. So I have about this much on my knife. And I'm going to mix that in here and look at how much that lightened it. It's still in the Dark Side of the value scale, but that's good. When you are painting and you want something to look realistic, the more values that you can use, the better. Now I'm just going to do that same process one more time. So I'm dividing that one in half and adding a little more white. Maybe about the same amount as last time, maybe just a smidge more. Um, but it's not going to take much again. And now we have three different shades that are all within the dark family, I guess you could say. Okay, dark, dark, dark, dark and medium dark. We'll call them. Alright. So I'm going to start with the big brush because I think this medium dark color would be really good for the majority of the background. When I look at, when I look really closely at the reference, it looks like the background gets a little bit lighter here beside her face. Maybe up here at the top. It might move up to that middle. The dark, dark, dark, dark, medium dark. Okay, I will remember that. So now the difference is this time we're not using water. If your paint is thicker than mine, if it's like a heavy body acrylic, then you might want to use a little bit of water to make it glide on the canvas. But yeah, as you can see, I don't really need any of that here. Now because this paint is a little bit more on the transparent side, there, there's a hint of that background that's showing. That's okay. You just get little little glimpses of Of the underpainting. And I actually kinda like that. I think that can look interesting and we still have many layers to go. So it'll probably be covered up anyway by the time we finished. But, but if not, you know, some artists really play into that. And maybe we'll use a color for the underpinning that contrasts what the end result is supposed to be. So maybe if they're painting a landscape and there are a lot of greens in it, they might do a red or pink underpainting and then leave a little bit of that showing along the edges. It can be pretty interesting. Now, as you're painting, since this is a more solid layer, it's a good idea to take your time and make sure that the brushstrokes are starting to work in the way that you want them to. So what I like to do sometimes is do X shapes like this, so that when you put down one brush stroke, the next one kind of camouflage is it and you don't end up with a whole bunch of marks that are, a whole bunch of brushstrokes that are showing that are all going the same direction. Just helps to even it out. But every artist has different way of handling the paint and different way of making, making marks. Some are a lot more deliberately all in the same direction. So as with most things in art, it's very much a personal choice. Okay, So I've gotten about to where it starts to shift too dark on this side. I'm going to do a little bit of this over here. Then what I'm going to do, I want to make this color or this value blend into the next darker shade at the top. So before I come back and do all of this part down here, I'm going to go ahead and do the top. The reason being, when you're painting with acrylic, it does dry pretty quickly. And when you want to blend, Here's your polyprotic or today. When you want to blend one shade into the next, both both shades have to be wet, so the paint that's on there has to still be wet. And then of course the paint you're using as well. But if the paint that's on there is dry, then you really can't blend into it. So you have to be a little bit strategic when you're painting. And make sure that you get to the blended parts while, while it's wet. Now, if it dries, then before you're able to do the blending, you can always go back and just grab some more of that lighter color in this case and put it on there. Re re paint that just that little section so you have a wet spot to paint into. But if you can get it while it's still wet the first time, then it will save you a lot of work and then see how I'm just kinda working the brush strokes to make the one shade blend into the other. You just kinda have to gently go over it. If you press too hard, if you use too much pressure, it will start lifting up the paint. But if you just kinda have a very light touch and as long if you're using a nice soft brush, you can get a really beautiful gradation to happen. Now I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm going to actually jump down to here since a period it'll just be that color going into that color. So it doesn't matter if it's wet or not, but here it's going into the lighter shades. So I want to get that transition worked out while the color is still wet. Initial off that top. The grid XYM method is also a very classical technique. Artists have been doing that for a long time in different, in different ways. But usually it's more opaque layer that is monotone. And it's just for working out the value structure, the details. Before you do that final color layer. You can see as I'm painting this background, I took it a shade darker than what the underpainting was. When the paint dry that I had put on the background, it dried a little bit lighter than where I wanted it to be. So you can always make adjustments as you go. The underpinning is there as a guide, but also feel free to make adjustments as you see fit to any of the values. I think painting is pretty much always a process of putting something down, looking at it, seeing if it works, changing it, tweaking it, adjusting, adjusting it some more until it looks right to you. Okay. That does it for the background. So next, next time we will do the same technique, but start getting into the details of the figure. Awesome work. Alright, in our next lesson, we are going to be continuing with the XYM method and starting to paint the hair. I'll see you then 7. Grisaille Method - Hair: Hi everyone. I'm Paul Richmond and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, we're continuing with the XYM method and we will be painting the hair. Happy painting. Today we are working with the same values as in the previous lesson. So the three shades of kinda dark gray that we mixed last time. So if you need to mix those again, pause the video. Remember it's just the blue and brown if you're mixing it from these colors, or if you have a tube of black, you can use that to you, take some of that and add a drop of weight to it, and then pull that one over and add a little more white so that you get three different shades. And now we're going to jump in and start painting. The here. We'll just work our way, work our way over. So I'm going to use the slant brush here. That slant brushes are the ones that are slanted. I'm not even going to call that a pro tip because that's just pretty obvious. Alright, so let me start in the highlight area. So I'm going to use this lightest value and come in wherever I have the highlights. And I'm still paying attention to that relationship between the value of what I'm painting right now, her hair, and then the background that's next to it. And do you notice how in the photograph In this highlight spot, the hair is lighter than the background. But then as soon as it goes into shadow, the shadow is actually darker than the background. So it's always about this juggle, juggling. Looking at the relationships of what you're painting to what's around it. And it can shift over and over again to just depending on how the light is falling. So I'm going to kinda get this highlight area covered first. And then while it's still wet, I'm going to go into the darker values and paint the edges so that I can kinda get a little bit of a blend happening. They are to you. I'm going to jump up. Actually, I'm going to go all the way to my darkest. And I'll come right here beside the highlights. And what I like about the slant brushes is if you use them on the, if you're not using the whole flat edge, if you're just using it from the side, basically, you can get really nice lines, clean lines that sort of taper and feel very hair-like. So that's what I'm using. When you paint here. The temptation is to try and paint every strand. But that will, first of all, take forever and also not look very good. Because if you actually look at the reference, you don't really see all the individual strands. What you're seeing are more clumps of hair or little, little groupings. So think of it more like that when you're painting it, you're painting the shifts, the planar structure. There's your pro tip for today by the way, your polyproteins, planar structure. Always think about that and what that means is the planes of the object, the different edges. So if you think of like a diamond or a jewel, it would be kinda like the different facets, the different, the different edges, sides of it. And everything can be broken down into planes. Another way of describing it that I often use is thinking of it as kind of like a soccer ball. And you know how a soccer ball is. It's round, but it is made up of pentagons, hexagons. Who knows? This is not geometry class. Whatever the shape is, it's a flat geometric shape, but they're all combined and wrap around the round surface. And that's if you can look at whatever it is that you're painting in that same way and try to identify where are the planes of that thing. So in the hair where we know that there's a shift in the direction because of how the light is hitting it. That's, that's the biggest clue to understanding the planar structure. If something is to pay attention to how the light is hitting it, how the light is wrapping around that thing? That helps us to understand it in more of a three-dimensional way. And that's, that's kinda what this is all about really. I'm pulling a few strands right up into the highlights. You can see how it kind of starts to make it feel like, like real here, even without any color yet. You just start to get that nice transition of value and it just starts to look more three-dimensional. Some parts of the hair go period T flat, especially in the dark areas. Not meaning that she needs more volume. More, meaning that you don't really see a lot of brushstrokes are individual hairs, I should say. In certain areas, especially like right here where I'm painting this big dark spot. If you don't see a lot of detail, then you don't need to paint it. Allow the, allow some areas to be more of a resting place for the eye and then other areas to be more detailed. That's what will keep your eye moving around the image. Now we're coming up on another highlight area down here. I'm going to start to taper this off. I'm pull a few of them down. I think it's important