Mastering Portrait Painting - Full Process and Walkthrough Guides on Painting Realistic Portraits

1. Day 1: Lesson 1 - Intro + Materials: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this class. My name's Ashley. And in this series, we're going to be tackling arguably the hardest discipline of reali start, and that is the human portrait. A lot of artists struggle with this, including myself, as there are certain things that you can get away with in other disciplines, that you're just not able to do with portraits. Human beings are hypersensitive to other people's proportions and facial expressions, which means that for the artists to create a likeness, we have to be accurate to the millimeter. If we are slightly off, then suddenly the expression changes completely, or it can even become a different person. In this course, I'm going to show you the best method that I know of to help you paint an accurate and realistic portrait. A few other topics that we'll be covering will include going over the general facial proportions and free hand drawing techniques. We'll be simplifying the face down into basic shapes and then using tone to build a three D form, and we'll also be going over different colors and combinations to mix accurate skin tones. I've structured this course to have seven modules with the idea being that you can complete one module each day. Now, you don't have to strictly follow this schedule if it doesn't work for you, you can work on this in your own time as well. Each module will be comprised of different lessons, which will include theory and also demonstrations you can follow along with. At the end of each module, there'll be a project for you to have a go at by yourself that will hopefully help to embed the skills we've discussed in a practical sense. With all that said, let's move on to the first module, and the topics that we'll be discussing here are the general facial proportions, as well as free hand drawing techniques. Now, the materials that need for this, will simply be a piece of paper and a pencil. We're going to be starting off in the sketchbook and you don't need any fancy kit for this, just a regular A three sketchbook, and a couple of pencils will do. I would recommend using a fairly light pencil, as well as a medium and a dark, something like a two H, two B, and then a six B. Once you've got all that, let's move on to the first lesson. 2. Day 1: Lesson 2 - General Facial Proportions: The first step to being able to paint a realistic portrait is to have a good understanding of facial proportions. Now, as human beings are all unique, everyone is going to have slightly different measurements between all their features. But there are a few general rules that we can follow to roughly get within the right ballpark from the very start. That is what I'm going to show you in this video. I'm going to be using photoshop to demonstrate this, and as you can see, I've already drawn a basic head shape with a line going down the center. The human face is actually quite organized and there are patterns that we can use to determine the position of all our features. A good place to start would be to put in where the eyes are, and these are located roughly across the very center of the head. If we take this top line, which will be the scalp and the bottom line for the chin, and if we divide that in half, we will get roughly where the eyes need to be placed. We can just put a line directly across here. Now, the next position that we need to establish is roughly where the forehead or hair line will be. We can do this by taking the measurement for the eyes and the top of the head. If we divide that into third and put a line across the top third, roughly about here. This will be where the hair line will be. This is important because if we can take now this measurement and the chin and divide that into thirds, that will give us the eyebrows and the bottom of the nose. The top third will obviously be for the eyebrows, and the bottom third will obviously be for the nose. Now, once you've got this, we can take the measurement for the bottom of the nose and the chin and if we divide that in half, that will be roughly where the mouth will be. Now the last features that we need to put in are the locations for the ears, and the ears are typically located in line with the eyebrows, so the top of the ears will line up here and the bottom of the ears pretty much line up with the bottom of the nose. And obviously, we can do that on both sides. Now we've got all the horizontal measurements, but we also need to determine how wide everything is. To do this, we can start with the eyes, and the total width of these is equal to the distance between the chin and the eyes. If we take this measurement to the eyes again and flip that horizontally, we will get roughly the total width of both the eyes. We can just put a couple of marks here. Now, to get the individual spacing between each eye, all we do is divide this new measurement up into thirds. Basically, you should be able to fit another eye in between the two that we have. Moving onto the nose, this also fits between the eyes and can be divided up into thirds as well, being the top and then the sides of the nose. We can draw a couple of lines down here and typically the nose gets wider towards the bottom and the widest part of the nose lines up with the corners of the eyes. We can take this measurement and drop it down here, put a mark, and same again on the other side, and that would be the widest part of the nose. For the width of the mouth, I don't think there is a general rule for this, but typically, it will be a little bit larger or wider than the total width of the nose. We can extend that maybe to about here just a little bit wide than the widest area of the nose. That's the basic proportions of the face, and it would be a good idea to memorize these just so you've got a reference the base your dimensions on. I've attached a PDF you can download detailing the measurements and proportions I've just mentioned in the resources section below. It's important to note here that these rules only apply to a level front facing. If the model is facing a different direction and at various angles, then these proportions are going to be skewed and won't line up in the way that I've shown you. Let's take a few photo references and see how they line up with the rules we've just spoken about. If I take this first image that we have, I've lined it up so the top of the head and the chin align with the sketch that we've got on the right hand side. If I lower the opacity of this image and drag it over the top. You can see that a lot of the features actually do line up pretty nicely. Obviously, the face shape is going to be slightly different, but we've got the eyes and the eyebrows and even the nose in the correct position more or less. The only parts that are a little bit different are the mouth and the ears. The mouth is a little bit high, there's less space between the nose and the upper lip. And obviously the ears are a little bit lower down and also closer set into the face. But overall, not too bad, but obviously, we wouldn't be able to rely on these rules to try and get accurate representation if we were trying to paint this portrait. The next image that I have is an image of older man, and again, if I lower the opacity and drag that over the top, This one is quite a bit more different. Again, we've got the eyes in roughly the correct place, but they are a lot narrower and they're set closer together. The nose is the correct height, but again, we've got the mouth being a little bit lower down, than it is in this reference photo. Also the face shape, his face is a lot thinner than what we've got here. Quite a bit different in this one. For the last image, let's just see how this one lines up. For this one, you can see that the head is just a little bit taller than what we've got on our lines, and that has resulted in a lot of the features actually being lower down than what we've got. B hole is not too far off, still very similar, and also the mouth is more correct in this one than any of the other ones. You can see we can get pretty close to the reference solely with these general rules, and they are definitely helpful to know so that you've got a basic understanding to work with. But as I mentioned previously, everyone is slightly different, so you can't rely on these rules absolutely if you want to paint a realistic portrait. This method is more heavily used by illustrators who don't need to necessarily create a lightness. For portrait artists like ourselves, we need to be a little bit more precise on this, and that leads us on to the next lesson, where we will talk about free hand drawing and using references to accurately portray our subject. 3. Day 1: Lesson 3 - Free Hand Drawing + Demo: Okay, so in the system, we are going to be increasing the precision of our drawings by using photo references. A couple of things that we need to be focusing on here will include the mood and expression of our subject. These are crucial elements that will help build the character of our subject and also make the painting seem more lifelike. The first step to conveying these is to make sure that we've got all the features in the correct place. My preferred method for free hand drawing is to find and take reference points within the photo that will enable me to see how the different measurements all correlate with each other. It's a very similar concept to how we drew the generic measurements from the previous video. Only this time we are comparing it to the photo rather than the drawing itself. For example, if we look at this portrait, we can see that the length between the chin and the eyebrow is equal to the distance between the temples, and therefore, we need to make sure that that is the same in our drawing or painting. Now, to measure this, you can just use a ruler if you want to. But the faster method that I like to use is to simply take your pencil and your finger. You may have seen artists constantly holding up their pencils and rotating them around, and that is essentially what they're doing just trying to find the proportions of the subjects. The way it works is if you have your reference out in front of you, you can align the tip of your pencil up to any feature you want to measure, and then you can just place your finger or thumb on the other end of that measurement. So then you can just move it around, maybe even rotate it to try and find some other dimensions that align with this one. Now once you've found it, you know that those two measurements are the same, and therefore, that needs to apply to your drawing as well. This way, we should be able to mark in pretty accurate placements of the facial structure that also correlates with the reference. So I'm going to show you a quick demo so you can see how exactly I would go about doing this. When I first start doing these sketches, I always like to begin using a fairly light pencil. This is because the initial lines that I put down are quite experimental, just my basic structural lines, and using a light pencil will make it easy to wrap out and make those adjustments. So I'm going to be using a two H to be doing this. For this drawing, we've got a front facing model. And when I start these sketches, I always like to begin by putting in the axis line for the head. What I mean by this is if we look at the reference photo, we can see that the head is slightly tilted off to the left. And to put this in, all I'm going to do is draw a straight line with this pencil at the angle that I think that it is. It's fairly shallow, not much at all, but just a little bit going over to the left. I'm just going to draw a straight line. Up like this. Now the next thing to do would be to mark in the top of the head and the chin, and then everything else is going to fit in between. I'm going to draw a line perpendicular to the axis line that we've drawn just at the top and bottom. It doesn't matter particularly where it's just determine how big you want your portrait to be. So I'm going to put a few lines here. Now we've got a start and an endpoint, and we should be able to use this to judge where all the other features are going to be placed. Taking my pencil, I'm starting to measure the distances between all the features. I'm taking the measurement for the chin to the eyes and then playing around without seeing what that fits into. I can see the eyes. If we take the top of the head to the chin, the eyes lie just under halfway between these two points. If we put a halfway mark, roughly here, the eyes are going to be slightly underneath this. I may put a mark for the eyes just about here. So I've just measured the distance of the hairline to the top of the head, and I can see that if I just put that down twice, we will get to the distance of the eyes. So the hairline lies two thirds of the way up from the eyes to the very top of the head. So I can put a mark about here, and that will give us the hairline there. Now that we've got the hairline. If we think back to the general rules that we discussed previously, we know that the hair line to the chin can be divided up into three parts and we'll get roughly where the eyebrows are and also the bottom of the nose. Let's just test that out on this reference. I'm taking the measurement of the hairline to the center of the eyebrows and just taking that down and seeing how it lines up. It is very close. I think the chin just maybe a little bit longer than that bottom third. But we can definitely put in the eyebrows that we take the measurement. Just divide that into thirds. We may need to experiment a bit with the bottom of the nose. I'm not sure if that is the exact placement that it needs to be. But essentially, we've got all of the measurements for the vertical parts of the head. Now we just need to discover how wide everything is. Once again, I'm going to start with the eyes and just measure how wide the eyes are. This is the total length of both the eyes from corner to corner. And then I'm taking that measurement and just seeing what that lines up with. It does line up nicely with the distance of the chin to the eyes. If we take this measurement and flip that. We will get a mark. Wide than that for where the corners of the eyes are. I'm going to just put a horizontal line going through here. Again, we need to follow that axis, so it needs to be 90 degrees across from that axis line. I don't think we put that in the center. I think we need to shift everything over a bit. Once again, we can divide the is into thirds and we should be able to fit another i in between these two. If you just take this measurement and divide that roughly into thirds into equal thirds, that should give us roughly the placement so we can put cut marks here. Then like before, we can just drop this down and looking at the reference photo, I can see that the corner of the nose does in fact line up with the eye. Just drawing a straight line down here along that same angle. We'll just put a few marks for the edges of the nose, and then we need to divide up the nose once again into three parts, so we've got the top, and then the two sides on either side. The nose is quite wide on the top, so we're going to put a couple marks here and bring those down. It does start to get narrower. And then at the base, we get a little bit wider. Now, we can see a little bit of the underside of the nose. I'm not going to take these lines all the way down, but I'm going to stop them at roughly this point. Now, sitting underneath the nose, obviously, we've got the mouth, and let's just measure where the center of the mouth lies from the chin and see what that lines up with. So the center of the mouth to the chin is the same as roughly the bottom of the nose to the eyes. So if we just take this measurement, drop that down to the chin, and we can put a line roughly this point, that will be where the center of the mouth is. The center of the mouth is a little bit higher up in the face. It doesn't lie halfway between a little bit higher up. So now, in terms of how wide the mouth is, we can just take that measurement and once again, see what that lines up with. So the width of the mouth lines up pretty much with the bottom of the nose to the eyebrow, so we can just take this measurement and put that on either side. Put the mark here, and mark there. So the mouth also is pretty horizontal. It doesn't curve upwards or downwards that much. So I'm going to put a very faint line just going straight across. What? Now in terms of the upper lip, that lies pretty much halfway between the bottom of the nose and the center of the mouth at the highest point, so we can put a mark roughly here, and I think the bottom lip is pretty much the same height. So we put that bit further down there. Now we've got the features of the face. Now let's start working on the actual shape of the head itself. I'm going to measure the widest point which is sitting just underneath the eyes at the top of the cheekbones, and I'm going to take that measurement and just see what that lines up with. That measurement lines up roughly with the bottom of the nose and the hair line. If we take this measurement, flip that on its side. You see, it's actually very close to the ye. I think we may have gone a little wrong with the eye placement. I'm going to put these marks in anyway, and let's just remeasure the eyes and see where we went wrong there. I'm going to measure the width of the eyes again and then flip that round. It lines up roughly with the center of the mouth and the eyebrows. Let's just take the center of the mouth. So we can see we've gone a little bit too wide. So I'm going to put another couple of marks here, just to reshape reshape the eyes there. This is obviously the widest part of the cheek, then it gets a little bit narrower as it comes up towards the temples. At this point, I'm more or less just eyeballing this. And it curves around towards the top of the hair line and rounds off. We're going to fight line down from the hair parting m in line with the corner of the eye if we follow this axis. If we put a mark here, this is where the hair overlaps from. And same again, if we just curve this round, meet it up with the hair line there. And the cheek bone lies roughly in lined the corner of the eye. So drawing a line here following the axis. Take that down here. Then once again, I think we've got the mouth just a little bit too wide. So if we compare it to the eyes and draw a line straight down, the stop in line with roughly the center just to the left of the center of this eye. I'm going to cut the mouth off a little bit earlier and same again on this side. Something more like this. Now, for the hair, usually, I just put this in by eye. I can see it's not too wide and it does flare out a bit at the sides. And we got the center parting to the right hand side of the center line. With the hair curling around here. Okay, so now from here, I'm just going to start drawing in the basic features. So from here, I'm going to draw the eyebrows in. So following this line, coming across Bing S gets pretty close to the hair, coming down on the side of the face, and we've got that arching motion from the eyebrows. So I'm going to lift that up a little bit and then curve it round at the back. Then obviously it gets thinner. At the ends. It kind of leads on from this outward angle from the nose. From here, we can start filling in the basic shapes of all the features. So you can see that the eye comes up roughly halfway between the brown and the bottom of the eye. Roughly, that is the highest point. Then we can see a bit of the eyelid on top of that. And a few creases. Maybe we can bring the the eyelash roughly here, bring that down. I'm just following the shape of the eye. We've got that little corner tear duct, and then a slight a slight lower curve coming out here in the same again for the other eye. The top of the eye is roughly halfway. That will be the crease for the eyelid. Starts curving around, then we've got the bottom of the eyelid bit lower down and connects onto the corner right here. Now for the nose, we can put in the nostrils and the shadow that just curves down here. Now, the mouth shape is a little bit tricky, so you've got the very center part here. It's not exactly a flat line because we've got a slight little curve up at this side and then it curves around and back across on the other side. And on the other side, it curves upward a bit first, and then once again, curves back down towards the center line. Okay, so I think we've got most of the measurement in roughly the correct place. But now that I'm looking at it overall, there are just a few alterations that I would like to make. And to begin with, I'm going to start with the hairline. I just think that we need to get a little bit higher over on the left hand side. This line was at the very bottom of the hairline, where we have a lot of the baby has, and we can see the scalp through some of these hairs at the very front, so it wouldn't actually look like it's that low down. But this also comes up a little bit further. So I think we can get a bit more of a V shape. Going on going towards the center of the hair line. And then where the hair starts getting a little bit denser, we can just continue drawing that straight line across. I'm also going to put a little bit of a dent at the very top of the hair where the parting is. Just to give that a little bit more shape and curve that round a bit more. I'm also going to just get rid of this little corner. I think it's not quite as sharp as this. It's going to be very slight, so I'm just going to cut into that ever so slightly, and then rub that away. And then the only other things that I would like to do to this is the first just widen the cheek on the right hand side. I think we've got a bit more space on this side. So I'm just going to take that out just a little bit further and then bring that round. Then I'm also going to just slightly thin the nose. I think it's a bit too wide, so I'm going to rub out these side lines and just narrow them s the small amount. Because since we narrowed the eyes, we didn't narrow the nose to compensate for that. I ended up with the nose being just a little bit too wide for this. And we can do the same thing with the top of the nose. We can just thin that just a little bit. With those adjustments, I think it's looking a lot nearer to what it's like in the photo. That is essentially done. That is how I would go about finding references and then applying that to my drawing to try and get the proportions correct. In the next asson, we're going to be doing some more of these line drawings. But this time, we're going to be using models which are looking in different directions with the head at even greater angles. So we won't be able to use the general rules as reference so much, but we should still be able to apply this method to get an accurate initial sketch. 