when you're doing something like this to try and not be too predictable with your brush strokes. You don't want every one to look the same. That means same thickness, same length. Try to, try to get some variety so that it will feel more organic. Okay, so now I'm going to switch to my middle value. Come in and do some with that. Just take a, taking advantage of having three different values here to work with. You can paint right on top of the other values so that you've put down the dark. Maybe you want to go in with a little bit lighter on top of it. Go for it. And I'm just so I sometimes grab a paper towel and just clean the excess off of my brush, maybe swirl it around in the water, clean it off when I'm wanting to go to a different color. So now I'm grabbing the lightest. I didn't want my dark. That was on the brush to make the light darker. Here we go, Look at how dimension all that hair is already starting to look. And I mean, we, we're just getting started here and it's already coming to life. It's making me very excited to get in and paint that face. But I thought that starting with the hair would be a good idea because you can be a little freer and it'll still look like hair. Once we get into the face, we'll have to maybe be a little more precise in some areas. So this is a good warm-up spot. Now her here gets a little bit lighter up here at the part also at ISI that so I'm just going ahead and putting that in. Then I will transition over to the dark. Might do a little bit of the middle first and then go right to the dark. Okay. The Dark goes right along the edge of her forehead and kinda defines its sort of blends into her face actually. So we'll, we'll get the dark on her skin to give it that effect. But for right now, since I'm just doing here, I will go ahead and kinda create an edge. They're getting it. How's yours coming? You having fun. You're not stressing or you don't want be stressing out there. Just remember there's nothing you can do on this canvas that you can't fix. If you don't like it, you can do you could do 20 layers on this thing if necessary. Probably won't be necessary, but, but you could. And it's interesting because they have done x-rays on famous paintings. And even the great masters made mistakes, had multiple layers, different, different adjustments to make proportion issues. I mean, I figure if Michelangelo can have those problems, it's okay for us also. So I'm just kinda going back and darkening a few of the dark spots. And I might pull out a couple more highlights here right around the ear because I just noticed that there's a few little strands that kinda catch the light there that I can alike can be very selective about what you choose to highlight and bring out in your piece. You're not trying to paint every single here exactly as it is. So it's always a process of editing and making choices about what you want to emphasize or show. Little bit more down here. Alright, great work that is some gorgeous hair. Now in our next lesson, we're going to continue with the grid XYM method and start laying in some of the shadows on the face. See you then? 8. Grisaille Method - Shadows on the Face: Hi everyone. I'm Paul Richmond and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. Today we are continuing on with the grid XYM method and we'll be painting the shadows on the face. Happy painting. Once again, we're going to be using those same three dark values. That's it. So if you need to mix them again, just remember, I used the brown and blue right here, added a little bit of white here, a little more weight. They're dark. Dark, dark, dark and medium dark. I think. I think that's what I'm calling it. It'll work. Alright, so let's jump into the face today. I'm excited for that. And I am going to follow a similar route that I used with the underpainting. So I'm going to use my darkest value and come right along the side of the nose here first, That's where I see a really dark shadow on the face. And push that dark even farther. Come all the way down here, beside the live under the lips. And then all the way over to the side of the face, which you can see in the photo, is darker than the background. Decided. These slant brushes and flat brushes are really great for getting a nice, clean edge, nice crisp edge. You just have to go slow. I usually rest my hand or at least at one finger on a dry spot somewhere that helps me to steady it a little bit. There's your Pali pro tip for the day. Nice, clean, steady edge. Find a spot to rest your hand. I can get trickier. As you go along. If if a majority of the painting is wet, you might have to reach a little farther for that, but it does help. Okay, now, I've painted the edge beside the nose and then the edge over here on the right. And now I'm going to grab my white color. Clean off my brush a little. Grabbed the white color now into that little highlight. I mean, it's still it's still quite dark, but within the shadows, I think you'd call it a highlight. Kind of follows the shape of the nose because I think the dark, the darkness here is actually a shadow. The nose on her cheek. And then it kinda comes down here. And you see how I'm just blending it into the darker tone by just taking that same brush that I'm using very gently. Doing some little criss-cross strokes, just letting the colors blend together. If you're black has already started to dry, you might need to put a little bit more on before it will blend the way you want it to. Mine still blending. Okay. But I'll go ahead and demonstrate that for you in case any of you are running into that issue. So let's just say like here maybe if it wasn't blending very well, you just grab a little bit more of the dark and put it right out here next to it. And then just work in from the dark area like that. As long as both colors are wet, they will blend. And I will tell you that you don't want to overwork an area because the acrylic paint is kind of funny. It will blend nicely at first, but if you keep scrubbing and overworking and area, eventually it's going to get tired of that. And it'll just start to get real messy. And you'll get weird colored hair. Color shifts, value shifts. It'll, it'll misbehave on you. So try to get it you know, about how you want and then if it's not quite right, when it dries, do it again. Alright, I'm gonna come right beside this darkest shadow now and just kinda work a little bit of the white into it so that it will eventually blend really nicely into the highlight side. One Pauli pro tip that I use a lot when I'm painting with acrylic is two. If I, if I know that I'm gonna be coming back in wanting to blend and other color into something. But I know it's going to be later. Once this this has dried, I will intentionally paint a little bit beyond the area where I want the blend to happen. And I'll make sure that it has a very soft, fuzzy edge like that instead of like a really sharp crisp edge. Because the sharp crisp edges are more difficult to blend out. And sometimes they can dry and there might be like a little ridge of paint there. So to avoid that, the best thing to do if you know you're gonna be eventually blending into that area, is to just leave it, go a little past where you actually want the highlighting to start. And just make that edge a little bit soft and Ralph, instead of real clean and precise, right? Now I'm going to go back to my darkest value and just start really paying attention to where I see that. I'm gonna get this eyebrow kinda blocked in. And this whole side of the face right here. This is where it kinda just blends into that here. And we don't really see exactly where the edge is. And that's okay. It goes along this eyelid and eyelash wine. Then inside of there, I'm gonna jump to my lighter value again. We're really just kind of sculpting this thing out. I use words like that a lot because it's really helpful to think about the dimensionality of the face as you paint it. Think about what areas are more racist. What areas stick, stick forward more. That's going to tell you everything you need to know about where to put light, where to put shadow. I'm going to save that for the next time. But instead, let me get this forehead. I'm starting with my dark going right into the hair. Then I'm going to jump right to the lighter wound. Blend into that. And again, I'm using that soft, soft edge because eventually we're going to be coming back with lighter tones to continue that gradation across her forehead. You, some of this, everything about this is very relative. You know, the values will look one way when you're seeing them against the unpainted targets. And then as soon as you start to get more on there, you might have to adjust things. That's alright. I think it's a really good thing to constantly be looking and comparing and just paying attention to where, where are the parts that feel like you've matched the values really well? Where are the parts that feel like maybe they need a little bit more adjusting. You kinda always want to be asking yourself that it's okay to find things that you need to change. That's a good thing when that happens. It's dresses, a lot of artists out, especially when they're first beginning because they might not have the confidence to know that they can fix it. But when you're, when you're noticing discrepancies between what you're painting and what you're seeing. That is a sign that you're really paying attention. And fixing those inconsistencies is how you end up with a really good painting. So if you see mistakes, congratulate yourself. It's a different way to look at it. But it is honest truth. You, everybody does it. Everybody has to make adjustments as they go. It does not mean you are bad at this. Sometimes you don't even see the mistake right away, you have to get away from it a little bit first. Alright, that looks pretty good for now. I'm going to let this dry. And then when we come back next time, we'll do some more awesome work, everyone. Alright, in our next lesson, we are continuing on with the grid XYM method and starting to paint the shadows on the neck. See you then? 9. Grisaille Method - Shadows on the Neck: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, we're continuing with the XYM method and we are painting the shadows on the neck. It's happy painting. Okay, let's get back into this. We are still using the same three shades of the darker value that we've been using the last few lessons. So if you need to remix that, go ahead. Remember you just start with black or your own mixture of black, can use ultramarine blue and burnt umber is a good combo to make a black. And then just add a little bit of white to one pile and a little more white to another. And you'll have the same three shades that I'm working with. They don't need to be exact. We're just kinda getting some basic values, lay them in here, and then we will be going back with color and getting more detailed. So today I wanted to try and get to all of the other places where I see these darker values. And then in our next lesson, we can start working in some of the lighter tones. I'm going to jump down now to the neck because I see a lot of darks on the shadow side of the neck. So I'm going to start with my darkest dark, the black color that I mixed, and just start laying that in where I see it. Polyprotein. Use your underpainting. Take advantage of that underpainting to understand the breakup of values. So you're not starting from scratch, you are just enhancing what you've already started. And I think that's important because this, this technique is all about taking advantage of the layers and the transparency of the paint and really building up the image. So I'm using the three-eighths inch. Is that right? Yeah. Three-eighths inch slant brush, right now, you use whatever you want. I like this brush, I think I've said before because you can kinda get it to go into different tight spots really well. So right now I'm going along the edge of the neck. And I want that to be a nice sharp, clean line. This brush is really good for that. Go right up to there. Okay. So I see the darkness and I'm just following I'm taking my own advice. I'm following the underpainting. And I see there's some darker values here. Here. All right, and now while it's still wet, I'm going to just wipe my brush off on a paper towel and go for the middle value of these three and start filling in some of those spots. So this little area right here, there's a little almost triangle sheep where a little bit of light's coming through. Even go a little bit lighter with that. It's always better, I think in acrylic, to go darker than what you need and then build up to the light. I like that technique, especially when painting something like this. Because it really allows the highlights to kinda feel like they are emerging out of the shadows. And because acrylic is an opaque medium, meaning you can put up, put down one layer and it will completely cover up what's beneath that if you want it to. It really takes advantage of that. It lets you know, it's kinda forgiving in that way. You don't have to make it perfectly the first time or second time where the 23rd, you can do as many layers as you want. What I'm doing now is just building out to some of the gradation. So I laid in the darkest darks first, but I noticed that none of these shadows really have what I would call sharp edges. They're all a little bit softer. So in order to get that look, you have to do the blend. The blending while the paint is still wet. So that's why I'm kinda going just all around the edges now with a little bit lighter tone. And then I'm going to take my lightest tone and then have everything kinda blend out into that. You do have to be a little bit strategic sometimes with acrylic to get the best effects. And you probably need to spend some time using the medium before you know what kind of strategy is going to work best for you? Some people paint very thick, don't and don't do any glazing, which is what we're working up to here. Some people paint in a lot of transparent layers, washes or glazes and build-up to the color. There's no right or wrong. It's whatever you want. But it usually does take a couple of coats with acrylic to get the to get, to get the best, smoothest results with the paint when you're just painting on that canvas, that first layer, It's going, you have to work a little harder to get the paint to blend and absorb. Once you're painting on top of other paint, it's a different story altogether. Kinda just glides across. Feels a lot more like oil. Actually, oil paint, which is my favorite medium. I have to say, I do like acrylic to you and I, and I combine them sometimes. If you are somebody who likes to oil paint or if it's something you're considering trying. A good thing to know about. This medium is that you can paint oil on top of acrylic. And there are times when I will use acrylic to do my base coat. For one thing, it dries a lot faster than oil. So that can be an advantage sometimes if you want to just get a layer down and be able to go right back into it again. Do the, do the first layer in acrylic. It'll dry in no time and then you can do oil right on top of it. The only thing I want to make sure and say is that if you wanting to combine the two medians, that's the order to do it. And you don't want to do the oil first, you can't you can't do that or well, I mean, you could, but you're not supposed to. And the reason is that oil takes a lot longer to dry than acrylic does. And even when it feels dry to the touch, an oil painting really needs about six months to fully dry. So if you paint acrylic on top of it before that time period, it will the acrylic layer will dry and then trap the wet paint underneath. So I know this is an acrylic class, not an oil painting class, but I do like mixing media. And if you ever want to try that, just know that that's the order to do it in. Alright, I've got all the dark spots down on the neck. And let's jump up and do a little bit around her. I I'm not I'm still not ready to do the actual details of the, I kinda like to build the structure of the face first. So before I paint eyes, I paint eye sockets. I want them to, I want the eyes to have a place to go. I want to understand the structure of that face before I start getting into the details of the features and stuff. So I'm just going into this darker area right above the eye. Then I'm going to grab my real dark and make the little crease. For the eye lid. I see a darker tone on the right side here. I'm going to put that into you. Will probably end up spending a whole lesson just on painting the eyes. We'll see how it goes. But those are, those are pretty important in a portrait. Alright, I'm going to put in some dark here for this eyebrow. And I'm painting it with some strokes that mimic the shapes of the hair. So it's not just like a solid wine. Don't want to give her like a drag queen eyebrow. I mean, well, you could if you wanted to, but if you want it to look more natural, supposed to draw a few little hears. And now look at the photo and you tell me where else do you see dark values that we can go ahead and lay some in. I'm going to grab a really small brush right now and do a little bit of darkness in the nostril. Right here. The shapes already been determined with the underpainting. So I don't have to think too hard. Which I always like. Let's do little bit of a lighter shadow right here for this little divot. And I see a little bit of darkness over here in the ear. Just not, not much really, just a sliver like there. Alright. I'm gonna just go ahead and put some darkness on her lips to get those get those started anyway. So upper lip first. And if you notice her lip, It's a bit darker on the right as it goes into the shadow. So I'll go ahead and switch to my darker color over here so that it starts to pick up that shadow. And then back to the light again. For the lower lip. I'm just going to paint the whole lip, even though there are some highlights on it. We'll come back and add those when we're working in our lighter values. So for now, I'm just going to paint the whole thing. That lip also gets a little bit darker on the right. And we have some dark real dark in the corners of her mouth. So right at leading right up to the teeth on each side, go extra dark. And then there's a little line under the teeth where we see deeper into the mouth. That's dark also. If you pull a little bit out onto the lips, just try to just imagine like I know I've said this before. Imagine you're sculpting. Where's the most raised apart? Where's the most racist part? Try to use your lighting to show that. Alright, great job. I hope it wasn't too much of a pain in the neck. And our next lesson, we're continuing with the grid XYM method, but moving into lighter values on the face. See you then? 10. Grisaille Method - Light Values on the Face: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In this lesson, we are continuing with the XYM method only. We're going to be starting to use lighter values now on the face. Happy painting, Let's do some color mixing. Today we're gonna go to the other side of the value scale, the lighter values. So I've already mixed up my block again, which as a reminder is ultramarine blue and burnt umber. Or you can use black right out of the tube. And this time, I'm gonna go ahead and pull out two different piles are actually that will make three if we count this first one. So we have three different piles of black. This is why I have an art teacher, not a math teacher, can't even count to three in each of these piles, I'm going to add different amounts of white. So for this first one, I'm going to put this much. So that gives us a nice medium light tone. Be sure you mix it up really good because you'll get some little spots around the color that are still maybe the unmixed, the darker, and you don't want to grab that by mistake when you think you're getting a light color, I'm actually going to pull some of this black over it, take some out of here too. And that way I'll have it in case I need to just pop in any little dark touches is like go for here. I'm going to add even more white than I did in the first pile. And you can see how just varying the amount of white that you add changes the value significantly. A little more. There we go. Nice, lighter value there. Then last one, I'm going to even take more of this blackout. Blacks are pretty powerful color and it doesn't take much of it to completely change the direction of the color you're mixing. So it's better to start with less than add more. Alright, so there's some way, I think I'm going to add even more white though, so that this will be a really bright highlight color. Right now it feels a little too similar to this one. We can fix that. I'm also going to put out enough so that I can leave a little bit of pure white here on the end. In case I want to use that for any little highlights are special touches. Alright? There's are, there, are, there are our values for today. Alright, let me bring up my knife. If you're using a palette knife, be sure you wipe it off with a paper towel and your fitness so it'll stay nice and somewhat clean. Alright, let's jump in. Are you ready? I'm going to go back to my bigger brush now. This is the, what is this three-quarter inch flat brush. And I want to just