4. Day 1: Lesson 4 - Demo 2 + Project: For this next demo, I'm using another model who's facing a different direction. So it's more of a three quarter profile. However, the method I'll be using will essentially remain the same. I'm going to start off once again by drawing in that axis line down the center of the head. I'm going to be measuring or lining up my pencil to the center of the chin to the center of the forehead and looking at the angle at which that line is. I can see it's actually very close to being 90 degrees, very slightly, so maybe more something like 94 degrees tilting to the left. I'm going to just draw a straight line coming straight down the center at an ever so slight angle. It's going to be barely noticeable. Once we're happy with that, I'm going to mark in the chin and the top of the forehead. Now, because the model has an afro hair type, it's very difficult to determine the top of the scalp. For this, I'm going to be drawing in a line for the forehead. I'll put a line at the bottom for the chin here. Then draw a line for the forehead. Because we don't have a line for the top of the head, we're not entirely sure where the eyes are. What I'm going to do is go straight to dividing the top of the forehead to the chin into thirds to once again try and get the eyebrows and the bottom of the nose. I'm just going to measure that on the reference and see how accurate that actually is. It is also very close. The only difference is that I think the chin is a little bit lower down than that equal third. I'm going to divide this into thirds and then just lift everything up slightly. If that is divided up into equal thirds, I'm just going to lift the eyebrows a tiny bit more and and also the nose, just a tiny bit more, and that should leave a little bit more room between the nose and the chin. Now, looking at the mouth, I can see that the center of the mouth lies quite a bit higher up above the halfway line between the bottom of the nose and the chin. However, it also doesn't line up by dividing into thirds either. What I'm going to do is actually measure the bottom of the lower lip, and I can see that that is actually very close to being halfway between the bottom of the nose and the chin. It's just a little bit lower down. What I'm going to do is just mark my position for that. If that's the center line, I'm going to put it a little bit below and put the bottom of the lower lip about here. Then we can divide the distance between the bottom of the nose and the lower lip. And if we divide that into thirds, then that will give us the center of the mouth and also the top of the upper lip. Okay, now I'm also going to start marking in the side of the head, and I'm going to measure at the narrowest point on the left hand side, which is just where the eyes are. I can see that the measurement for this next to the side of the nose, that is equal to the chin to the center of the mouth. If we take this measurement and put it horizontally from just the left of the central eye because the sentine we go through the center of the nose. So just to the left of this and put that horizontally here, that will be roughly where the side of the face is narrowest. Then from here, this is where the eyebrows are, so this will be a little bit further down at about this point. So the nose, you can put a line in here just to the left of the center line. Now that we've got this side of the face marked in, we need to now mark in the other side. I'm going to just measure that distance, and then if I flip my pencil around, and this is measuring exactly horizontally. If I flip that around, I can see that that is very similar to the measurement for the eyebrows to the chin. We can take this measurement and flip that horizontally. If we put a mark here, that will be roughly where the side of the faces. Now I want to start marking the position for the eyes. I'm going to measure from the side of the face to the eye, and then let's just see what that can line up with. I can see it's very close to being halfway between the two sides of the face. So if you put a mark roughly halfway between, if I just draw a line going all the way across, I is a very faint line. And if I measure halfway across this, the corner of the eye will roughly be about the spot. Now, remember, it's got to be lower down than the eyebrows, so we can probably put it here. And then the width of the eye, you can just divide this measurement between the corner and the side of the face to divide the into two, and that will give you the other part of the eye. Then following this line, I'm just going to pretty much eyeball where the other eye is going to be. I can see it gets very close to the side of the nose, which cuts across about here, and the eye lines up roughly here and it's not going to be as wide as the eye on the right side due to the angle that we're looking at it, so we can probably put that more about here. Now for the sides of the nose, if we just put a straight vertical line across the widest part of the nose, we can see that that is pretty much in line with the whites of the eye in between the white and the iris of the eye. If we just draw a straight line coming down here, that will be roughly the widest part of the nose. And if we do the same on the other side, I can see that this side of the nose is just slightly to the left of the corner of this right eye. So Destroying straight down We can put a mark about here. Now in terms of the width of the mouth, I'm going to do pretty much the same thing. Line my pencil up vertically against the corner of the mouth from the left hand side, and I can see that lines up roughly with the iris, which is just to the left side of the nose. If we just draw a line coming down here, this will be uh the side of the mouth. Due to the angle that the model is facing, everything on the left hand side is going to appear a little narrower than everything on the right hand side. If we do the exact same thing to the corner of the mouth on the right hand side, we can see that that lines up. It pretty much goes straight through the pupil, which is more or less in the very center of this eye. So we can draw a straight line coming down here. And that will line up to about this point to considerably to the right of the nose on this side. F here, I'm going to mark in the shape of the mouth, and I can see that it's parted a little bit at the very center, but it does slope downwards just a little bit on the left hand side. I'm going to curve that er so slightly. Then on the right side, again, we've got a very slight smile, so it curves down and then back up to connect to the corner there. And the lower lip gets overlapped by the up lip, but there's a small parting at the very center. With this, I'm now going to draw the side of the face. I'm pretty much going to just use my eye to draw this. I can see it gets pretty close to the corner of the mouth. So I'm going to put a mark roughly here. I'm just looking at the shape from here it slopes downward a bit and then cs back around to the chin. And I'm just going to curve that. And I think maybe we've got this side of the face is a little bit too wide. I'm just looking at it objectively now. And so I think I'm going to just cut in on that just a tiny bit. And then curve it around to meet the top of the forehead here. Now for the side of the face, we've got quite a dominant jaw line coming on the right hand side here. I can see that that lines up. If we just measure the corner of the jaw, it's pretty much directly horizontal to the corner of the mouth. If we just continue drawing a horizontal line across here, this will be roughly where the jaw line is. It comes down and it meets somewhere about here. Then we've got the ear appearing in line with the bottom of the nose. You can draw the bottom of the ear just about here and it's obscured mostly by hair after that. You can draw this coming all the way down, O obscuring that. From where we've marked the eyebrows in, if we just draw a straight line, we can draw roughly the shape of the eyebrows. Again, they're arching a little bit, they come up and then curve back around to meet pretty much in line with the corner of the eye. And they extend a little bit beyond the corner of the eye here. So then doing the same on the other side. And these meets with the side of the nose, just curves around here. So then drawing the upper and lower lip, again, the angles are a lot steeper on the left hand side. But still looking at the shape, it's more of this curving motion like this and curves up to the corner right here. So now let's just quickly put in the placement for the edge of the hair. So it's quite wide. So if we measure one of the widest points on the left hand side to the temple, and let's just align that with something else. I can see that aligns roughly with the bottom of the lip to the eyebrows. If we take this measurement and put that across from the temple, this is rough where the hair goes. Again, it doesn't have to be 100% accurate this because the hair often falls in different places, this isn't absolutely necessary to get exactly right. But I'm just going to be following the loose placement that I can see in the reference photo. And if we do the same on the right hand side, just measuring the ends of the hair to the temple. So that lines up with the bottom of the chin to the eyebrows. And also lines up horizontally, the bottom of the hair with the chin. So we can loosely mark this all in. Then just the temples where the hair is, where the hair line is. I can see that that lines roughly with the edge of the eyebrows, so we can bring that up to about here, and then again, that just curves around to meet the top of the head there. With the basic outlines in, all we need to do now is just roughly the shapes in between. I'm just going to very loosely draw the shapes that I can see. So the censer of the nose comes down ale bit closer. And then we've got the nostril coming from this side of the nose, which curves background. And then we can we've got a high light. It's a fairly dominant shape, so we can pretty much draw the high light in down the center and also the other side of the nose. Then lastly obviously the eyes, and just draw the rough eye shape. Again, the bottom of the eyelids pretty much comes up halfway between the bottom of the eyebrows and the bottom of the eye, so we can just put this up halfway and then bend it background to meet the corner. And the lower eyelid it's got a slight curve to it. We've got the tear duct as well, which is a slightly different shape. Then obviously on top of that, we've got the decreases, which I'm just loosely going to draw in just over the top. And then do the same for the other eye. Again, looking at the shape, the curves gets a lot steer on the left hand side here. I think that's essentially done. But now that I'm looking at it overall, there are just a few alterations that I would like to make to this. The first is that I think that we got the space between the e to the side of the head, just a little bit too large. I'm going to narrow that ale bit more again. And then rub out those previous lines. And then I also think that we've got the wrong shape for the eyebrow. I'm going to rub out the eyebrow. I think we just need to raise it a little bit more on the left hand side. So if we put this as the bottom of the eyebrow, and then we need a slight little bend at the corner here, and then we've got it cvs connecting onto the nose here. The other thing that I would like to change is just the placement of the mouth. So I think the mouth needs to be a little bit lower down than what we've got it. I think we need to bring the lower lip to roughly about here. So everything needs to come slightly. So I'm going to rub out those initial lines. This is the top and the bottom, we need to divide it in half. Then there's a slight little gap, so going to put a line just above it and just below for the gap between the lips, let's just continue. I think we had the width pretty much in the correct place. I can see the mouth curves downward a little bit, let's just bring the corner to about here. And the mouth curves upwards, And again, we got it curving slightly upwards on the ran side. So going to start bringing this down and then background to roughly this point. Okay. So I think those adjustments have helped quite a bit, but there is still something about this that's just not quite feeling right. I think something is still a little bit off with this drawing. So at this point, it would be a good idea to start remeasuring and comparing all of your dimensions and start comparing them to other areas that you didn't do first time. So I've just started by measuring the distance between the temple or the corner of the eye and the nose. And I can see that this on the reference photo is actually very similar to the total width of this eye, just a little bit longer. Than the eye. But we can see if we just take this measurement and put it across. Ours is actually quite a bit longer. So I think what that means is that we need to start to thin the temple or the corner of the face just a little bit more. So I'm going to put another mark about here. I think that is one of the things that's putting me off. I think we need to create more of an angle on the face. I think is more front facing than it is in the reference photo, so we're going to be narrowing this side of the face. So I'm just going to draw another line coming down, still following the rough shape that we had. But maybe more something like this. I also think that we need to create a steeper curve coming around here. And then connect that onto the top there. I'm just going to rub out that previous line that we had. Let's just see how that looks. Something else I think we can do is maybe just to lengthen the side of the head. If we just take that measurement from the corner of the eye to where the hair overlaps and just compare that to something else. It's very similar from the lower lip to the bottom of the nose. If we take that measurement and put it across, I think we need to get a bit of a longer space between the corner of the eye and the slide of the head. So if you can bring this down here. And it also means we need to bring the ear around a bit more. So I think the final adjustment that I want to make to this is the mouth. And I think we just need to increase the angle of which the mouth is facing. So I think we've got the center of the mouth just a little bit too horizontal. I think it needs to go more over to the left hand side to just shorten the left hand side of the mouth and that should make it look like it's turning more away from the viewer. So I'm just going to take the top of the mouth just a little bit further over to the left hand side, and then start curving it around a lot more steeply. Over here. That should also just make the right hand side of the mouth seem a little bit longer. Obviously, we need to do the same thing with the center of the mouth. Bring that further to further over to the left. And then the lower left, as well. Already, I think that's looking a lot better. I think I'm going to leave that here. I think it's looking pretty accurate. Of course, we can always put this into photoshop and align with the reference photo just to see how close we actually got with this method. That's essentially my preferred method for free hand drawing, and that also brings us to the end of day one. Your project for today is to download some references and I'll provide links to where you can do that. But I want you to try and use this method to accurately mark in the placement of all the features. You're not going to be doing a full drawing at this stage, so all I want you to focus on is the general outline of the face. To begin with, you may find it a little difficult, but as you continue to do more of these exercises, it will become a lot more intuitive, and you'll find that you'll be able to judge a lot of these placements just by eye without needing to measure it exactly. That's it for today. Good luck with this project, and most importantly, have fun with it, and I will see you all tomorrow for the next lessons. 5. Day 2 : Lesson 5 - Intro: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Day two. In these lessons, we're going to be continuing on from where we left off. This time, focusing more on tone and building a three D form. Now, when you look at an image, the colors you see have two main aspects of them, one of which is the hue, which is essentially what color something actually is, like red, yellow, and blue. This is fairly easy to see. However, the other aspect is the tone of the color, and this is essentially how light or dark something is. This can also be shown on a scale from black to white. Now this is sometimes less obvious because you often get distracted by all the hues. To get you used to being able to pick out the different tones, we're going to first start by breaking down the tonal structures of the portrait into more simplified shapes. Then from there, we're going to be doing a series of exercises gradually building up that tonal complexity until we have a fully rendered drawing. The materials that you're going to need for today are essentially the same as yesterday. Just a basic drawing kit will be perfectly fine. You'll want a range of pencils, including a light pencil going all the way to a fairly dark pencil. Once you've got all the materials, let's head to the first lesson. 