start blocking in some of the tones on the face. So I'm going to start with my darkest color and come right up here next to where I left off on the shadow. And now that area is already dry. So what you wanna do is just kinda paint right up to it. And then I like to take a brush, a clean brush. And you can even wet it a little bit that can help. And just kinda work it in even though the value next to it is dry, you can still give this a nice soft edge. Now, another thing you can do if you want to really be able to mix it right into the dark color is mix up some more of the dark and paint it over that part to reactivate the paint. But I'm just going to do it like that. Alright, I see where, wherever you see kind of almost like a transition from the dark shadow area to the light. That's where you're really going to use your darkest value from this set. It's kinda like a medium. Medium value. Alright, I see some of that down here along her jaw line. I see some of that going down her cheek right here. It might end up getting lightened a little as we go, but it's fine for me. I can see a little bit of it here. I think this is a really good time to, again, think about the sculptural qualities of the dimensionality. Wherever you see shadows and highlights, that's telling you that there's a shift in the planar structure in the, in the angles of the subject because it's catching the light differently in different parts. I'm just taking this radon down the side of the nose. I might grab a smaller brush. When you find yourself having to work too hard. Pro tip, polyprotic tip. If you're working too hard to try and get your big brush into a small area. Sat down your brush and get a smaller one. I'm I am saying that for my own benefit too, by the way, I am just as guilty as everybody else is picking up one brush and using that the whole time because they just don't want to take the time to set it down. But it's important to take advantage of all these brushes that you bought does make the job easier. Alright, I see a little bit of it here. I also see some in the ear. So there's the shape. A little bit of a shadow that comes down here. Here. You go wherever you see it in the in the photo. I want you to I want you to trust your eye. It's good to watch me and see what I'm doing. Obviously, that's why I'm making this video, but don't feel like you have to do exactly what I'm doing. I think part of the skill here is learning how to look at the reference and identify these values for yourself and where you see them and how you use them. Alright, so we're going to stick with just the face for now. We'll come back and do the neck later. I'm gonna go back to my bigger brush and get this middle value. This kinda like very light, but not the lightest yet. So I see that kinda goes to about, let's say here and blend that in because it's still wet. So that makes it easy. I can blend right into that gray lips, eyebrow. We can fix that. If you do make a mistake like I just did, which I totally just did for to give you an example, by the way, not really. If you do make a mistake, if it's still wet, you can get a clean brush and wet it and just wipe it off. Otherwise you have to paint over it. But no matter what you can fix it. And I just pull a few of those down into the eyebrow. Little bit, I see a little bit of that over here. Where else? I see kind of this area has a little bit of it. Yeah. We can blend since we still have this color blends right into it. And blending again is just while the colors are wet, kind of mushing one color into the next little bit of it here. Alright, I think that's good for the medium one. I'm going to clean out my brush and just swish it around in the water, wipe it off on a paper towel, and let's go in and hit those really light parts. Now, I'm going to start right here. Blend ray, then we'll come back and add some of the more subtle shadows and things in a bit, especially like right along the hairline. I love that you're never stuck with anything. So each each phase of this is just another step. Okay, bring it on down. Now just, I'm double-checking. I keep looking over at the reference to make sure, but I'm pretty confident that the rest of the face that we haven't painted yet is going to be this lighter tone. Blending it into that a little better. Okay. I'm just going right up to the edge and then pulling the color into whatever else is there so that it blends. You don't want to have a lot of real sharp edges on the face. Now, maybe if you were painting someone with more wrinkles and texture on their face, then you might have some sharper edges. So there are no rules. Just look at, look at your subject and make your decisions based on that. We will continue this in the next lesson. That's all for now. Great work everyone. In our next lesson, we are going to just continue right on with the XYM method and adding highlights and details to the face. I'll see you then 11. Grisaille Method - Light Values on the Face and Neck: Hi everyone. I'm Paul Richmond and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, we are continuing with the grid method. More highlights and values to make our face really start to come to life. Happy painting, alright, I'm still using the same lighter tones that we mixed in the last lesson. If you need to re-mix those, put me on pause and go for it. Remember we're going for kind of a medium value and then going lighter and lighter and then pure white. Okay? Alright, so I am still working on adding this lightest value, not the white, but the lightest one. Besides that, I'm going to use a smaller brush now so I can get into some of these tighter areas. Now there are a lot of subtle shadows and things that we will be going back and adding in. But at first I just wanted to get all of the painting covered this step so we can get, kinda get rid of all of the brown tones and really just see the value structure. And then we'll go back and add some more detail. If you need to grab a little bit, I'm grabbing some of the darker ones now so I can make a blend here. Wherever you see a softer edge. That means you want to blend it, not have it be super light. I mean, I'm sorry, not have it be super sharp. There we go. Alright, and that little highlight rats all the way around the lip. Over here. You having fun working on this, cannot believe this is already less than nine. We have been working hard. And I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am. There's nothing I love more than painting. Portraits and figures. I just think it is. Magical. Artists have been doing this a long time. And I have had people ask me, why do you why do you paint portraits? Why do you paint people? That's been done before? And that's true it has, I do not claim to be the person who invented painting portraits. But I always just say, well, as long as there are interesting people in the world, then I'm going to want to paint them. I think there's just so much you can bring out in a painting of someone that is different than photographing them. Phot photography is a really great art form to though nothing, nothing against that. I think there's room for everything. I'm just kinda grabbing different values as I see fit and filling in the rest of this face. Like I said, the goal for today is to get all of the underpainting covered, with the exception of the eyes. We will come back and just spend one whole lesson on those. Getting some value in here and the ear will come back and detail it a little bit more. But for now we're just getting it covered. Here's can be complicated. Just look at the shapes and focus on the main shapes. Don't get to put in by all the little details. One polyprotein for today. If you're working from a photographic reference like, like we are in this course. Once I get to the detail stage, I do like to zoom in really close on the reference. I usually look at my references right on this on my computer screen while I'm painting. And I'll zoom in. If I'm painting the eyes, I'll zoom in really close on that part. But you've noticed I haven't zoomed in on the reference yet. There's a reason for that. This is the tip and that was a long buildup. The actual tip is, don't seem in when you're first blocking in the values. Wait and do that when you are at the final stage, the details stage, because otherwise you're going to see too much. It'll overwhelm you at first because there are so many subtle variations. And I've seen a lot of students, especially students who wanna do portraits, really get thrown off by that by zooming in, studying the reference to closely at first and trying to capture everything right off the bat That is not the, not what I recommend. I recommend starting more general and then moving towards more precise and specific throughout the process. So we will zoom in on it once we get to that stage, but we're not there yet. Alright, I'm gonna go back to my bigger brush, this one here and block in the neck. Now the shading that we put on there is dry. So to get it to blend, you can either wet it and just kinda do a kind of almost a watercolor you kind of situation. Or you could, you could mix up a little bit of the darker value and blend into it. Wait, here and here. And kind of that middle value here on the shoulder, you can tell that's at a different angle than the rest because that's a little bit more in shadow. Alright, well, mission accomplished as far as getting the brown covered. And we still have a little time, so I want to refine it more. But first, let me give her some teeth. The temptation with teeth and also with the whites of the eyes when we get to those, is to just use pure white, but even things that are really light, like teeth and the whites of your eyes still have shadows. They're not pure white and you can see if you were if you look at her teeth in the photo and really study them, they're not, they're not white. They are more of a middle. Middle value really doesn't mean she has bad teeth, it's just just the lighting in the hidden the image. Weight, weight is tricky to paint. One of the first still-life assignments I had in college was to paint a white egg that was sitting on a white stand against a white wall. And when the teacher told us that I thought it was a joke, and then when I realized it was serious, I thought This sucks, right? And also this will be so easy. But it was a great assignment because it actually made me really look and see that there's so much more Going on, so many different subtle shifts of color and value. So I recommend that, that a challenge to anybody that really wants to learn how to pick up the subtleties of weight in shadow. Choose something that seems very simple and maybe