6. Day 2 : Lesson 6 - Analysing tones: So in this first lesson, I wanted to talk about how to view the portrait to be able to see the most important tonal variations. Now, the human portrait is incredibly complex and is comprised of an infinite amount of subtle tones shifting in and out of each other. So it can seem like an impossible task to be able to view all of that. Now, the good news here is that you don't really have to and that you can break the portrait down by tone into more manageable shapes and still be able to give it that three D and realistic look. Now, I just want to stress it that it's very important to have a good photo reference to work from. The most important aspect to look for in a reference is going to be the lighting. There needs to be good definition between the shadows and the highlights. There really isn't any point trying to work with something which doesn't have that because it'll be really difficult for you to get a result, and you'll just end up causing yourself a lot of grief. Ideally, you would want to be able to take your own photos, but I know for a lot of people, that really isn't an option, so there are a few sites online where you can get good references, some paid and then some for free. I'll list a few examples in the description. One thing that I'd be very careful about is using photos from professional photographers as they often edit their photos to remove any of the harsh shadows or blemishes on the portrait, giving the photo Qian airbrush look. This really isn't something we're looking for as artists. Even if the photo looks great as a photo, it doesn't necessarily mean that it would make a good reference. That's just something to be aware of. Anyway, going back to the topic of tone, I'm going to quickly head into photoshop and see if we can use some of the tools there to get a better understanding of the tonal dynamics within a good portrait. You can see that I've already got a reference displayed here and this one has got quite a strong tonal contrast. If I put a black and white filter on this image, we can simplify these tones as much as possible by grouping them into these two categories of light and dark. Hopefully, you can see that even though it looks a little flat, it is still recognizable as a person. Now at this point, you may be wondering how this is actually helpful for painting a realistic portrait as it looks more like something banks he might do. Well, this is actually the fundamental building block for painting realism and creating a three D form. To demonstrate this, let's take a look at some paintings by the Old Masters. This here is a self portrait by Rembrandt, who is famous for his unique style of lighting. By once again making it black and white and condensing the lights and darks, we can see a clear separation between the tones and the figure still reads very well like this. Going back to the regular black and white filter, we can take the eye dropper tool, which picks out the individual colors, and by going over the area in highlight, we can see that the cursor just dances around within this mid tone area without varying too much. If we then move that over to the other side in shadow, the cursor suddenly drops quite significantly, and then once again dances around within this zone. Even without compressing the lights and darks, we have a clear distinction between the two tones. The next painting is a portrait by John Singer Sargent, and if we follow the same steps for this painting, we'll get a very similar result. There isn't much variation in tone on the side of the face and shadow, and it's all sitting very dark. But as soon as we move into the lighter side, the tone drastically shoots up to a lighter mid tone. Even though there is a lot more tonal variation within this lighter side, it doesn't go anywhere near the tonal level of the side and shadow. The takeaway from this is that for our paintings to have depth and form, we need to have a clear separation between the tones we use in our highlights and the tones we use in our shadows. Going back to this reference photo, we need to be able to identify the main tonal varieties within the image. Now we can divide these tones into two as we've done before, and this is a good starting point. What you see me doing here is just marking the edges between what I see is lighter and what I see is darker. Then by filling this in, we get a good sense of the basic lighting dynamic. However, this is also a little simplistic and we don't really have a good sense of depth. Now let's try splitting the tones into three, so we've got a shadow, a mid tone, and a highlight. I'm following the same process here, but I'm trying to see the main tonal shifts within the colors. As we're now getting more detailed, it is a little harder to distinguish the line which will separate these three tones. Now we're just starting to see a three D form emerge. But it's still very simplistic, and I think we need to break the tonal categories down even further to have something usable. I'm going to go through this process. Again, only this time, I'll be using four main tonal varieties. In the previous exercise, we just lumped everything in between the shadow and highlights into one tone. But if we look closely, we can see that there are two main shades that lie within this mid tone group, one lighter and then one darker. Splitting the mid tones up this way will also help us get a clearer distinction between the lights and darks, like in the old master paintings we looked at. This time, I'll have a shadow, a darker mid tone, a lighter mid tone, and then a highlight. As I'm blocking out these different areas of tone here, an important point to note is that I'm not explicitly focusing on the edges of the features, and in fact, many of these edges end up merging into the surrounding areas. However, even with this being the case, it doesn't affect its readability and it still ends up looking like what it's supposed to be. We don't necessarily need to have definitive outlines of what we think we know about what the features look like. It's better to look at these as more abstract shapes, which are defined by tone rather than what they actually are. Now that I've finished, you can see that we've got a very good tonal study of this reference, and it's reading very well as a three D form. This is a really good exercise to develop skills, picking out tonal values. If you've got photoshop, I would highly recommend doing exercises like this. If not, then that is perfectly fine too. In the next lesson, we're going to be taking this concept back to the sketchbook and start doing some preparational drawings before we get the paints out and move onto Canvas. 7. Day 2 : Lesson 7 - Tonal Studies: In this lesson, we are going to be doing some exercises that will hopefully get you used to picking out the tonal values within the colors of the portrait. Now this is the point where we are going to start working towards our final painting. We need to choose a reference that we'd like to work from. I've chosen to go with this image that we've already looked at because I really like the strong lighting ascot, and it's not too complicated, so I think you'll make a really good study. The only problem with this image is that the top of the head has been cut off. We are going to have to use our imagination for that part. But as it's only a small section, I don't think it'll be that difficult. Now, you're welcome to use this image as well and follow along with me. Or if you're feeling confident, feel free to use your own image. The methods that we are going to use will essentially remain the same. If you are going to use your own image, just make sure to choose one which has good lighting. That is the most important aspect. To begin with, we are going to need to become familiar with our subject. And that means we're going to be doing some preparational work at the drawing table. Okay, as you can see, I've divided my page into three equal parts, and we'll be doing a study in each of those segments. For these studies, we are going to be focusing on tone, and this is going to be essentially the same as the toternal exercise I demonstrated in photoshop during the previous lesson. The only difference here is that we will obviously be doing this on paper, so we won't have any of the fancy tools photoshop has, nor will we be able to trace directly over the reference. To get the basic proportions down, we'll be doing some free hand drawing, like what we did during day one. Now I'm going to go over the exact measurements of this reference in the next video, where we will be doing a full detailed drawing of this. But essentially, I'm following the same procedure of finding reference points within the image and then applying that to the paper. Because I've divided the page into three, these sketches are quite small, so it's a little more challenging to get the shapes right. However, these sketches will have a bigger emphasis on tonality. As long as the proportions are roughly in the correct place, I'm not going to worry too much. I once again sketch this in using a two HH to keep my marks fairly light. Now that we've finished our line drawings, let's start adding some form. For this first sketch, I'll be simplifying the tonal values as much as possible, so we'll only have two tones, one for the shadow and one for the highlights. For this, I'll be using a two B pencil, which I'll use for the shadows. Then for the highlights, I'll just leave those zones blank. To start, we need to identify where to draw the line between the light shade and the dark shade. Luckily, this image has quite definitive lighting. Anything as dark or darker than the main shadow of the skin, will be shaded as shadow, and anything lighter than that will be left as highlights. To shade this, I'm holding the pencil at the very end, engaging the side of the lead, which produces a thicker and softer mark. I don't want to press too hard on the pencil because I don't want the pencil to dig into the paper and create any grooves. I also want to get a nice even tone. Because we are grouping all the darker tones into one, we are not going to have clear separations of all the features. I'm trying to keep this in mind as I'm shading this and not get too hung up on the specific shapes of the features. Instead, I'm trying to identify the shapes caused by the clear difference in tone. Hopefully, even without the features clearly defined, it should still look recognizable and read a little as a three D form. Moving on to the second sketch, we'll follow the same process. Only this time, I'll add another shade for a mid tone, which I'll put in using the two H. This time, we need to identify where to separate three tones, and as the shadow is all very similar, I'll use this mid tone at a bit of form to the side of the face in highlight. Basically, I'm going to break the highlight down into two tones. Looking at the reference, we can see there are areas that become a little more saturated in color and this also makes them a little darker. The lighter area of the left side of the cheek is actually still quite dark when compared to the highlights on the right side. Also, we've got a bit more of a pink issue underneath the cheek bone on the right hand side, as well as in the center of the forehead, tip of the nose, and center of the chin. These areas among others are quite a bit darker than the intense highlight on the skin. These can be grouped together as a midtone. I'll start this off exactly like the one before by first shading in the main areas in shadow, so it's going to look very similar. Once we've done this, we can go to the two H and begin shading in some of the areas we've already mentioned. Anywhere within the high light side, that is a little more saturated. The neck is predominantly this darker shade, although it's slightly lighter across the very center. Now, when we switch to areas which are a different color, it becomes a bit more difficult to judge the tone in comparison to what we've got so far. Moving on to the clothing, we've got to judge the tone in comparison to the skin tones we've already put down. A good way of judging whether something is lighter or not is to see if it's closer to white, than the something else you're comparing it to. For example, I can see that the edge of the shirt on the shoulder is much closer to white than the skin, and therefore, it needs to be lighter. Even the color of the shirt in shadow is closer to white than the skin in shadow and is probably quite similar to the mid tone that we used for the skin. By this comparison, we can use the two H to shade the shadow of the shirt and leave the lighter sides blank for the highlights. We can also use this method for the hair as well. We're building up the form a bit more in this one, and in the next sketch, we'll add another tonal level to further increase the three dimensionality. We split the highlight into two previously. This time, we'll add another tone for the shadows. If we look at the reference, we've got some very dark tones, especially in the hair, but also in the shadows around the eyes, nose, and mouth. Now we're going to add a six B to really deepen those shadows. The process again remains the same. I start with the two B blocking in the main shadow areas that we've firmly established by now, and then I'll start deepening the tone in some areas by working over the top with the six B. We should be able to get considerably darker and this will also help to define the features a bit more. We've got that really dark area at the bridge of the nose, and we can also define the majority of the eye and eyebrow with this deeper tone. Obviously, any areas that are close to black like the hair, nostrils, and middle of the mouth can also be shaded in with this. The lighter two tones are going to remain the same as the previous sketch. I won't go over this again. But looking at this exercise as a whole, it is very similar to the idea of doing thumbnail sketches, which is a concept you may have already heard of. But essentially, it involves doing many miniature drawings that experiment with different compositional ideas. Now, in the case of doing head and shoulders portrait, obviously the composition is pretty straightforward. So we don't need to experiment with this. The goal of doing these studies is to become very familiar with our subject in terms of shape, proportion, and tone. When we move onto Canvas, we are more likely to get those aspects correct. Even though this process may seem a little laborious, knowing the road ahead will help save time in the long run. I'm going to leave these sketches here, even though we've simplified the tones, hopefully, we've got a pretty good understanding of the form in this reference. In the next lesson, we are going to be doing a full size drawing of this portrait going into full detail. 8. Day 2 : Lesson 8 - Full Drawing 1: In this lesson, we are going to be doing a full size drawing of this image. At this point, we should have a pretty good understanding of the tonal values as well as the general facial structure. I'm going to begin this in the same way that I did the other line drawings, and that is by first analyzing the axis that the head is on. Looking at the reference photo, I can see that it's pretty much 90 degrees. It's fairly vertical. I'm just going to draw a straight line coming all the way down. It's not really on any of angle. Then the next step, we have to determine the size of the head. So obviously, we've got the neck and the shoulders that we need to put in as well. But I don't want this to be too small, and the main thing that we want to get right is the face. So I'm going to make this a little larger, and we'll just crop the bottom off a bit. So I'm going to just put a mark coming across here for the forehead, and I'll put a mark down here for the chin. Before we start marking in the placement of the features, something else you want to make note of is the general direction that the head is facing. It looks like it's pretty face on when looking at the reference photo. But if we study this a bit closer, we can see that there is slightly less space on the left hand side than there is on the right hand side. From this vertical line coming down here, there is less space between this and the side of the head on the left than there is between this and the right side. It's going to be at a very slight angle. This is important because it means that the spacings are going to be slightly longer on the right side than they are on the left side, so we can't put them evenly space in the middle. F here, we're going to start marking in the horizontal placements of all the features, we know that if we divide the top of the forehead and the chin into thirds, we will get the placement for the eyebrows and the bottom of the nose. I'm just going to quickly measure this against the reference and see how accurate that actually is. It does line up pretty well. If we divide this up into third, The mark for the eyebrows. This is going to be the top of the eyebrows. I'm just going to put a mark underneath to indicate the bottom of the eyebrow, and I'm just going to eyeball that in. It's not going to be very thick. The top third at the hair line. This is actually going to sit a little bit further back. We do have a few of the baby hairs that overlap and obscure this. This went all the way back to the dark shadow of the hair. I'm going to put another line out there to indicate that. Looking at the mouth, I can see that the center of the mouth lies quite a bit higher up than the halfway mark between the bottom of the nose and the chin. I'm going to try and find another reference point that we can use. The bottom of the lower lip, that lies just under halfway between the bottom of the nose and the chin. If we imagine the halfway marks about here, I'm going to put it a little bit lower and place it about here. Then from here, we can divide this distance into thirds. And so this mark here, this will be for the bottom of the lower lip, and this will be for the very top of the upper lip, so we'll have to divide this measurement up to get the gap or the parting between the upper and lower lip. Now, for the eyes, I've just measured from the bottom of the chin to the upper lip. Then if we take that measurement again and just double that, that will give us roughly where the corners of the eyes need to be. I'm going to just put a mark across here. And then that is essentially all of our horizontal measurements. At this point, I want to determine how wide the face actually is in total. I'm going to take the measurement from the side of the face in line with the eye and measure that to the axis line coming down the center through the nose. I can see that that is very similar to the distance between the chin and the bottom of the nose. If we take this and then Measure that across the line for the eyes. We can put a mark about here. This is the widest point on the left side. Now, to get the other side, I'm going to take the total distance from this left side that we've just marked in all the way to where the ear joints onto the head on the other side. That measurement is pretty similar to the upper lip to the hair line. We can take that and then put that across. And so we should have a larger distance on the right side than on the left side. Okay, with this, we should be able to put in the width of the features. Once again, I'm going to start with the eyes, and I'm going to measure the distance between this side of the head to the very corner of the eye. I can see that that is very similar to the upper lip to the nose. So just taking that measurement and putting across here. This will be roughly the corner of the eyes, and I'm going to do the same thing, just measure the total distance from I to i, and it's very similar to the chin to the eye line that we've already established, so we can take this and put this across. And that is the total distance. Then all we need to do is divide this up into thirds. Now, the widest part of the nose, if we just drop a line down from the corner of the eye, it's pretty similar. I'm just going to put a mark here and it's a little bit in from this corner, so we can put a mark in here as well. Now for the mouth, again, that goes a little bit further over than the side of the nose. I'm going to just drop a mark about here, and same again for on the left side, I'm going to just