even is all the same color. But then let the light and shadow really bring out the edges later dramatically so you get some good variations. Alright, apparently I can't talk and pain at the same time. Which is really bad for you guys because that's my job. Alright? Just blending these areas in a little bit more. You see how I just grab a little bit of the dark, little bit of the weight, blend them together. We go, That's starting to look good. And let's do a little bit over on this side to kind of what we're seeing is almost like the shadow of her hair that's falling on her neck and the back of her neck here. That's why it gets darker. I'm going to come back in with my light. Make it blend really nicely. We are so getting this. Alright. Clean up my brush and just add a few little quick highlights with my pure white here. I see a real strong highlight here on her nose. I'm going to put that in. And I see one right here as well. Right over the nostril. Kinda creates the shape of the nose. I see a little bit here, a little strong highlight here on her cheek. Here as well. Maybe a little bit right here. And I see some inside of the ear. So I'll put a little weight there. Maybe a little here, just wherever you see all these little highlights. A little bit here. And here. Alright, We did it. Great job everyone. In our next lesson we get to do one of my favorite things, which is painting the eyes. I'll see you then 12. Grisaille Method - Eyes: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, we get to do my favorite thing, painting, the eyes. Happy painting. Today, I am using the same three light values that we used in the last lesson, and I'm also using the darks that we had used previously. So if you need to mix up your colors, start with the black or the brown and blue combo to mix the black and then create 12345 different values that get progressively lighter and then end with your white. Again, it's just the ratio of how much black to white that you mix together to get those different shades. So if you need a minute to do that, go ahead and pause me. And then when you're ready to come back, we'll paint those eyes. Okay. I am using a small brush today. I have a couple of small ones that I'll probably use. I'm going to start with this number two brush and then use this even tinier, pointy little brush for some of the details too. Alright, but this one will be good to start with. And I'm going to start with this. I, the other one is more in shadow and it's going to feel a little weird to you to paint. So we'll start with the one that looks the most like what you would expect an idol look like. And I'm going to start actually out here in the white of the eye. And I'm using the one on my pretty dark values because if you really study it in the photo, that I get awfully dark over there. That's because the white of your eye is round. It actually, it's a whole sphere that we just see the front little part of it that's peeking out, but it's really a rounded shapes. So it would make sense that it would get darker as it goes back in value. So this is your polyprotein tip of the day. Paint what you see, not what you know. And that is the ongoing struggle for artists who work in any sort of realism. We all have seen a lot of eyes in our life. And the temptation is to paint our own mental concept of what an eye it looks like instead of painting what we actually see. So I'm going to encourage you just to forget that this event is in I and just paint shapes, look for where you see light, middle, dark. I can't really emphasize that enough. It's one of the, one of the most helpful things as an artist that I have learned is to stop mentally labeling what I'm painting and just look at, look at it for what it is. It almost to me makes drawing and painting kind of like a meditation. Because you're letting go of those mental concepts of what, of what these things are and just kinda taking it in almost like you're seeing it for the first time. It's it's really cool. I think it's makes you appreciate things so much differently. Makes you really stop and look and see. Instead of just thinking, oh, it's a face, it's another face. Actually really observe it. I think artists are kind of like the observers of a wave. We have to see it and understand it before we can recreate it. Alright, getting very philosophical here. I'm going to go really dark with my boy. Inside the eye here in this part. And actually all along that last line, I'm gonna go pretty dark. If you use the point of your brush and just go real slowly, you can get nice clean lines and it's, it's calm. It's kinda like drawing really. It's like drawing with your paintbrush. Alright, now I also see there's kind of a dark line around here. While we're in that area. I'm gonna go ahead and put some eyelashes. Let me kinda curl out. Just really study the shapes of them again, just like with other stuff. Don't, don't paint what you think eyelashes look like. Paint what you see. Right? Now I'm going in with one of the darker, kind of medium, medium, dark. And doing this part. Here we go, see so much, it's so much easier to do without having to worry about color right now. We will come back and add color of course. But it's nice to not have to worry about that when you're first just laying in the shapes and the values. Write this a little bit stronger light up here. Okay, Now for that other eye, we're getting it. How juries turnout, still working. Feel free, like I said before, to pause me as much as you need to. I'm going to keep going though. I'm going to start over here. There's kind of a really dark line or shape at the right edge. And that's kinda how that's showing how that I kinda wraps around on that side. And then the whole white of the eye is really quite dark. So I'm going to use my medium dark value in there. You would think that it would look odd. The white of the eye on this side is darker than the white of the eye here. But that's how it looks. And if you painted it differently than it's going to make that I'd not feel like it is in being affected by the shadow that's affecting everything on that side of the face. I'm going to take my black and do the same thing on this side and go really dark in the middle. And along that last line. And then there's dark outline around it to go. I'm going to use my medium dark again. Here. There is still a highlight and then I write over here on the left side. There we go. Alright, we have some allies. Now since we still have a few minutes in this lesson, I'm just going to continue working on refining the painting. Alright, I want to start by making a shadow along her hairline here because that edge right now feels too sharp where it goes from her skin to her hair. Want it to I want it to be a little bit softer than that. So just coming right along with this medium weight or having my dark because I want to fix a little spot up here. I'm gonna go lighter now so that I can just blend right into that. And my latest, we go instantly much softer edge, except for this one little blob here. I've got to fix. There we go. Alright. Alright, I want to work a little bit more on this shadow. It's kinda, it's standing out a little too much. So I'm noticing that there's more of a shadow here to the kind of almost comes up to meet this one. So I'm going to make that happen. It goes darker again down by the jaw line. So doing paintings like this, it is constantly just a process of painting something and then evaluating how it looks when it needs next. Just take your time and really study what you are making in anything that doesn't feel right to you. Ask yourself, why? Don't just assume, oh, it looks terrible, I can't fix this. Really study it, see if you can. You can identify the problem area and if you can understand why it's a problem, what isn't working about it, then you're you're already halfway to fixing it. Figuring out the problem is usually the hardest part. Just doing a little more shaping on her face, building up some of these shadows a little more. Looking good. Alright, that's all for now. Beautiful work. See how those eyes just come to life and sparkle. In our next lesson, we will finally be finishing up the XYM method. I'll see you then 13. Grisaille Method - Finishing Touches: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, we are finishing up the grid method, Happy painting. Okay, I am still using all the different shades of gray. Again. In this case we have six different shades. And this will be our last lesson where we are focusing on this presi, technique. And then next we will move into color. But I just wanted to give us one more session to make sure we're happy with all of the details and make sure there aren't any areas where the paint is too thin. I have a few of those. So this is just kind of like a re-finding moment. And then we'll move on to the final step, which is adding color. So I want to start with the mouth. I painted that pretty quickly on the first pass. So I'm gonna zoom in on the mouth. And let's see if we can capture a little bit more information. Okay, I'm going to be using a really tiny brush now. And let's just start. I want to begin with my darkest dark, my black, and add a little bit more darkness in the inside corner of the mouth and just really get the shaping of the mouth. Correct? So it comes over like this. And you'll notice that the darkness from the inside of the mouth kinda continues over past the edge of the lips. Just a little. You want, you want the mouth to, the laugh. The corners of the mouth where you smile or laugh. You want those to go a little bit past the lips. Alright? Just reshaping the teeth a little bit. You can see so much more when you zoom in. And that is why I didn't want to do that too soon because we can very easily get overwhelmed and lose sight of the big picture. When you're blocking in color or value. The big picture is always what you want to be focused on first. And then after you have that worked out, then you can go noodle away at details to your heart's content. Alright, her mouth kind of goes a little straighter over here that I had it I had it curl, curling up too much. And then I'm going to grab this brush instead. Go a little bit lighter too late, and pull some shadow right here. Just really study the photo. What else can you bring out in yours that you see now that you maybe didn't notice the first time you were painting it. It's kinda this process of just continually honing in closer and closer onto the, the amount of detail. And depending on how realistic or how photorealistic you want your painting to be, that will determine how many steps you take, how, how, how, how much do you need to zoom