drop a mark about here. Now, the jaw bone on the left hand side is a little bit lower down than the corner of the mouth, and it seems to be in line with this left corner of the eye. I'm going to just drop a mark about here and then we need to curve around to meet the chin and then curve up to connect to this side. This is the widest points, then it comes back in and then goes straight up. Now, on the right side, again, it's just a little bit lower down than the corner of the mouth here, not much, and it also doesn't curve in quite as much on this side either. It comes down straight. And this side is obscured by the hair a little bit, as well. So I'm not gonna worry too much about that. We'll just curve this round over the top. Okay. And that is essentially the features of the head. The only thing left to put in is the ears. So the ears are just a little bit higher up than the nose. I'm just going to Again, use my own judgment to put this in. It doesn't go out that far. Something like this. Same again on the other side, even though you can see even less of this. The neck comes pretty much straight down from the corner, and again, it is at a slight angle, so I'm just going to curve this round at the bottom. Something like this. Then it doesn't go very far down before we hit the shoulder. From the chin to the top of the lower lip, that is the distance that we go before the shoulder means the neck here. F here, we can pretty much start marking in the general shape of all the features. I'm going to start with the eyebrows and let's just roughly marking the placement for these. Again, eyebrows generally curve upwards to begin with, and then at the side of the sku going temple, they curve back down. Something like this. On the other side, I can see it's actually slightly raised more so than the other one. I'm going to take this up just a little more curve it round. It does go a little bit further past the corner of the eye. I just take that all the way around here. Then on the other side, just copy the same thing. So then moving on to the eyes and going to start by just roughly mapping in the general shape. So the crease for the eyelid at the very top is pretty much halfway between the lower eyelid and the top of the eyebrow. So I'm going to put a mark roughly here and then curve that round in roughly the right shape. The actual eye itself isn't that wide. So coming in from the very corner comes up and then levels out quite a bit and then gradually slopes down to the other corner, a little bit higher up though. And then we've got a curve curve, the lower eyelid. I curves a bit down as well. And so same again on the other side, decrease for the eyelid at the top. Curve it down. It's quite a steep angle at this right side, goes up a little bit and then curves background. For the shape of the nose, we can see quite a bit of the underside of the nose from this main shadow. So again, I'm going to just follow the rough outline. I'm going to put in the nostrils. Then for the shape of the mouth, I'm going to start by just drawing in the middle line first. I can see it comes down just ever so slightly on the left hand side with a slight curving motion. Then we've got a bit of an M shape at the very top. Again, it comes down quite a bit, a little bit higher up and then it gets overlapped by the lower lip, curving in the other direction. She doesn't really have a smile. I'm going to just get rid of that slight curve at the other end. Now, the bottom lip is pretty straight actually, so I'm just going to pretty much draw a straight line. It does curve ever so slightly up on the on the left, something like this. Then of course, the upper lip, we've got the little bridge area at the very center. Then we've got a curve down to meet the other side. It's a very slight curve, not too much at all. The same again on the other side except slightly curves the other way, very slightly. Again, the lower lip is a little more simple. Curves down and then pretty much a straight line, and it gets lost in the shadows a bit on the right side. May just make it a little wider on this side. And in fact, I may just make the mouth a bit wider in general. It's not looking quite right at the moment. Moving back down to the throat area. We I've drawn a rough line for the basic outline of the neck. I'm just going to put in a bit more definition to some of the main shapes. I'm going to do this p m b I for the most part. We've got that slight little highlight coming from the neck and then just got that space in between the two collar bones. And that larger shadow that comes up, and then and then we've got that slight separation at the very center here that joins on about this area. The total distance between the left shoulder to the right shoulder, if I just measure across, It's pretty similar to the chin to the very top of the hair line, so we can take that measurement across. This is about as wide as it goes. If we curve that round, and it does go just a little bit lower than this side. I'm going to bring it down here. And in the sleeve as it comes around, if I draw a line coming straight down, in line with the corner of the eye here. Again, it curves up slightly to begin with and then comes back around and straight down. From here, we can work out where the collarbone needs to be. We've got this line coming down here and then the collarbone. It is again at a slight angle going up, and it probably joins on about this point. So I'm just going to draw a line going across. And then we've got that slight shadow in the shoulder here. The most part, that is the basic proportions down and now we can begin working on adding some detail and shading. Now that we've got our basic outline in, let's begin to put in some of the shading. I'd like to begin this by starting off quite light and then gradually deepening my tones. I'm going to begin using the two H pencil and basically just follow the same process that we did for the smaller sketches that we did previously. Just looking at the basic outline shape of the main shadows, I'm going to do a very light layer with this pencil. So I'm just very roughly going over all of the edges. Using the side of the pencil, the edges still show this very thin layer that we're putting down. I'm not pressing too hard on the pencil, so all the lines that we've put down show through this area. But just any which is slightly, we can just shade over that whole area. Okay, so with those basic tones down, I'm now going to deepen some of the stronger shadows with the two B. So this area on the left hand side of the face, I'm just going to lightly go over this. Again, still using the side of the pencil mainly, and I'm not pressing too hard at all. The lightly going over. I deepen the tone quite significantly. And we can start paying a bit of attention to the more subtle variations within this zone. So if ary, it is just a little bit darker, you can press just a little harder. You don't want to go too much, you don't want to make any sort of groove into the paper. But this main shadow can be darkened quite significantly. So especially areas like the very corner of the nose here, this bridge, this gets quite considerably darker than the rest of it, so we can kind of work on that area a bit more, really try and deepen that tone. And then in the smaller creases within the skin as well, so just at the corner of the nose, we've got quite a strong shadow, so we can go over this area a bit more. And while we're working here, we may as well do the same thing for the creases of the eyelid and generally start to define the features a bit more. So putting a darker tone for the eyelashes coming around and then in this corner, it's solid dark color. There isn't much detail in here at all. And to avoid it looking like a solid lines make it look a little bit more three D. I'm just going to shade around it just to get a small little transition coming from this darker line into some of the light colors, so it doesn't look quite so harsh. It's got a very soft blend going between the tones. Now for the lower eyelid it gets a little bit more complicated. Obviously, we've got the whites of the eye. But if we look at it, the whites of the eye on the left hand corner. It's actually a little bit darker than the top of the eyelid. So I'm going to leave a slight little gap and then start shading in this zone. It's going to be pretty light. Shading in that corner there. And then we can reinforce like that that lighter zone. That kind of faces upward and catches a bit of the light. It gets a little narrower on the other side. And then I'm going to start drawing in the pupils. Then obviously, the eyelash that gets a little bit darker as well so we can deepen this color. We've kind of left a little channel here that we can follow around. It gets thicker further over we go. A, For the lips, these actually sit a little bit darker than the skin tones. Once again, we can deepen this color a little bit, it's going to be pretty similar. Then we also really want to define where the lips have that slight parting. Because that's going to be pretty close to black. Now, also the teeth, even though the teeth we know are generally a whitish color, because they're sitting in so much shadow, they're not going to be very visible and still going to be quite dark. Going to shade that p dark there. Now for the lower lip, we've got that slight deeper tone as it curves around to the center of the mouth. Also on the bottom, it is slightly darker as well. But in the middle it's going to be catching just a little bit more light. Of course, we've got that stronger highlight across the very center. On the left side, we can deepen the tone quite a bit, that. So we do want to get a slight transition. We know that this area is lighter on the whole, but it's still more of a mid tone. We want to get that soft transition going from the deeper shadow to this side. So I'm going to just shade in the edges very lightly to try and get that transition going. And I think we may have lost some of the deeper tones so we can just work over this area again, just cross that to try and bring back that deeper tone. Then try and blend it across to try and get that rounded form. So moving on to the other side. Again, we can do the same thing. This is more of a midtone. So we're just going to be pressing very lightly here. And just shading in this zone. Again, we've got this area under the cheek bone, which is a little more saturated and darker. Then as the cheb rounds out from the eye socket. This is the part which catches the light. We're going to be leaving this area pretty light. Working at the side of the head here. Then once again, we've got that really bright highlight just across the forehead above this eyebrow. Let's work a little more on the right eye. Once again, we're going to be deepening the tone for the creases, just by working over these lines. And then of course, the eyelashes are pretty dark and the curve upwards a little bit at the end, become a bit thicker so we can put those in. Same thing again for this lower eyelid. We've got that small little highlight just sitting across the center or the very top of the lower eyelid. When we put the pupil down, I'm not going to bring it down all the way, I'm going to stop it short and just leave a tiny little gap for that highlight. Maybe this I could do it being a little bit wider. Then once again, to start rounding out the form of these creases, which is going to shade around them, try and blend it across into some of those lighter tones. Moving on to the neck. Again, we can do pretty much the same thing. There isn't much separation going on between the shadow part of the neck and then the bottom of the chin. We're not going to worry too much about the outline there. I'm just going to deepen some of this tone. As we start to move down, we go into this light portion, which just catches a bit of light, the tendon coming up from the th. On the one side, we do have a slight shadow. GS coming out here. So we're going to be shading this in and then hopefully we can start rounding that out by transitioning to that lighter tone. So on the other side, we want the shadow to be quite dark on the whole. And then want to curve curve around here. And this tone remains for the main section of shadow across the throat. It's going to be something like this. Now, on the other side, again, we've got a slight deeper shadow, so I'm going to press a little bit harder to really get that definition going. Then of course, the little gaps where the shirt doesn't sit flat. Again to skin, those are going to be really dark. So I'm going to start shading in those first. But most of this is in quite heavy shadow, so can really start deepening that tone there. Now, as we move towards the collarbone, again, it's not going to be such a harsh line and we want to get some sort of transition going between here. So I'm going to start by shading in the darker side on the bottom. And then we need to start rounding that to the lighter side across the top. Now, just to mark the edge. I'm going to just deepen the shadow slightly on the other side of the collarbone. Then we want to start rounding out these shadows towards this main highlight, which is pretty close to white, so very softly transitioning towards this. Again, we want to get that really deep tone in this area here. But again, we want to lose that harsh line. We want to round out that form, just a little bit, get the transition going. Okay. So at this point, we've only used two pencils, the two H, and the two B. But now we want to start really deepening some of these tones, getting some strong tonal contrast in here. So we're going to be switching to the six B, and we're only going to be using this in the darkest of areas. So I'm going to start with the eyes, and let's start by putting in the eyelashes, just on the bottom of the eyelid here. And it should be easy to deepen these tones. Shouldn't have to press very hard at all. And I'm also going to kind of deepen the crease of the eyelid as it comes around. Also on the bridge of the nose here, we can deepen this quite significantly, and also coming down the center of the nose. Got quite a strong shadow coming across here. But again, we want a soft transition into that light tone. Go back to the, let's just start to blend this out a bit, blend out that dark tone. And we can also deepen the eyebrows with this as well. So other obvious areas to darken are the nostrils, also done the pupil and the iris. So moving on, we're going to be darkening also the center of the mouth in that gap. And also in the kind of the crease between the upper and lower lip. That can also be darkened quite significantly. Also, other areas like the center of the cheek. This gets a bit of a darker tone coming in here. It's also going to help round out the form just a bit more. As we come up, get a slight little blend going and coming down to the j, we can darken this tone just a bit. A. Now we're really starting to build up some of the form of this zone. It's looking pretty good right now. Let's just go ahead and continue onto the other eye. We're going to be deepening that eyelash. And also the crease of the top eyelid. Then we can use the two B once again to just try and blend that out to round out that shape. Moving on to the neck and shoulders, we're going to start by darkening the darkest areas which are just the gaps between the skin and the shirt, it just leaves or parts away. Can we really go ahead and deepen those areas. Then for the rest of it, I'm just going to start by lightly going over and deepening some of these shadows. Sit in the center of the throat here. This is probably the darkest area. So coming up, we can darken this tone. I think I'm going to move on to the clothing and there isn't actually definition here, a few lines here and there to indicate thee. The main thing that we've got on the left hand side is just the fold that comes up this corner edge. As it curls around here, there's just a slight little crease on the other side which we can put in. And a few very subtle tones indicating some of those creases. But that is pretty much it. It is majortly this kind of dark and midtone shade. I'm just going to streak in a few lines here and there, and that's pretty much it. For the other side, again, this top little rim of the shirt is pretty light as well as this area on the right hand side. As it curves upwards here though, this is going to be more of a darker mid tone coming up. So I'm going to shade this area in. Put a few lines to indicate some of the creases. Once again, that's pretty much it. That's all we need to do there. Then moving on to the hair. This gets a little bit more complicated. So the hair is considerably darker, especially on the left side. It's mostly in shadow, and it does blend in quite a lot to the background. But obviously, our background is white here, so we're not going to be able to get that subtle blend into the background that we would otherwise. But I'm just going to begin with this six B and start really deep in the tone. You want to get a pretty dark tone here as it comes down. And we want to get a clear separation between the side of the head as it comes up. So over here, I'm just marking in the parting of the hair it's a little bit over to the left side. And then just before it, we can see a few of those darker shadows that are just coming round here. I'm going to draw those in. Maybe darken them in a few places as well just to build up some of that texture. Then let's get the two B. Start rounding that out. We're going to be following the direction that the hair will be falling in. Just following this curving motion. I'm only going to be putting in the basic outline shape of what I think the hair is. Again, it won't look this dominant in the actual painting because it's going to emerge in with the background, but I'm just going to put in the rough shape here that curves out. Of course, the grouping of the hair here, I'm just going to be putting in a darker areas. On the other side, we've got those really dark shadows here. I'm going to put those in first with the six B for the hair, just putting in that grouping. Coming down here and then it gets a little bit darker at the other end over here. I can also put in a few of the the sides of the hair coming down here. This is also a darker color. The curve around. So most of this is also a midtone, so I'm going to be shading in the two. A few areas, I'm going to leave blank for some of the intense highlights that we can see. Now that we've pretty much finished shading everything in. Looking at this portrait as a whole, there's still something that doesn't seem quite right to me. Just from looking at it as a whole, I think generally the head is a little bit too wide. I think the model has got a narrower face. I think we'll definitely need to do something about that. Also, I think we've probably made the left eye just a bit too big. I think it could do with being a little bit sh as well. But before we make any changes, we want to first cross reference some of our dimensions and measurements against the reference photo. So I think the first thing that I'm going to do is narrow the side of the head next to the eye here on the left hand side. I've just measured the edges from this corner of the side of the head to the nose where it turns into highlights. And I've just compared that to the chin to the top of the upper lip, and according to the reference photo, they should be pretty similar in length. However, according to mine, the distance between these two points is quite a bit larger than the chin to the upper lip. I'm I'm going to cut back in against the side of the head over here. I'm just using the six p to further darken this tone to get just narrow that edge. And then I'm going to just use the rubber to erase the small amount of the side of the head here. Okay, so I think that's looking much better. So now I'm just going to work on the eye a little bit more. So I think the eye can do with being a little bit smaller. I think we've got it quite a bit longer than this eye on the right hand side. So I'm going to just cut the eyelid back a little bit. I'm going to make it a little bit narrower and also just lift it up a little bit more as well. A few other adjustments I think we can make is to first narrow the head on the righthand side. I think we've got slightly the wrong shape here. So I'm just going to draw a rough outline here. To reshape that. Cut back in at the bottom here. And then I also think we can narrow the neck on their left hand side. I'm just going to cut back in with the rubber very slightly. And already, I think it's looking a lot better. One of the last changes that I think I would like to make to this is that I think we've got the right eye just a little bit too far over to the right. I think the gap between the two eyes is just slightly too big. I want to bring this whole eye over just a bit more. I'm going to rub out those darker lines that we've put in. Mark a bit further over. If we imagine this is the corner, I think most other things we had right. It was the right shape and actual size itself. But I think just do it being over to the left a bit more. I'm going to wrap this drawing up here. It's still pretty rough, it's not something our display in a frame or anything. It's just my personal use. But doing this has helped me come to understand the workings of this portrait better, and hopefully the proportions have been embedded in my memory to make this process a intuitive, and I do feel confident now to give this a go on Canvas. So as I mentioned earlier, today is when we're going to start to work towards our final piece. Your project for today is the first choose the portrait reference that you would like to work from. Again, you can use the same one that I've been using if you would like to follow along, and I'll provide links to that and also some other reference photos as well. If you would like to do something a little bit different. Once you've chosen your reference, I would encourage you to give some of those tonal studies that I demonstrated ago. You'll want to be able to easily identify the different tones within a colored reference. Try to first simplify them down as much as possible, just into two categories of light and dark. Then you can start to gradually increase the tonal complexity by adding more tones to your studies. I find this is an excellent way to train your eye to see the dominant tonal shifts. Also, when you're doing this, try not to over emphasize the edges of the key features with dominant lines, and rather let the different tones sitting against each other naturally create those separations. Lastly, once you've completed those tonal studies, I want you to have a go at doing a full drawing of this portray. This will be a good way to practice our free hand drawing skills that we focused on in day one, along with applying our knowledge of the tonal dynamic of this portray. It's important to keep in mind that this doesn't have to be a fully rendered drawing. It's okay if it's a little messy, a little rough. This is just for our personal use to help us when it comes to getting the paints out. Good luck with this project, and I'll see you all tomorrow for the next module. 