in to? You could go as far as you want. You can paint every pore. But that's also not necessary and probably not even advisable, real because we already have the photo. I always think as a painter, it's good to be able to add something or painted in a way where it's not exactly like the photo. You see some brushstrokes, you see some, some personality. Personally, that's what I like. But I also have a great appreciation for more realistic art as well as more abstract art. You might not even know what your style is yet. That's okay. It's good to start with realism, I think, because the kinda teaches you the rules. But here's your Pali pro tip for the day. Art rules are made to be broken. Most rules are in my opinion, but especially with art, there are no rules actually. But there are tips and recommended ways of doing certain things. So think of that is what I'm showing you here. I'm not showing you this is not the end-all be-all. You know how to paint like, like me, I want you to just learn these techniques and then apply them. However you want. Have a great appreciation for abstract art, or if it's more expressive. And if that's where you find yourself being drawn, go, go that direction. You could just as easily make more expressive strokes or break things down into more geometric shapes. Just all depends what your style is, what you use, see how you interpret it. If you don't know what your style is, that's okay too. You might not know yet. It takes some work to figure that out. But one really good way to start that process is to pay attention to the kind of art that you like. That will as you start to really understand your own taste, that can be a big clue as to what you want your work to look like. I started out painting very realistically. And then as I grew to appreciate other styles and other other techniques, I really found myself being drawn to much more expressive paintings. I still like to have realism in there. I like to paint figures and things like that. But I like to, in my own work now put a lot more expressive marks and unusual color into my work. So it can always be a process, you can always be evolving. This is just a starting 0.1 thing. I noticed if you look really closely over on the rate, by that right eye, there are actually some lighter colored eyelashes that you see right here. The light must be catching them even though it's not catching around that I, or even inside that. There's also a little touch of it right here on the bottom. You see that just kinda wraps around. Alright. I want to break up this eyebrow a little more. It's looking still a little too painted on. So I'm just taking some of the lighter tones and painting up into it so that it breaks it up. A little. Same thing up at the top. Looking good. I want to soften this little line right here, this shadow. It's there in the image, but it's not as dark as I have it. Value is someone of those things. I think we've already talked about this, but that is very relative. So something can look too dark or too light at first and then be perfect once you get everything else painted. Or it might look perfect when you first do it, and then you realize that it requires some adjustments later. So you just have to constantly be assessing. Not obsessing. Can do that sometimes do. But constantly assessing what's going on with your piece, what it needs. Just remind yourself to keep looking up at your reference at all times so you can find more information to pull out in your, in your piece. Alright, I'm gonna go a little bit later here. Make that mouth really come forward a little wider here. I see a little bit more shadow on the chin, so I'm gonna go a little bit darker. Seems to me this is one of the really fun parts of painting now that you have everything in there and it's pretty much in the right place. You just get to really study it and see how close you can bring it to your reference. It's like putting together a puzzle. Now I'm going to grab my lightest blend back into there. There we go. See how you can get it to be nice and soft. If you just read, re-wet the area. There we go, That's starting to look like I always love it when the person that I'm painting starts to show up on the canvas, It's exciting. Usually takes about this long. Just want to soften things a little bit on this neck. Don't want any real rough edges or anything trying to make it little smoother. It's almost harder to paint a face like this than to paint an older face that has more lines and wrinkles and character. I love painting all different types of people. And then I just wasn't gonna go back into the here for a minute and a few areas where it's still looks pretty brown. I'm just giving it another coat. Just take one more look here. Go a little darker beside beside the nostril on the right side of the nose. Make that go more into shadow. There we go. All right, my friends. There we have it. Great job everyone. Alright, in the next lesson, we get to add some color into this. I'll see you then 14. Glazing Color: Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here and welcome back to learn to paint portraits in acrylic. In today's lesson, it's finally time to start adding color will be glazing some color all over this whole Canvas. Happy painting. All right, we're going to do some glazing. So I'm putting out burnt umber, the brown color. And I think I want to make it a little redder. I see a lot of almost kinda like a rust color in this bottom right corner, the background and it kinda shows up elsewhere too. So to get that, I put out my burnt umber, my brown, and I'm just using a little bit of red. Red is another one of those colors that a little bit will go along way. So mix those two together, you'll get a nice, warm, rich, reddish brown color. If you have a tube of paint that's called burnt sienna, That's what this looks like. So you could also just use that, but this is how you make that if you don't have that colon. Alright, here's the fun part. Are you ready? We're going to start doing some glazing. So here's your polyprotic and vocabulary word for the day. Glazing is when you paint in a transparent way so that it allows the other information that's already on the canvas to still show through. So we are glazing some of this brown color into the background is where we'll start. So it kinda gives you a space to get comfortable with it before we get too detailed into the face. So load up your brush with a lot of water. Can it really wet and then just get a little bit of the paint, you'll see how Almost will feel. Like watercolor. Really wet it. You want it very nice and thin. And then just start brushing it over the background. Like that. You may need to experiment a few times to get comfortable with it. You don't want to go, you don't want it to be so opaque that it's covering up what's there. You're just tenting the color, if that makes sense. It will. By the time we're done with this step, it'll probably it'll take us a couple of lessons to get her completely covered and then we'll go back and do some finishing touches. But when you do it this way, it has such a beautiful, luminous quality. And you don't really, to me, it's like harder to know when you look at a painting that was done this way exactly how it was made. You don't really see all the brushstrokes and because it's disguised by this thin layer, It's a nice way to get the acrylic to have some more subtle blending and variations because that can be tricky to do. It's acrylic is a little bit more of a plasticky kind of medium. I would describe it that way compared to oil. So thinning it down. Like this allows it to be a lot more fluid and to blend. And again, it just takes advantage of what the medium can do and also of the work that you have already put in to the painting. A lot of classical paintings were done this way. I think it really helps to emphasize the feeling of the light shadow. It prioritizes that because you're painting just that at first without thinking about color. Look at that. It's getting that beautiful, warm, rich tone all around. Next we'll go right into the here. Don't be nervous. You can't hurt it. I mean, you could, I suppose, but you can always fix it. You don't ever want to be afraid of your painting. That's probably another good poly pro tip to throw in today. You feel like you're painting is looking pretty good. But you think there's just something I really think it needs. I'd like to try, but I don't want to mess it up. That to me is always a sign that you should try it. Because I always think it's better to go too far and ruin a painting, but to learn something from it, then to never know what would happen if you if you try it. So that is my suggestion and that's what I always share with my students. If you're afraid of ruining it, don't, because you painted at once, you could always repaint it again if needed. Alright, now I'm going into the hair doing the exact same thing. It kind of helps unify everything to it makes it all come together. Now there are a lot of colors in her, in her skin and in anybody's skin when you paint a face. It's always more than just whatever the primary color pigment of the skin is because skin is very reflective of what's around it. So what I'm actually going to do is continue just using that same color that we've mixed and do a wash over the skin now, really thin it out. You don't want to lose any of the detail that you painted. But just go in because this will really warm her up. And then we'll come back in and put in more flesh tones in details and stuff. But for right now, Let's go ahead and cover. Look at that. Isn't that cool? It's just like kinda comes to like breathing life into the image. So many times when I'm painting just feels magical. Like it was not only ago when this was just a white canvas. Now look, there's a person showing up. So exciting. Try to smooth it out as much as you can so you don't have a lot of brushstrokes, but also don't keep overworking an area you will be painting more. So if there are things that don't look quite right, Don't worry about it. We're just getting some color in there. Now everything is starting to feel like it's in the same light. It's in the same environment. Making a portrait like this, I think it is really important to have that sense of harmony of the color. And the way you achieve that is by doing steps like this where you just pull that color through everywhere. Just steady and see if there's anywhere you missed. You can also wipe your brush off on the paper towels so it's not as loaded. And then go back and just brush over some of the parts so that you can smooth out the brush strokes even more. Look to see if there's any