9. Day 3: Lesson 9 - Intro: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Day three. In these lessons, we are going to be continuing on with the same theme as yesterday, which was getting a better understanding of the tone in our composition. Only this time, we're going to start to work with oil paints. A technique that I would like to introduce you to at this point is something called a grasa, and this is what we are going to be creating during these lessons. I'm going to go over what this is in a bit more detail during the next lessons. But essentially, a grasa is an underpainting, usually done in gray scale or with a very neutral color. Is job is to essentially map out the composition and establish the basic tonal values first before moving onto some color. Now at this point, you may be wondering why this step is even necessary, as we've already done a pretty detailed drawing of this, getting to know all the tones. Well, the main reason is that it's not actually so simple to go straight from a pencil drawing all the way to a full colored painting, and we need to be able to translate each step of our drawing into a painting solution and agresi is the perfect stepping stone to be able to do just that. So I'll just quickly go over the materials we'll be using here for our painting service, I'll be using a 16 by 14 inch canvas board, which I've pre primed with a burnt umber wash. If you're unsure of how I prime this or why, then make sure you check out my tutorial on toning and gridding, which you can find in the beginners basics course. Now, because we are doing a risa, we won't be using many colors here. In fact, I've only got three, and those are titanium white, burnt umber, and ivory black. I'll also be using a painting medium called liquid original, which helps to thin the paint and make it dry a little bit faster. As brushes, we'll be using a quarter inch ivory dagger, a size two ivory flat, size two classic long flat, and then a size zero ivory rigger. Once you've got all that, let's head to the next video. 10. Day 3: Lesson 10 - Grisaille in History: Grazie is a very old technique and has been used by many master artists in the past. In this essen, I thought it'd be good to show you some of these examples to give you more perspective on what it is and how it is normally used. This picture here is a painting by an Vanick, and it's a fantastic example of how a grazie is used to achieve a sense of light and space. We have a very obvious light source coming from the top right, which moves across the form before falling into some really nice and deep shadows. Notice how the tone shifts in the folds as the light moves around the figure, giving the figure a real sense of space within this frame. This painting was definitely made to provide a convincing effect of three dimensionality, and the figures look very sculptural, almost like a statue would. The absence of colors here allows the artist to focus on the design and texture of this painting. For example, how the complex folds and movement of the drapery leads the eye across the figure, and the beautiful, intricate details and textures you can find in the wings and the platform the figures are standing on. All these things makes this painting look very convincing and almost makes you forget that there is a very limited use of color here. This next painting is by an artist called Andrea Del Sato, and you can immediately see that this painting doesn't convey depth to the degree that Van Iike did. However, this is a good example of a si being used more to map out the composition and set the scene. How the figures and landscapes are positioned to provide a focal point for the painting. Most of the figures are looking towards the baptism of the figure in the center, which naturally draws your eye to that area. Now, even though a grazie is considered neutral, we do have very subtle hints of cooler tones contrasted with warmer tones. If we look closely, we can see that some of the tones have a slight bluish cast and this creates separations between certain elements. For example, we can see that the contrast between these two tones draws a line to separate the land from the water, indicating the edge of the stream. We can also see this bluer tone on the foreground rocks, and this could be to indicate that the rocks are a little wet. Now, although we have a temperature dynamic going on in this grazie, it is not an essential component to what a grizi is supposed to achieve. There are a couple of examples of how a grazie was used in the past. Now, I also briefly want to talk about the specific techniques and concepts I'd like to express during this stage of the painting process. As I mentioned before, the grazie is the stepping stone between our drawing and our painting, and I'd like to have a clear structure for this part. I'd like to split the sie into two main sections, which will span over two days, allowing the paint to dry between layers. The objective of the first day is to establish the initial foundation of depth and form within the image. The paint that will be applying will relatively thin, allowing the paint to dry pretty quickly. Because of this, the paint layer will also be slightly transparent as it will be affected by the neutral midtone we have as a background. Because of this, we won't be able to get to the extreme ranges of tonal values within this first layer. In the second layer, we're first going to be identifying and correcting any mistakes that you made with the proportions. Even though we've gone through this many times before, it's still very easy to make a mistake and overlook something. With fresh eyes, it should be a lot easier to analyze and then make those changes. In this lay, we're also going to be further expanding the tonal values, creating a lot more contrast, which is going to continue to build up the three D form of the subjects. Basically, at the end of this layer, we want the grizie to be able to stand on its own as a finished painting, even though we plan to paint over it with color. Hopefully by now you have a pretty good understanding of what a grizie is and how it's supposed to help you in the painting process. In the next sesson, we are going to be going over how to prepare your palette to create a good tonal value range of different color mixtures. 11. Day 3: Lesson 11 - Palette Preparation: So I've got three colors on the palette which are titanium white, burn timber, and ivory black. I wanted to use burn timber in this grazie I wanted to have a slightly warmer temperature, just using ivory black and titanium white. It provides a very bluish gray which won't translate very well for the skin tones that I once put over the top of this. I find that burn timber works pretty well. What we're going to be doing here is using what we call a closed palette. Basically, that means that we're going to pre mix all of our values before we actually begin painting. So we're going to want quite a few mixtures going from our darkest value all the way up to our lightest value. Our darkest value, we want to be somewhere close to black and then obviously our lightest value has got to be somewhere close to white. So I'm going to mix about six to eight mixtures. We don't really want more than that. Now, to mix my colors, I like to use a palette knife, but you can use a brush as well. It's just easier to pick up the mixture with the knife. So I'm going to start by mixing our darkest values first. We're going to take some ivory black. I'm just going to put that in the center here and then mix that with burn timber. So about 50 50 ratio of burned timber and ivory black. We just mix that all very well. I'm going to pick up that mixture and just put it to the side here, and then we're going to get slightly lighter. I'm going to take some burn tumber again. Not as much. So probably about a ratio of one to two, two parts burned tumber, one part ivory black. Now for the next mixture, we want to get lighter still. I think what we're going to need to do here is to start adding some titanium white in there as well. We're going to take some burned tumber. I'm going to mix in a small amount of ivory black, not much, about three to one there, and then also going to add just a small amount of titanium white. Again, not much. The ratio is probably something like three parts burned tumber, one part ivory black, and one part titanium whites. That may have been just a little bit too much titanium white here. I think the jump between this and this is a bit too much. I'm going to just add a small amount more burn timber and ivory back just to try and bring this bag pound. Now for the next mixtures, we're going to be pretty much just adding more and more titanium whites and less ivory black. This is about two parts burnt umber to one part, titanium white, and it's just got a tiny amount of ivory black in there, not at all. But I do think it's a bit light. So now, we're just going to do the same thing as adding more and more titanium white to the mixture. I'm going to completely leave ivory black out of the mixtures now. Chessie burn timber and titanium white. So we've got about eight different shades here, which should be good to get all the tonal values down for this grizzi. Of course, we do have a bit of a space in the middle, which means we can revert back to using more of an open palette, if we want to make a slight adjustment on the palette. We can just add a bit more of these base colors to any of these pre mixtures just to get that extra variety. Okay, so I'm also going to add just a small amount of liquid original to the palte, which is going to help thin the paint and make it easier to draw thinner lines, which will be good for just marking the initial sketch to mark in the general locations. 12. Day 3: Lesson 12 - Grisaille Part 1: Okay, the first thing that we need to do is to mark in the general placements of the portrait. So the first thing we need to do is to mark in the general placements of the portrait. And this means that we need to decide how big we want our portrait to be on the Canvas. So a general guideline to follow is that you want the eyeline of your portrait, which is going to be pretty much the main focal point to be around the two thirds mark from the bottom to the top. So somewhere about here, you're going to want your eyeline. I'm going to be using the dagger brush to first mark in these placements, Let's just use this darker color here. I'm just going to put this into the middle of the palette, add a bit of liquid to this, and it should just help the paint flow a bit more. What I'm going to do is first, if we imagine the eye line to be about the two thirds, I'm going to mark in the top of the forehead to be about here. I'm just going to put a rough mark here. And then we'll have the bottom of the chin about here. So now from here, we can pretty much follow the same method for marking the rest of the features. So we should be pretty familiar with this by now. I'm not going to go over this again. I'll probably just time lapse through this part. But I'm using the dagger brush this produces a fairly thin mark, and I just prefer it for marking in the general sketch. Once we've done our initial sketch, as you can see, we've got a fairly messy one here, but I think most of the proportions are in the correct place. Now we can start by blocking in the main tonal values. This is going to be very similar to the way that we did it in our drawings. We're going to start off by first in the main shadow areas. One thing that I want to go over before we actually begin is the idea of working thick, over thin. So basically what this means is that we want to start our painting by applying very thin layers of paint because this just makes it a lot easier to layer over the top of. You want to be very conscious about the thickness of paint that you put down. You don't want to go too thick, too early on, and I'll be very difficult to make adjustments during that painting session. The brush I'm going to use to begin this is the size two classic long flat, and this brush is a little bit stiffer than the synthetics. It should be a little bit easier to spread the paint around and just spread it out really thin. We don't want to go too dark too early on. I'm going to take one of these mid tones to begin with and just go into this one. We can just put that in the middle here. I'm going to add just a small amount of liquid to once again help the paint flow, and then I'm going to use this to just block in the main shadows on the skin. So we're not going to be thinking about detail too much at this stage. These are just the initial locks of color we want to put down to just establish the main form. Now that we've blocked in the main shadows of the side of the face. What I'm going to do now is just to add a bit of those tonal varieties within this zone. I'm going to begin with this main triangular area, which is in a little bit more light. What I'm going to do here is just shift a. Maybe use this one. And then start blocking this should be a little bit lighter. Something that we also want to be looking at here is the edge separating these two tones. The shadow caused by the nose. This creates quite a harsh line separating these two tones. There's not going to be much blending going on between these. However, on the other side, this starts to get a little bit more rounded following the planes of the face. We can start to diffuse this edge over a little bit into those darker shadows. I think that is a little bit too dark. I'm going to get a little lighter here, and let's just try and bring that back. You can also see if we had a slight lighter tone just in this little area underneath the eyebrows. I'm going to block that in there. Looking around the eye area, I want to start to deepen some of these darker tones. So we're going to go a little bit darker. E. And just drop the tonal level here. We also want to get a bit more detailed around the eye. So we can do this by just adding in those darker shadows where we've got the eye. We can add all the detail to this zone a bit later on. But for now, let's just get in that dark tone just to put in the rough outline shape. And I will also start to draw in the eyebrow as well. Obviously, the larger shapes like the hair. This is pretty much getting very close to black. So we can just block this all in with this dark color. And also help shape the side of the head as well. I'm going to start to build up some of those lighter values. I'm going to switch to using the ivory dagger. This is a synthetic brush, a little bit softer, we should be able to make the colors sit quite a bit lighter over the top here. I'm just going to go ahead and brush this over. The way that this brush is angled makes it really easy to get that differentiation in the type of edge that we want, whether we want a straight harsh line or more blend. This brush makes it easy to be able to get those different varieties. Blending out the edges there. Snow let's transition more into the lighter side of the head. We're going to be continuing with these lighter colors to begin with. Just use a little bit of liquid to help the paint flow. I'm going to first start blocking in the largest areas. That may have been just a little bit too light. So I'm going to just go down a shade. We've got that slight darker tone just coming the side of the head here, and we've got to leave room for that really light color. That little sheen across the head. This is going to be the lightest value, lightest tone, and then as we start to move away for it should get der and. The lighter zones we can block in with this light highlight color. We can see that we've got a little bit of this lighter tone just coming round the cheek here. Is it starts to round down and away from it. Transitions into some of those darker colors. So we need some of that transitional color just occurring between the shadow of the nose and on that lighter side as well. So just going to go ahead with this more of a midtone. Just put a thin streak going across here. We want to subtly blend, blend that across. So moving on to the nose again, at the very tip, it's more of this mid tone color that we can put in here, so we're just going to block this whole area in. So like this. Now we need to transition that into more of a shadow as we start to move to the underside of the nose. We're going to be going back to some of these darker mixtures. Now we don't want it to be too dark here. We look at the reference. This area is a little bit lighter than the shadow on the side of the face next to it. We don't want to get too dark here because it still needs to show up lighter. And then, likewise, on the other side, this area is more in highlight. So we're just going to get slightly darker than this, but no near as dark as we have on the shadow side. Now getting into some really dark colors. We can go ahead and start marking in where the nostles are. So not all the nostels are completely dark. We do have areas of light within them. Just thinking about where the light source is coming from is coming from the top right down and across. That leaves just a tiny space for some lighter colors to come th. Of course, we've got the main highlights coming down the center of the nose, and also a little bit just on the right hand side at the base, but in the middle. It's very subtle, but it's just slightly darker. So going to go to our second lighter toe, put in a little strip to come down. Arch that across here and then we can go into our lightest color and just put in that really bright highlight across the center. Then also in this little channel left at the base. And then towards the eye. We've got that deeper shadow, which we're just going to block in. And blend up into some of those lightestones. But Okay. So with the main shapes blocked in. Now what I want to do is to start to work in a bit more detail around the features. So to do this, I'm going to use a slightly smaller brush. This is a size two ivory flat had brush. It's a very new one, and it will help us get some nice chiseled edges. So to start to define these features, what I'm going to do is to first go into some of this darker tone. Just load up the brush here, and then I want to begin by marking in the bottom of the eyelid for this left hand eye. So just looking at the shape of it in the reference photo starts curving down a bit more. Then to mark in the eyelet above it, which is going to pretty much tap a line coming across. Now, it does fall into shadow as we move further over to the right. So we can block it in like this. Then of course, we do have some of those lighter highlight colors. Well, not really highlights, but more mid tones. I'm just going to be putting in maybe some of this. We can put that across the center here to act as that lighter tone. Coming across. Then it needs to diffuse into some of those darker tones. Same with the highlight coming across the bottom of the eyelid, a little bit brighter on the left hand side, and then gets lost into more of the deeper tones on the right. Hey. In the very corner of the eyelid, as it sits, as it goes into the tear duct is even darker than the skin tone surrounding it. We can go into our darkest tone and just mark this one in like this. It should sit a little bit darker. Now, for the whites of the eye, obviously, it's going to be pretty light, but it's not going to be our brightest tone. In fact, towards the corner, it actually gets dark you can go into some of these darker mid tones to put this in. I'm going to do pretty much the exact same thing for the other eye. So I'm first going to begin by marking in the bottom of the top eyelid. Looking at what kind of shape it is. Now, because this is in more of the highlight side, the top of the eyelid actually is in quite a lot of highlights, so we can go into some of these lighter tones and start putting this in just making a nice chi e to get that case in there. And we can put one above it as well. And then I may just go into our brighter highlight, bring that out a little bit more. Okay. So moving on to the mouth, there isn't much tonal difference between the lips and the skin tone in shadow. So we're not going to be going too dark for this, but we're going to take maybe some of this mid tone color and let's just try and block in the main shape. So we're going to be using the chiseled edge of this brush to try and in that edge. And same for the other side we're going to be putting in that darker side in first. Lange that darker shade just extending pretty much all the way over the bottom lip. So getting a little bit lighter, it still should be quite a bit darker than the lightest part of the skin tone. Let's just try and block in that edge. No, no, no, no. And we can also put this in the center of the lower lip as well. Now, the lips are quite uneven, so we don't need to worry about blending this area too much. C just let that sit against the other color. Then just to mark in the outline of the center of the mouth, go into this pretty dark tone here. And then the teeth, obviously, they're not anywhere near white. They're a little bit lighter than than the lips, but still dark. I'm just going to use more of a mid tone to put that in. Just to put in some of the highlights on the lips, we can go ahead some of those light color, dot in a few sharp marks to indicate some of those light tones. Then we can just go ahead and start darkening some of the tones in shadow. So especially in areas under the lip, I think we can get a little bit darker here. So now that we've blocked in the main facial features. A few changes we need to make is that I think we need to just shift everything over to the left a bit more. What I mean by this is the highlights that we've got down and the center of the nose just a bit too far to the right. I'm going to start these tones over a. Maybe that was a bit light. Start pushing all of this just a bit further over to the right hand side. This is what I mean by starting off using thinner paint because now that we're starting to work over the top of all these colors, it's a lot easier to layer the sofa without it blending too and the colors still re the right value. So following along with this idea, I'm going to move the left eye further over a bit more. Okay. So moving on to the hair, most of this is pretty dark. It's going to be a lot darker than the skin tones that we've currently got down. I'm going to begin by first marking in the darkest areas. So I'm going to be going in some of these darker tones first. And we can just begin putting this into making the edges. Again, just to redefine those edges for the side of the face. A lot of these hairs overlapping the ear are very thin, just wispy hairs, so I'm not going to worry about defining these too much because we haven't actually put in the ear yet. That is some of the darker tones on the other side. Again, we need to firm up this edge a bit more, I think with this darker tone. I may just cut back in ever so slightly against the skin tone, and I think it got a little too wide over on this side. Not too, just a tiny amount. And then a few other areas, the darkest colors that we can see, just going to mark those in. Now, of course, for the very top of the head, this actually isn't in the reference bote, so we're using our imagination here. We just got to imagine where the light sources. The light source is coming from the top right, go to imagine the lighting it's going to have. As the parting curves, on the left hand side of this, it's going to be in a bit more shadow, and on the right side, it's going to be a highlight. So I'm just going to follow the direction that the hair's going in, block this all in. And the parting again, is going to be pretty dark in here. Then as the hair curves around again on the other side. We can see the beginnings of it, but there's just a small little highlight on this side so we're going to get a bit of a light tone here. Then as it curves around and away. Again, we fall back into that dark shadow. I'm just using the here to get some fairly thin lines to indicate a streaky texture. Then we've got that slightly darker mid tone at the very top here where the baby hairs just come out from the forehead. I'm going to just put those in. Going to cast a little shadow on the forehead here, which is what we're putting in now. Go to make a. I'm pretty happy with how the head is looking. I'm going to move on to the head and shoulders. I'm going to begin this in pretty much the same way that we did the head, and that is just blocking the main shadows. I don't want to go too dark here, using more of a midtone, and we can just start by blocking this side in. We do have a very slight variation in the chest, so gets a little bit lighter in the center here. So we can just go one step up in the tonal values, and then just blend that into these dark colors down the center and also underneath the collarbone. Then we can do the same thing on the other side as well. Got a bit of a lighter tone around here. That is the majority of the darker colors in. Now let's go into some of the lighter mid tones. So getting a little bit lighter. We can start to put in some of the stronger colors. At the collarbone, we can start by putting this in. This color is actually quite light, so we're going to be reserving this in the middle. And then let's got a step down for kind of more of a transitional sort of color. Now we've got some of those really dark shadows just sitting on the underside where the clothing lifts up from the skin, deepen the tone in this area. We've got that pretty much coming all the way down. It's a little thicker in a couple of parts, but we do have it pejoratively all along the edge. As we start to move into the lighter side, let's first go in with this lighter tone, it's just one step away from our brightest highlight. We can start by putting that along the outer edge. We got a little bit of a shadow showing coming down the side of the neck with the highlights on either side. Then, of course, we got that brightest highlight just coming down the very center which we can put in using our brightest color. We want to start to plan that out into the surrounding areas. Now, as I mentioned before, the clothing is significantly lighter than the skin tones. Even if we start with the clothing in shadow on the left hand side, we're still going to be using a fairly light mid tone to put this in. It should be quite a bit lighter than the tones that we were using for the skin here. I'm going to just draw the rough outline of shapes that we can use because some areas do catch a little bit of light, we're going to leave those areas predominantly blank. So then we can use some of the light colors just to add a bit of just to add a bit of variety in here and create edges maybe some stronger shadows as well, as I see them in the reference photo. On the other side, again, for the shadows, let's start off with a slightly lighter tone, just redefine that edge coming up. Then we do go into a slightly deeper shadow as we go a bit further down here, slight little crease, and then this fold outward, got a few streaks curving round the shoulder, which we can put in with this darker tone. Now with the slightly dark tin, we can begin to mark in the general shapes of the clothing, so we've got this sleeve coming down here. And then these larger creases as they curve around the back. Then going back to the slightly lighter color, go ahead and start marking in most of that lighter lighter zone. I just block the whole thing in. Then to put in the brighter highlights, we can go in with this brightest color that we have and use this to pretty much highlight all the rims or the areas that need a bit more definition coming around. With that done, all I think I'm going to do now is just to block in the background just to really bring out the highlights of the skin tones. It doesn't really matter what we use here. I'm just going to mix these darker tones remaining altogether to one color. Then essentially just go around the edges and put in this darker tone. H 13. Day 4: Lesson 13 - Grisaille Part 2: Okay, so welcome back to day two of our grazie. The previous paint layer has fully dried and it's nar rely to accept a fresh layer over the top. Essentially, at this stage of the process, we've established our blocking and basic tonal values. But something that you may notice is that as the paint has dried, it has become slightly lighter. And this is a fairly normal occurrence in all painting. It's not something that we need to worry about necessarily. As we're going to be painting over the whole thing anyway, we don't really need to do anything about it. However, it can become a problem if you're at the last stages of the painting, and you're only going to be doing a few touch ups here and there. Then it may become a little bit difficult to judge your values correctly because the certain parts have dried lighter than they really should be. In this case, you should use a method called oiling out, which will help to bring back the correct values of the painting. However, as we're only at the beginning stages for this one is not something we need to worry about. The goal for this layer of the painting is to essentially complete the grazie, and the criteria for a grazie to be completed is the first have all the proportions correctly shaped and located. Second, there needs to be a clear and definitive light source that makes sense throughout all parts of the painting. This means that we need to be choosing our tonal values in relationship to the whole picture and not just that one particular areas immediate surroundings. This way, we will be maintaining a balance of lights and darks and avoid creating an unnatural lighting dynamic. Now, I may have noticed that I'd like to work in sections, which is to say that I'll spend a lot of time on a certain area before moving onto something else. And because of this, I'll split this painting session up into two parts. The first part will will be working solely on the head, and then for the second part, we'll move on to working on the neck and shoulders. Now, this is just my particular way of working, so don't feel like you have to follow this if it doesn't feel right for you. As you can see, my palette is pretty much exactly the same as the first layer, the same three colors, and I'm going to be using liquid as well. I'm first going to begin on the left hand side and begin slightly reshaping the side of the face coming on the left. I'm going to take some of this dark tone. I think we can just start making some alterations to the jaw. Basically, I think that we need to raise the jaw line up a little bit. Not too much, very small changes. As you can see, I'm using the size two ivory flat, it's got a very nice chi edge, which should be perfect for making these adjustments. Now, I think we can also do the same just coming down here. It's going to ever so slightly creep in to that edge. I think that's looking a lot better already. I think some other adjustments that we can make are to do with the Ii. I think the I on the whole is in the correct place, but I just want to basically slightly lower the left hand side. I think it's curving up a little bit too and it's making it look quite slanted. I'm going to lower this side a bit. I'm going to be using some of that dark color to cut back against that lighter highlight. On the rim, not too much. Again, you want to be careful with the amount of paint I'm opening down. We don't want it to become too saturated too early on. I'm going to try and spread this out very thinly and it's going to enable us to work on this area a bit longer. Then with some of the lighter colors. I'm going to try and redraw in that highlight, just using the very corner of my brush here. I'm not going to go quite as far. And then using that darker tone for the eye lash, I'm just going to crop down a little bit more. Now while we're working on this small era, we can even switch to this ivory rigger brush. It's a very small brush. You will have to use some liquid for this because it's not very strong. Then going into this dark so we can draw some really precise lines. I'm just going to indicate the corner of the eye with this. Again, I want to be sparing with the amount of paint put down. Just spending a bit of time on this eye as I'm readjusting. I've just brought the eyelid down a little bit more than what it was. I think we can even bring it down a bit further at the top. And using the rigger brush to put in this cree. We definitely want to make sure we get this shape right. Then going back to the rigger brush, we can start to define a bit more of these features. So using this incredibly dark color, it's going to highlight what dark in the outside of the iris. As we're starting to work in a lot more detail in this layer, the whole process is going to slow down quite considerably. We're going to make sure that all our values are reading well when combined together. So we've got these darker values in the eye here. We need to make sure that everything around the eye fits in relation to that. These creases need to be pretty dark as well, getting close towards these values in the eye, and they need to be able to transition into some of the softer values or lighter values that surround them. I don't really get any hush lines. Another very slight alteration I think we can make to this is just we're going to slightly bring the nose over a bit more to the left hand side. This darker value, I'm going to be bringing that just slightly closer to the eye here. Then we've got that transitional color that we need to get down here as well before it moves into the strong highlight. We've got that darker shadow. It does extend quite a bit over into or to the eye as it comes round the eye here. It's quite a dominant shadow. Boy, you can see now in this layer. Now that the paint has tried, it has become a little bit lighter as it's tried. This new layer is going to look a lot darker and the value should be sitting quite a bit stronger over the top, so the darker values should be showing up quite a bit darker and our lighter values, again, showing lighter. Another very slight alteration, I'm going to actually lift the nose up just a millimeter p mu. So I'm going to get that shadow value and just crop the bottom of the nose, just a tiny bit more and just bring that up. And the same on the left hand side. Just going to crop that a bit more over here. I'm going to put it in roughly. This ds's still working on the left hand side and more so. So just going to roughly mark that in just so it looks relatively correct. And let's get that dominant shadow line coming across the nose. Again, that's going to shift over to the left a bit along with everything else. So that really bright value that we've got going down the center of the nose. We can put that in. And we can intensify that later on, as well. Moving on to the mouth, I feel that this is one of those areas where we can make some adjustments. I feel that we can move it over ever so slightly to the left hand side, and then we can also raise it a little bit higher as well. I'm just going to draw an experimental line but where I think it should go. And I think it should be something like this. Then we can connect back on to the line there. So just going to shade this in. We haven't used the darkest tone available to us. Just crop that as well. And now we can use the darkest tone to just draw in the underside or the kind of the gap between the lips. So again, I'm going to raise that a little bit. And then on the other side, again, let's use this lighter tone and the lips is actually the upper lip is quite light. So we can use this. We've got a little crease coming down the very center that we can put in. And a slightly lighter on the other side of it. Then as we raised the upper lip, you also need to do the same thing with the lower lip because we don't want as big a gap between the lips. I'm just going to take some of the lighter color and slide, it's going to cut back against that darker tone. And let's try and get a little bit more definition here, so just taking some of this dark tone, and we're going to just put a line coming across just to separate the lower lip. Then just to provide a bit more shape to the lips, we can go ahead and start defining some of these lighter and darker areas a bit more. Put in some of this mid tone coming across the very center of it. Contrasting with s shadow tone that comes down. I think I'm going to leave the mouth there for the time being. I'm going to shift my focus over to the right hand side of the head. The main adjustment I'd like to make to this area is just the slight alteration to the jaw bone. I just want to cut it in a little bit more. Be this area is in quite a bit of highlight, and we don't want to go too dark. I'm going to take more of a darker mid tone and just cut in this can be the shadow separating the jaw from the neck, and I want to join back on here. I'm just going to draw a thin line. Coming across this zone, I think we can just thin this whole area a bit more. And to the I'm just going to take something the light to colors up a little bit more. Just obscure that previous line a bit. A. While we're working on making these adjustments. A few other areas which I'm going to change is just the side of the head coming up here. I think we can just bring in or just a little bit more the hair as it curves around the side of the face, and we can connect it onto this line that we've drawn previously. Then let's just connect that connect that. I'm just going to darken