way you missed. Doesn't it look like one of those old photos that was like recolored by hand? I kinda like that. I mean, that is essentially what we've done here. We've taken our black and white image. Now we're just starting to add color over it. I'm going to do another layer. It's starting to dry. It's not all the way dry, but that's okay. I'm gonna put a little bit more in the background and just work it in. Because I went that really nice, warm, rich tone, especially on the bottom. That's where I see it a lot in the image. And then blending up into the shadow. And I see it a little stronger over here too. So I'm going to do that also. Everything is a process and sometimes with acrylic, it will look one way when it's wet and it might dry a little darker, a little less vibrant. Sometimes, you know, that that kind of thing does happen. So if it looks good while you're painting it, but then it dries and doesn't feel quite, quite as on-point. Go back and do it again. There we go. Great job, everyone. In the next lesson, we are going back in and working some more on the face, the skin tones and getting all of it to really start to come to life. I'll see you then 15. Glazing Skin Color: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to paint portraits and acrylic. Today we are going right back in and painting more color and detail on the skin. Happy painting. I have my brown that I was using in the last lesson. So that's just burnt umber with a little bit of red mixed into it. And I want to mix a couple of other colors for her skin right now. So I'm gonna put out some red, some yellow, and some white. Okay, So here's the brown. I'm going to take a little bit of that, pull it down and add some white to it. And so you get kind of a lighter brownish, tan kinda color, I guess. And then into that, I'm going to put a little red, warm it up. A little bit of yellow. Starting to look like a nice shadowy color for her skin. Now, take a little bit of that, pull it down, add some more weight. I'm a big fan of Mickey being as efficient as I can. So I start from scratch, but I can pull from what I've already done. I want to add a little more yellow into that one because she had some spots on her skin where there's a lot of really warm light hitting. There we go. That's nice. And pull some of that and add even more white. Now there are some places, especially like on her cheek, right? I see a rosy color too, so that's gonna be the last color that I put out here. I will, again take a little bit of that dark brown, add more red to it. Maybe a touch of yellow, but the dominant color here is red. And a little bit of weight. We get a nice pinky color, maybe a little more brown. You don't want it to be too, too bright. Um, I mean, again, personal choice. I'm going to try to match the photo for the most part. But if you want to give her some really bright lipstick or fancy make-up, Go for it. Okay. That should be enough for now. I want to start right here on this cheek. So I'm going to take my slant brush. And this time it'll be, it'll start with a glaze. But then we will also do some actual just painting too with more opaque paints. But let's start by doing a little bit of glaze of this pink color, very thin into this cheek. It looks kinda strong. Way you can do is with your brush, thin it out with water, and just kinda work it in. It's better to go a little too much than to not go far enough that we can always pull it back. Alright, so now that I've got pink kinda warming up that cheek, let's go right next to it with more opaque layer of this lighter kind of yellowy skin color. And just see if we can start to get it to blend in. Just soften her face up. There are a lot of shifts in light and dark on her face, but they're always like very soft edge. So it takes a little more work. You have to keep going in with your brush and kind of puffing out those edges. But look how warming up that cheek made such a difference. When you are painting over a black and white painting, a lot of the shadows might look a little cooler because of that. The gray is probably a little bit cooler than it is warm. So if you have to push it a little farther towards warm at first, go for it. Alright, asked to see that tan color up here. I'm just grabbing a little bit of whatever I see, blending it all in. Again, taking advantage of all the work that I've already done on this. Right? Now, I want to take some of this really nice light. Hello. Come in, actually want a smaller brush for this. This one will be good. Pull out that little highlight That's right below the eyebrow. Just work it in. Here's your polyprotein tip. For today. Don't be afraid to push shadows darker and to make the highlights brighter. That's kind of one of the beautiful things about this step is that you can push those things until you have the exact amount of drama that you want. If you're going for a more subtle look, then you might not want real extreme contrast of value. You might want it to be more gradual. If you are doing something like this image, I'd say, I say go for all the drama. You can. This is very much like a classical painting. They would have been referred to as a tyrosine bureau. Because what that means is emerging from the darkness. And you see a lot of portraits, especially like paintings that were done during the Renaissance time period onward, where the figure is against this really dark background. And that allows the light that's hitting the feast to just really pop. And it makes, it makes the figure feel very, very realistic and believable. Just kinda blending in here. Going pretty bright on this side. On them. Place where you see little details. This is the time. Some of the shadows on the nose and forehead still feel a little bit too gray. So I'm going to do a little bit more of a glaze of this pink and this kind of darker skin tone. I kinda like to take a little of both and then really thin it down. Then wherever you have shadow that looks to grade, just warm it right up. When you're painting and the color that you're using just doesn't look right and you're trying to figure out, well what actually is wrong. Lot of it might be the temperature of the color. That's not something that we think about as much as how dark or how light it is. But now that we're at the stage of adding color, temperature is a huge factor to think about. How warm is the color, How cool is the colon. You can have many different versions of the same color. I'm going to go warmer up here on the forehead to just really makes that skin start to come to life. Let it go into this kinda more yellowy peach color here. And then I'm gonna go really light over here because that's a, that's a spot where there's a lot of light hitting. Look at how just pushing these values a little bit. Starting to make such a difference already. That skin is coming to life. Just keep layering it to if it doesn't get as light as you want on the first attempt, go back, push it farther. Don't be afraid of it is all about layering. Later in here as we transition into that cheek. Okay, It's all for now. Great job everyone. In our next lesson, we're just going to continue painting the skin and bringing out even more detail. I'll see you then 16. Glazing Details: Hi, everyone. I'm Paul Richmond, and welcome back to Learn to paint portraits in acrylic. Today we are continuing painting the skin and really bringing it to life. Happy painting. Using the same colors is in the last lesson. I have my brown, burnt umber red combination. Then I use some of that to mix a few different shades of flesh tone. This one has the brown plus some red yellow and white. Then actually all of these do just different amounts of each. These two have more yellow than anything else. This one has more red than anything else. Go ahead and mix those up again. Yours do not have to look exactly like mine. Don't obsess over that. Just get some color out, and let's keep going. You can pause me why you do that if you need to. All right. Now, let's get back to work. All right. I want to come over here next on this side of the face and warm that up a little too. I'm going to actually take the brown, I think, maybe with a little bit of red and just come through and glaze into the skin over here. Warm it up. Then I'll maybe use just the pink up here. It's all trial and error really with this. You have to just experiment until it looks right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's warm up the shadow around here next. I'm going to use a little brown again, a little red and just come through and very lightly glaze wherever you feel like it looks too gray still warm up those parts. The thing that happens too with repeated glazing, and then especially if you go in with a little bit more opaque color two, you just end up getting really beautiful soft gradations, which is ideal for this painting in particular, this model. Okay. A little bit here. I feel like that looks a little too gray still warm this up on our nose. Soften the edge of that shadow a little bit. The other interesting thing about painting faces is that the tiniest little detail can make all the difference. Feeling pretty good about the way her face is coming together. I want to take a little of the red, maybe mixed with a little of the brown still and go in and do her lips. That's going to be a glaze as well. Just go right on top. Painted in. All the work that you've already done will make this step this final step just so much easier. Okay. I'm going to take a smaller brush if I can find it. There we go. While the lips are still wet, I'm just going to take some of my high light color here and pull out some of those highlights, especially on the lower lip. Of course, it depends on the light source, but usually there's more light hitting the lower lip than the upper lip because of the angle. The way the lower lip angles down and out. The upper lip shields itself from the light a little bit more usually unless the light is coming down below. Okay. Now I want to go down and work on the neck. I use my big brush for that. I'm going to start with this kind of darker skin tone and work over from the shadow. Okay. See how it smooths everything out so nicely. And do the same thing coming in now from this side. I'm actually going to put a little bit more of the brown tone into the shadow. Still feels a little too gray. Another glaze of brown in there. Okay. Glazing is our friend. That's your polyp tip. How can I forget the poly? That's your poly tip for today. Glazing is our friend. All right. Now I'm going to my next lightest and a little less water this time because I like the highlights to be a little more opaque. It's nice to