that whole area. And that also means that we need to bring the ear in just a little bit more as well. So working a bit more onto the right. I'm going to pretty much do the same thing here. It's more or less in the correct position. I'm just going to raise it ever so slightly up against the eyelash. And then we can use the rigger brush to kind of outline that again. Maybe just put it a bit higher up. So I just going to extend this over a bit more, pull that around. And with this deeper tone, I can lower that shadow underneath the eye as well. I think that those were some of the main alterations that we needed to do. So from here, I think we just need to start refining all of these areas to start increasing the contrast of these tones as well. So I'm first going to begin with the nose area. It's looking messy at the moment. I want to make sure we've got all the definitions of all the colors clearly defined here. So this center part of the nose is predominantly a mid tone. So I'm going to just brush over this whole area with this color. We need a very slight hint of a shadow definition just on the other side. Then obviously on the underside of the nose, we've got a heavier shadow. And for some of the really detailed lines, we can just switch to the rig brush. So just to kind of draw the underside of the nose here. I'll just switch to this brush. S. On the whole, on the left hand side, I'm going to start to increase the depth of some of the shadows, just going over the more dominant areas of shadow. Start to deepen some of those tones. I got a little channel of highlight coming down the side of the face here, which I'm going to leave for some of those highlights. But for the most part, all of this can be darkened quite considebly. That slight light tone. Lighten that a little bit, connect that on to the center of the nose. We do also have just a slight light tone just along the very side of the head, most like a subtle reflective light. It's just catching a bit more, but again, very subtle, so we're not going to do too much over there. Now transitioning into some of the lighter colors. We do have a fairly solid line separating the lights and darks, this transitional color, but again, we don't want it too sharp. It's going to brush over the edges and try and diffuse them. Now within this lighter region on the left side of the face, we do have a slight differentiation in tone. We've got a slight darker one as it transitions out from the shadows. And then it gets a little bit lighter in the very very center. So same thing on the forehead, just go to deepen this color. And then using some of those really dark color. We can begin to frame the side of the head as well. So we don't want to draw two dominant line I'm going to make just random strokes. Okay, so from here, I'm actually going to switch brush and move back to the dagger. You can get a slightly larger mark with this. Let us begin extending some of these darker tones a bit further over. We've got a slightly lighter mid tone that just extends just above the eyebrow and we can put in here as it connects on to the bridge of the nose, softly blend those two tones together. As I mentioned, we need to start getting a bit lighter as well, intensifying some of those highlights. So going into our brightest color, we can go ah and put in the sheen, coming across the forehead. Also, while we've got this light tone, let's also go and put this in some of the other brightest places. Just on the top part of this cheekbone as it's curving around the side of the face, coming towards the eye. Of course, across the very center of the nose as well. And just about the lip. Now let's try and putt in some of the mid tones around this one. We're going to be still pretty light. I'm using the second lightest tone, and we can begin by using this to transition between some of those shadow colors and this highlights. Can even go one step down. Then we want to bring this and also start blending this into this deeper tone. This is much more of a mid tone that we've got going on here. Just above the eye. Now for this lower part of the jaw, it is slightly rounded and that is casting a slight shadow just across the underside here. So we need to put in this shadow and then kind of blend that into some more of these midtones. As we're putting in the eyebrows, the ones on the right hand side are obviously not going to be as dark as they are on the left. I'm going to use more of a mid tone to put this in and I'm going to be following the loose direction that the hairs are growing in. As the hairs get a little bit more sparse at the front and at the top, you start to blend that into those lighter skin tones we put down. And that should just lighten that zone. And obviously, we can work back and forth. Just put a bit of the lighter tone underneath and in between. Start blending all of that. Now at the corner of the mouth, we do have a slight shadow and then gets caused by the crease just at the corner. It is very subtle still, but I'm going to put in, and we're going to work back and lighten it again with some of that lighter color. And continue that lighter color coming around, and that's just a slight little crease at this corner. Now, I think overall, the face is looking very good. So now we can start to work on a bit more of the finer details. So for example, just increasing the light on the bottom eyelid at the very top. We can use the rigger brush and make that stand out a little bit more. And then we can also use some slightly thicker paint, make sure we're getting that highlight across this zone. Very center of the eyelid. And then likewise along the very top as well. It's quite an intense highlight we've got here. So we need to make sure that we're getting that in. I think we can also do with lightening the whites of the eye just at the very center. This part is in more shadow, but as we start to move towards the pupil, want to be getting that area of light in there, and it will diffuse a little bit to the background, so it won't be quite as strong. It using the rib brush here, getting a lot of control. And then we can also use this brush to start putting in some of the detail within the eye as well. For the ris, it's got a dark outer rim. I obviously the pupils going to be dark in the center. We can put in some of the light tones. I'm going to make it quite uneven. We're just using a mid tone to do this. We don't want to go to lights. And then with the dark tone again, we can put in the pupil. Then some of the really bright color for the glint just at the very top, you're going to put a tiny dot across there and that should really make the pupil come to life. Then we're going to do exactly the same thing for the other eye and spending a little bit more detail getting in some of that midtone, blending that into some of those darker colors, and also following the direction, coming straight down from whatever angle the pupil is, I working my way around here. Star to blend it. And you can see a much deeper shadow along the right corner. So a lot of that is going to be obscured. But then once again, we can put in the glint. We should make this eye come to life a bit more, just on this little corner. Put that there. And we can also probably lighten the white of the eye a bit more as well. I want to make a quite a definitive shift between the shadow and the light tone. Areas where we can put a bit more detail is also we've got that little glint on the edge of the nose, so we can put that in here, just a small little dot. We can probably also use the rigger brush to put a bit more detail in here as well. Got a few lighter areas just across the very center of the nose that we can put in. This area has become a bit wet, the colors aren't taking that well, so we've got to use a bit more thicker paint to that definition show. But, again, the tones here are quite subtle, so it may work in our favor. As we move on to work them on the ear. We start by deepening the tones for where the creases are. Again, these tones have all got to be in relation to what we've got in the phase here, so we need to be looking at them and judging accordingly. We don't want to go too dark. I can see that nothing really goes as let's say the pupil, for example, we want to be avoiding our deepest tones here. And on the whole, even though the ear is quite obscured, it is quite light, in general, so definitely want to be getting some of those lighter tones in there. So I think that may have gone a little bit too lift the top here. I think I'm probably going to leave that there as it is mainly obscured by the hair. We don't need to get too detailed with it, so I think that should be good enough. Then moving on to the hair. We do actually get here. It's majoritly a mid tone, but at the corners here, I think we can deepen a lot of the tones that are going into this darkest color. Oh. As it starts to overlap the ear, can start pulling this out. It's only dark in the very center, so we don't want to go too far over either way with it. Then following the same process looking at where we have those darkest areas and we can put in those deepest shadows first. And then on the left hand side, the hair here is entirely in shadow, so a lot of this deeper tone across here. From this point, which is going to be starting to put in some of the midtones, working alongside this shadow. We want this area to appear pretty smooth, so we don't want to end up with massive amount of texture. So we're going to be creating quite smooth blend here. Curving up and around the head. At the same time, we also want this texture to be quite streaky. So we're going to be letting these colors sit at different lengths. Just pulling the ends out. We've got that slight little midtone high coming across the other side here, curving round into the shadows. Once we've smooth everything out with these darker shadows and mid tones, let's go into some highlights. This is our third lightest color, and I'm going to begin by just putting in some streaks here and there. Again, you want to be blending into some of those other colors. Don't really want to create any harsh textures. Y. And then in just a few certain places we can really brighten this area up. So in the intense heights, going to be putting in a few streaks. 14. Day 4: Lesson 14 - Grisaille Part 3: Okay, so I think the head is looking pretty good overall. And now let's start to work a bit more onto the neck and shoulders. So I think this is where we need to make the most drastic changes. I think that overall, the neck is just a little bit too long, and I've got everything just lower down, then it should be. So I'm first going to begin with this darkest tone, and I think what we can do is just to cut back slightly against the shoulder here. I think we've got it coming way too far over. So going to go in with the kind of the shadow background color and pretty much draw a line to kind of indicate how far over we need to go. We're also going to crop down a little bit on the shoulder. A so slightly at the bottom here. Then I'm going to raise this area of the neck up just a little bit. Now, for the shirt, again, I think this needs to be raised a little bit, as well. Can probably have that coming out here. Connecting on there. Then if we look at the reference photo, we can see that the bottom of the shirt on the right hand side, you can see it is just slightly over to the left then line for the neck. If you've got the neck coming down here, we need to actually be over a little bit more. We need to actually draw a line coming across here. Again, pretty drastic changes here. Then we just need to follow the rough shape that we can see in the reference. Now, on the other side, I think we've actually got this one pretty close, much closer than the other one. I'm just going to raise it ever so slightly at the neck. Maybe it's get a little bit darker than this, it's in shadow. I can to raise it slightly at the neck and then round out this area a little bit more. It's probably more something like this, and then I'm also going to crop. It's a little bit further over to provide a bit more of a gap. I think that those are the main adjustments that we need to do. Now we just need to alter everything to make it fit with these new proportions. What we're going to be doing is just taking some of the shadow color. Again, we don't want to get too dark too quickly, and we just need to start to raise everything up a little bit. I'm going to be cropping back a bit on this little highlights. My just put it about here. All of this is going to be pretty dark. We're going to spread this out pretty thin because I want to be able to work over the top of it. Let's just continue the shadow coming all the way up. I may just also continue this darker highlight for the background. Just continue that coming down. As we want the shadow toes for the skin to still show up. We need that ultra dark tone for that to happen. There is this very slight shadow coming on the top side, like this. Again, we're going to be raising the collar bone up a little bit as well. We're going to put that shadow about here and then bring that across a bit more. We're working in quite large areas here. I've just switched to the So just establishing the strongest shadows to begin with. D you want to deepen the whole tone in general for this part? We do want a definitive line separating the lighter part and the shadow. Even the transitional color between those two tones is quite dominant. We definitely want to beginning a bit lighter here. I think it's a blend going between these tones. As we start to move further over to the right, we get even lighter. So moving into some of these brightest tones here, we want to get a gradual transition going coming over to the. We do have that very subtle shadow coming down the center line here. I'm going to put this in now and then we need to transition into it. Certainly softly blending that out. I Now, the skin tone on this side coming down the shoulder here is not as light as what we have coming down the center. We're not going to be using our brightest tone here. More of a lighter mid tone we can put in. We also want to just transition that into this deeper shadow and in the shoulder. I think we can get even lighter in some places. Just taking some thicker of this white paint, and we can really brighten this one coming around here. Then we just want to softly blend that across. We don't want to blend it too much because that will lose the intensity of the color. It's lightly brushing over the surface. So for our clothing, obviously, we need to make all those adjustments again to incorporate the new proportion. So what I'm going to do first is first kind of draw the line of these main landmarks. So we've got this main crease coming from the shoulder, kind of curves from the and comes across here, but just a little bit higher up than where we had it. And then for this larger crease, it gets pretty close to the very edge of the shirt here, so we're going to draw it coming around here and curving around. And then this also connects onto the sleeve as it comes up here. Okay, so that is essentially the new proportion, with this in mind, let's just go ahead and fill this in. I'm going to start with the lighter color at the very top for the color. And let's just bring this down a little bit. Going to get a nice chiseled edge against the skin tones above it. So now, everything else is just a little bit dark than this. I'm going to go into more of this mid tone. Especially as we start coming down, we get quite a bit darker. But again, it needs to be significantly tone lighter than the skin tones. For these lighter areas in shadow, we're using more of a mid tone to put this in. Because now I'm going to block in this whole area, try and get rid of those previous marks that we had to make it a bit less distracting. Just going to obscure all of this. Now that we've pretty much blocked it all out again, let's start to increase the intensity of some of these areas of light. Go to go into some of our brightest tone. Once again, looking at which areas are lightest. We've got this and larger crease at the very sleeve here. You can start to put some of these marks in. Of course, the very top, which is separating this zone a little rim coming all the way around. Start to put a bit more detail into all these creases. Then with the remaining paint on the brush, we can get a little bit darker. Start to put in some of the highlights with some of the more subtle case within this zone. We can also get a little bit darker as well, especially coming around the corner here, I think we can deepen this tone a little bit. And on the bottom side of some of these creases, I can exaggerate these a little bit. This crease, to really get the roundness of its showing through here. We've got this mid tone and now we just want to highlight this coming across the very center just on the underside of the center, and then as it curs around transitioning more across the top. For the deeper tone and the shadow, we want a slightly harsher edge at the very base. Then as we start to come up, we see more of the roundness of the shape as it blends into those shadows. As we start to come around, we want to round this out a little bit, blend it a bit more into those light tones. While we've got the shadow colors, let's continue to extend them up a little bit. Got some creases coming round the shoulder here and with the shadow colors. Now the paint layer is pt. It should be blending a lot and losing some of the intensity. We're getting smooth blends across this whole area. It should lend itself to putting in the subtle creases. Uh Now on the other side, let's put in some of the lighter tones. Again, we're going to be using this dominant highlight that we have. We can just extend that coming around. Again, it's going to diffuse slightly into the background, so it's not going to end up quite as bright. But that should be pretty good to get a nice transition going as we out the shoulder. Moving on to the other side. Again, this is mostly in shadow. We do have a few strong highlights. I'm just going to use some of the whites and mix it back in here and let's just intensify these highlight areas. Then for the most part, let's just go back into some of these shadow colors. Let's try and redefine a lot of these creases that we can see, so it's pretty subtle. Again, you can put in some of the more dominant ones over here. Then we can just draw some faint lines here and there. Loosely following what I see in the reference. With that, I think I'm going to pretty much leave the clothing there. Now, the only thing that I'm going to do is to just darken the whole background, and then we can begin to put some of those wispy hairs that flow over into it. What I'm going to do is just take all these dark tones again or at least the darkest two tones and mix those together. Then let's wipe the brush clean as much as we can, and use quin to help this paint flow a little bit more. And then with this, let's just try and darken this whole area. Want to get some nice chiseled edges against the figure. So being pretty careful as we can move close to the edge. Lastly, to finish this resite off, all we're going to be doing is taking some more of these mid tone colors and to start to put in some of the wispy hairs coming down the side of the face. Now that we've got the darkened background, we should be able to put in some of this mid tone to indicate these tones. Just coming out here, I'm going to be using the dag rush to put this in. We don't want to go too light. I think that may just be a bit too light for this. I'm going to turn it back down a bit. Just going to be using the blade of the brush to try and get some pretty thin lines coming across here. At first, we're going to be using just this darker color, and it should still sit a little bit lighter against the background. With those darker colors mainly in, we can go probably with this lighter color just one step up in our tone of scale, and we just start working over in a few areas to highlight some of these hair strands. Then on the other side, we do have some of the hairs that just stick out a little bit at the ears, but it is very, barely visible. So we're just going to be using this pretty dark color just to