blend into the wetter dark tones that are already on there. I like to build up from dark when I'm working with acrylic. Nice and soft you can make it blend. Okay. Think about the shape of that shoulder that's coming toward us. The light wraps around that very differently than it does say, you know, the neck up here, for example. Okay. A little bit of light hitting here. I'm going to bring that out more. Then with my smaller brush, I'm going to do the lightest color, the lightest high light color, and I see that it's the brightest right up here on her neck. I'm going to put that in. It helps that I was just painting the other colors right in that same part. I can just blend this right into it without having to grab more paint or work very hard. I'm getting down here. He go. I want to. Let's see. That looks pretty good on the neck. I'm happy with that. I'm going to come over to the ear now, see a few little things I need to do in there. Let me start with the brown and just bring out some of the dark shadows, warm them up a little bit. Ears and no, especially nostrils are places where you tend to see a lot of reddish colored light showing up. I'm going to put even a little bit more red in with the brown to warm that up. And I'm going to come and do that same thing right below and around the nostril, just glaze a little bit of red in there. Then on the ear, I see there are I'm going to go with this middle one first. So highlights that I want to bring out. This little shape right here, I'm going to go brighter here right along this edge. Okay. And once more, when I just push this highlight a little farther on the cheek. And over here by the eye, And our next lesson, we are going to be focusing again on the eyes and all the other little finishing touches. I can't believe we're almost there. This went way too fast, you guys? Okay. Just blending out that highlight. And I'm going to come back to the ear one more time with this really light color and just work that in a few spots where I see the lightest tones in that ear. So here and here. It's always those little touches that you do in towards the end of a painting that really make it. So when you feel like you're getting close to the finish line, don't rush because that's actually one of the most important parts. Okay. A little wider here so that lip comes forward even more. Just kind of work it in. This is sort of a dry brushing technique I'm using here to just blend in that highlight. So many different ways to manipulate the paint and make it make it blend. We've done it using water to thin it. We've done it blending one wet color into another wet color, and then dry brushing is also a very good option. I like using dry brushing with highlights, especially gives them a little bit of draws attention to it a little texture or something, but along the edge that just makes that highlight pot. All right. Great work, everyone. All right. In our next and final lesson, we are going to go back and paint more detail in the eyes and do some finishing touches to make this wrap up. See you then? 17. Finishing Touches: Hi everyone. I'm Paul Richmond and welcome back to learn to paint portraits and acrylic. This is our last lesson in this course. I've had so much fun painting with you. Now it's time to really bring those eyes to life and do some finishing touches. Happy painting. I still am working with the colors that I have been using. So the multiple skin tones. And I also put out some of the grades that we were using before, the black, some darker grays and the lighter ones too. So that's what I have on my palette, might not use all of it, but if you want your palette to sort of match mine, that's what I am starting with. And I'm also going to squeeze out just a little bit of green so that we can make that kind of hazel color in her eyes. Alright? If you don't have green, of course you can mix it with blue and yellow. And so to get that kind of hazily color and take this green, I'm actually going to mix it with a little bit of the skin tone with a little bit of yellow. There we go. That's getting in the right direction. More skin tone. Maybe. You can make her eyes whatever color you want to you. But alright, that looks good. And focus on those eyes. What I always considered the most important parts of a portraits. All right, and this is a small brush time. Alright, going to start by just kinda glazing that color into the eye. A little greener I think than the photo, but that's alright. We'll just say that was an artistic decision. You can always make it a little brown or two if you, if you want. Alright, then I am going to make the white of the eye pop a little more when we glazed over it initially with the brown and kinda Dahl did a little and I always like for that little sparkle in the eye to really pop. You could even make it thick if you want, like put a little thick glob of paint on that area, you see that a lot in master portraits also. They do that because if the paint is raised a little bit, it will catch the light and really make the eyes come to life. Alright, now I want to just brighten her eyes a little bit. So I'm going back to my really, really light gray since her eyes got a little a little warm from that brown glaze, I'm just going to bring the coolness back in. They're not completely, it's good to let a little of the warm tone staying in parts too because they would reflect the environment around her. All right. Come over here. And then on the other side, it's also a little bit grayer but darker. So I'll go with my darker gray. Just glaze over that part. Then let it blend into the darkness. A little bit here as well. Alright, and then I want to bring out the eyelid a little bit more. You can do that over here to you. When I painted I is your last polyprotein tip. I really tried to also paint some little details all around the eye. I never want the eye to, to just feel like it's kinda stuck on. So I just consider the area around the eye to be part of it, part of, part of painting BI. It should have a connection to the light source and into the rest of the face as well. So just kinda working my way out, I see it gets a little darker here. So I'm going to put that in. Actually, Let me go up to my slant brush for that. Shadow ray here. And let's warm up. Taking my red, yellow, making just kinda like a really warm orangey tone. Now of course, this needs to be thinned out a lot. Mostly water, just kinda warming up some of these shadows around her eye. Even a little more than what I had. Helps It's a way of kind of pooling the attention Of the viewer even further up. Going to make this little flap of around the nostril underneath. But kinda just in that detail phase now. So let your eye wander around anything that you see in your painting that doesn't feel quite right. This is your chance to address it. One thing I wanna do is soften this edge here of the nose because it actually starts to fade into the shadow on the nose itself. So you don't really see that hard edge of where the nose overlaps the right side of the face and just gradually goes over to it. And I want to do a little bit of a cooler gray on her teeth, maybe a little too brown right now. We don't want that have to send it to the dentist. There we go. You don't want to use pure white. I know we've talked about that before, but even though teeth are what we would consider weight, It's also affected by light and shadow in the same way as everything else. So it's actually quite dark. Because of the shadow of her lips. The light can't quite reach in there. It's best not to overemphasize teeth either. I kinda make them a little, a little bit ambiguous. If you put too many details, they can very quickly become the focal point and look strange. So just kinda keep it subtle. I think I wanna go a little router on her lips. I also like putting little touches of red even arrayed around the eyes, just very subtle. Anything to draw your attention up there? I think. It's good. I like that. Let's just blend it in little, maybe a little more red over on the ear. See, I'm just jumping around. You do the same and doesn't have you don't have to jump to the same places is mean either you go where it feels. The earpiece means it. Even though we've all been painting the same thing together here, every one of our paintings, I'm sure it's totally different. So spend some time really studying your ears and assessing what you need to do to make yours feel finished. I think I want to just pull out a few little highlights in her hair too, and I'm just going to use my darker skin color for that. And my slant brush. I'll come back in here and just make a few little streaks that are a little bit more opaque. So this part is not really a glaze, this is just actual painting. Don't want to overdo it, but it can be just kinda helps to make it feel a little more complex. A little more detail. And pull out a few here and a few down. She does have a few loose hairs that they sort of dark brownish, so I'm just going to use that and let them come and overlap the neck. See how I save that for last, it would be annoying that try to paint all the shadows on her neck if I had to paint around here. So I just kinda save that for the end. Few more little highlights here. All right. We did it. We did it. Congratulations. I would absolutely love to see your paintings, so please, please, please share it with me. I really hope that you enjoyed this course and learned a lot of new techniques. And I especially hope that you continue to apply them in other works that you create and explore and find your own style, your own way of working. That's what being an artist is all about. Acrylic paint is such a versatile medium. You can use it in so many different ways. Every subject matter imaginable. We have just scratched the surface here. I encourage you to keep painting, keep playing, and keep coming back and taking more courses with me because I have had a blast until next time. Happy painting everyone 18. Closing: We did it. Congratulations. I would absolutely love to see your paintings, so please, please, please share it with me. I really hope that you enjoyed this course and learned a lot of new techniques. And I especially hope that you continue to apply them in other works that you create and explore and find your own style, your own way of working. That's what being an artist is all about. Acrylic paint is such a versatile medium. You can use it for so many different ways. Every subject matter imaginable. We have just scratched the surface here. I encourage you to keep painting, keep playing, and keep coming back and taking more courses with me because I have had a blast, happy painting everyone