indicate something on this side. But for the most part, it's going to be predominantly in shadow. You put a few streaks here and there. Don't need to worry too much about this. So I think I'm going to leave the grazie here for today and call it finished. I think the structural changes that we've made have significantly improved the likeness of our portrait, and I'm also really like in the tonal contrast and depth that we've managed to achieve. Now, to be honest, we could take this grazie even further if we wanted to and really nail down into the subtle shifts in the transitional values between lights and darks. If we look closely, a lot of the marks that I've put down, especially with the lighter values, are quite bold and gestural, making the brush strokes and texture quite dominant. Ideally, you would want to find a balance between those photo realistic smooth transitions and the more paintfully accents you may choose to put in. If you go too far either way, then either you lose your artistic interpretation of the subject or those paintfly textures just become way too dominant and overpower the painting, making it look like a complete mess. I would say that this resires on the borderline, but it does look pretty good when viewed from a distance. I'm going to continue on with the next stage of the painting, which is going to be introducing some color. Now, if at this point you're looking at your ghazi and you feel that it's not quite there yet, then that is also perfectly fine. Sometimes it can take a little bit longer to be able to achieve the result that you're after, and it could take five or even six sittings before you get there. There really isn't a set time for any of these stages. I would say the most important thing to keep note of before each session is to have a clear and realistic goal in mind. For example, it may be something like fixing some proportions which are out of place, or you may want to increase the contrast of your tonal values. This way, it's much easier to feel a sense of accomplishment after each session if you've got these mini successes along the way. 15. Day 5: Lesson 15 - Intro: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Day five. So at this stage, you should have a fairly refined grasa of our portrait reference. And today, we're going to be starting to add some color to our painting. Now, this stage of the course is actually going to be spread over three days as there are three main stages to our painting process. I'd like to refer to these as the blocking in, the refining, and then the detail stage. And like the grasa, each of these stages is going to have a specific goal that we're aiming for. Blocking in stage, which is what we're going to be doing today is to basically just put down the basic color values over the whole painting. We're not going to be getting too detailed here, and we're more focusing on the general areas of color, making sure that the hues that we put down correspond to the tonal values of our grazie. The grayish brown tones of the grazie are going to be influencing these new colors that we're going to be putting down over the top. So we're not going to be able to get the correct level of color saturation in this first layer. All the colors are going to have slight grayish undertones, but we should be able to create a pretty good foundation of those correct colors that we'll also be able to intensify in the later stages. In the refining stage, you want to start building up the saturation and tonal values of colors. Ideally, at this stage, the previous pain layer has become touch dry, so we should be able to layer over the top fairly easily and make any necessary adjustments. In this layer, we'll also start to work in smaller zones, paying closer attention to the transitional areas between definitive tones. So as the colors shift coming out from shadow and into highlight. As the name suggests in the detail stage, we want most of the hues and values to already translate very well when compared to the reference. And this is so that we can just focus on the small details, things like adding individual hair strands, or maybe increasing the texture of certain places, or even maybe intensifying the tonal contrast of specific areas. Basically, just making little tweaks here and there that will really help to bring this painting to life. I find having a system like this really helps to keep me on track and not get overwhelmed with the amount of work that we need to do. So going back to what we'll be doing today, we first need to decide on the colors to include in our palette. So head to the next video and we'll do some color analysis. 16. Day 5: Lesson 16 - Colour Analysis: So I've got my reference out in front of me. What we're going to be doing here is picking out the most dominant colors we can see in the portrait, and then we need to think about what paints we can use to achieve those specific hues. People who have been painting for a while will find the step a lot easier as the more experienced you are with your palette, the more you are going to be familiar with the different color combinations that the paints you own can achieve. Now there are a couple of rules that I like to stick to when choosing colors. Those are that you definitely want to include the three primary colors. That will give you plenty of options with color mixing. You also want to include an earthy brown tone as that will help with adjusting the saturation levels of your mixtures. Now, for me, there are three colors that I always find absolutely necessary in pretty much every painting I do, and Those are titanium white, ultramarine blue, and burned t umber. Those colors always have a place in my palette, and I find them to be present within many colors that you find in nature. For the other colors, we are going to be a bit more selective. My initial assessment of this reference is that it is full of very warm colors. In the skin tones, we have plenty of reds, yellows and oranges, and even in the other areas like the shirt, eyes, and hair, we have very similar shades. For now, I'm just going to focus on the skin tones. Again, we only need to look at the general colors. Let's start with the areas in shadow. To me, this seems like a warm earthy brown color. Obviously, we've got plenty of subtle variations in there, like some areas are slightly more yellow while others are more red and I'm even getting a sense of some green tinges coming through as well. But for the main block color, I'm thinking we can use the colors million red and yellow ocher alongside Burntim re ultra blue, which I've already mentioned. Vermilion red is a very bright red color, quite close to orange, but if you try and darken it becomes more of a murky brown color. I think it will be quite useful to use in the shadows. Yellow ocha is an earthy yellow color and is great for mid tones where you don't want the yellows to be too bright. The burn timber and train blue will darken the mixture and also kill the saturation while vermilion red and yellow ocha will tint it to the right shade. I may also just throw in ronaconomena, which is a very powerful deep reddish color that leans closer to the blue side of red than yellow. I may add this to the shadow mixtures just so we have the option to increase the saturation of the reds in some areas. I'm also thinking that it would be good to play on the temperature dynamic a little bit. We could use this and ultramarine blue, for example, to introduce some cooler tones in the shadows to contrast with the warm colors in the areas we have in highlights. I think this may enhance the composition of the portrait as it adds another point of interest. However, doing this will take us away from our reference, so we'll have to see how effectively we can add that. But at the very least, it's good to keep our options open. As we move on to the mid tones, again, I'm seeing a lot of oranges and warm pinks. We can even see some very vibrant areas in the side of the nose as it transitions to the shadow. A lot of these hues, I think we can achieve with the colors we've already mentioned. The only colors that I would like to add are windsor lemon and alizarin crimson. Windsor lemon is a very light yellow color, and I think this will be good to mix in with some of the reds, to get warm and saturated oranges. This is something that we wouldn't be able to do so well with yellow ochre, which is quite muted and much more of a mid tone. Alizarin crimson is once again a very saturated red, but it's quite a bit warmer than ronacomagena, and much deeper in tone than vermilion. I feel like this will be good to give a deeper warm tone to the areas which are a little darker, mainly in the transitional areas coming out of shadow. Now, for the areas in highlights, we will just add varying amounts of titanium white to our mixtures. At the moment, we've got Titanium white, burn timber, ultramarine blue, gnacnogena, lizarin crimson, vermilion red, yellow cha, and windsor lemon. To be honest, it is very easy to get carried away with choosing colors and you can find a tube of paint for just about every shade you can think of. In my experience, it's best not to overcomplicate things. I never like to have more than 12 colors on my palette at a time. You want to find a balance between having the widest range of mixing options available with the fewest number of premix colors. I find having eight to 12 works pretty well as you can become very familiar with how those colors work together while also being able to mix a wide variety of shades. Looking at some of the other areas of the portrait like the hair and shirt, again, I think we can use the colors that we've already mentioned. For the shirt, I think we can use combinations like titanium white, yellow ochre, and burned tumber, and then the hair is full of warmish mid tones, so plenty of reds, browns, and ochres. For the darkest areas which are close to black, we can use burnt umber and ultramarine blue. For areas like the mouth, nostriels, and eyes, we can use this combination to get pretty dark, very close to black. We can also alter the shade and temperature by varying the ratio of brown to blue in the mixture, and we can even tint it with some reds as well. We are going to end up with having eight colors on our palette. I think that should work very well. But I find going through this analytical process really helps give us an idea of what mixtures to go for. Of course, our color mixtures are going to be slightly different to what I've speculated here, but it shouldn't be 1 million miles off. The more experienced you become with the colors that you have, the easier and quicker this process will be. With that, we can head to the easel and begin the first stage of adding color to our painting. 17. Day 5: Lesson 17 - Block In: Welcome back to day five. Today we're going to be working on this painting some more, and we're going to be starting to add some color. One of the things I can talk about straightaway and I've already mentioned this briefly before. But that is that some of the tones that we have may not be reading as they once did when we were doing our gris. What I mean by this is that some of the tones have what we call sunken in, and what this basically means that the tones have become quite mat. As they've dried, they've become a little bit lighter than they once were. To combat this, we're going to be using a technique called oiling out, which is basically when we just apply a very thin layer of oil over these specific areas, and that way, it should bring back the original tones of the paints while they were still wet. Now the reason this is a good idea to do at the start is so that we are able to judge how the tones really should be. So to do is, we're going to be using some linseed oil, and I've got a little bit in this id on the palette, you can see, and then we're going to take a fairly large bristle filbert brush. Don't have to be a bristle filbert brush, but I just find these ones work pretty well, and we're going to just put a small amount on the brush. And then much just cover the surface. Now, we don't want to a much. We want this to be a fairly thin layer because obviously we got to think, we're going to be layering over this with colors and this will end up mixing quite a lot with the tones that we put down. So we don't want it to interfere too much. So I'm going to be spreading out quite thinly. But essentially, we're just going to be covering over the entire surface, trying to even out those tones and bring back their original values. Now, as I mentioned, we don't want this area to be too wet. After you've completely covered the surface. Hopefully you should be able to see that some of the tones have been brought back. There's a much greater contrast. But all of the excess oil that has been left on the surface, we want to remove most of that. We're just going to be taking a paper towel and then lightly going over and hopefully start picking up some of that excess excess oil. We don't want to be rubbing too hard hicks, that will start to dislodge the pain that we have down. We're just going to be making small circles. Just picking up that excess oil. Okay, so with that, we should be able to start our painting. So before we begin, I'm just going to briefly go over the different color trues that I have in my palette. We've already kind of established what colors we will use, but just to give some clarity. So on the palette this is titanium white, burn timber, ting blue, gncnum agenta, alizarin crimson, fermion red, yellow cha, and Windsor lemon. And this over here is also liquid original, and which I'll use as my medium. Oh So for this stage, I'm going to be using more of what you'd call an open palette. And what I mean by this is basically, when we were doing the grazie, we would pre mix all of our colors or the different values that we wanted to use and then just put them on one side that we can pick out. Well, that would be what you'd call a closed palette. The open palette is kind of when you just mix the colors that you need as you go. So it's going to be consistent color mixing throughout the whole process. And I basically find this just leaves a little bit more room for kind of adjustment and alteration, and it just provides a little bit more options than a closed palette would. If you're not so confident with mixing these colors as you go and you want to use the clothed palette, then that is also perfectly fine. I used to use that a lot when I was starting out as well. Now because we've pretty much already established the shapes and the form, the different tones. We're going to be working in a little bit more detail during this stage than I normally would if I was just doing the initial blocking. So I'm going to be using a fairly smaller and more detailed brush. This is the quarter inch ivory dagger, and this is going to help give me a little bit more control with my color placements. I personally always like to start on the left hand side and then work my way across. This is simply for the reason that I have somewhere to rest my hand on the palette just to help steady it, and just a personal preference. I'm going to start with the skin tones as that is the most interesting part of the painting, the actual face and the portrait. I'm going to start there and let's start mixing some colors for some of the areas in shadow. As I mentioned, there is tons of subtle varieties of the colors in this area. I'm going to start with just the broad and general tone that we mentioned. I'm going to take some burned timber. We just mix that on the palette here. Then I'm also going to mix that with ultramarine blue. Now, this area is actually quite warm, so I'm going to use a little bit more burned timber in this mixture. But the ultramarine blue will just kill and mute the color ale, make it quite a bit darker and a bit less saturated as well. Now, this will give us quite a brown grayish color. I'm going to start tinting this with some reds. Now, for this, I'm thinking we can take a lizard and crimson. Now this is a very powerful color. We don't want too much of this. We go in small increments, just gradually increasing the saturation of the reds in this color. Maybe even some vermilion red. And let's just try this color out, see what it looks like, see if it works with this tone. So it's pretty dark. I think I'm going to lighten it with some yellow ochre. And maybe strengthen the red a little bit more. Bit more liz and crimson. I think that looks pretty good. It's actually very similar to kind of this darker tone that we had down from the gris. It's not too dissimilar here. Right. Moving a little bit further up to the forehead, we can see we get a little bit more yellow tones in it. And I may even add some whites just to lighten it and further desaturate this mixture. We've also got this lighter color coming down just at the very edge of the chin or the jaw line, sorry. Now we can blend into. I think one of the problems that we're having here is because these toes, all these colors are very similar to the grazie tone that we had. It's really difficult to read how the colors are looking. So what I'm going to do is to mix a lighter color for some of the transitional areas, and then that'll give us something to compare it to if we've got the different tones that we need to transition into. Let's take the million red small amount of nacho agenta. And I'm going to lighten it with yellow ocher and a small amount of titanium white. It is going to mix with some of that dark tone that we had left on the brush, and that has just killed and muted the color quite considerably. But that's actually pretty good. We don't want it to be too bright over here. So with this, which is going to be layering. This in this channel area, a small area on the left side, which is in a little bit more light. Then obviously, as we move towards the center, you can see it becomes quite yellow, so we're going to be increasing the amount of yellow ocher. Then again, it becomes quite murky as we start coming towards the very edge here, so just taking some of that shadow color, not too much and just blending into. The yellows should just create quite a murky sort of color. A bit more yellow light in this zone in the very center. Now, we can also do similar things to kind of this area up here, a very similar shade. Maybe a little bit more yellow. It becomes quite earthy this tone. Now one of the good things about applying this layer of oil over the surface is that it does help increase the flow of the paint. We don't actually have too much on the surface. But what I'm finding is that the blends and pushing the colors around, it's a lot easier than it normally would be if we didn't have the oil there. With that slight little highlight just peering in the very center of this area above the eye. Also, I do find that the dagger brush is very useful for kind of getting in all those small little shapes. It's very versatile. You can pretty much create any shape you want with it. So I find it's a very useful brush to use. Especially when you want to put in some of the smaller details. You have a little bit more control. I think this brush is probably one of the most versatile brushes you can get. To start rounding out some of these forms as it transitions from light into shadow, just increasing the amount of red in that transitional zone. The goal of this first stage of adding color to the portrait is not to create a finished painting in this session. Probably just isn't going to happen. What I'm trying to do is just get down the basic colors that I can see and start transitioning from between those different tones. The important thing is like the analysis that we went through in the previous lesson where we picked out all the different colors of where they were located and how they interacted as they moved from light to dark. For example, on the chin here, we can see that this area is actually quite pink along the bottom. That is the general color that we want to put down here. We're not focusing too much on the very crisp details of this zone. But we more want to cut down that block color. And also make sure we don't want to lose the shape of the grazie that we applied here. We don't want to accidentally go over any of the markings that we've put down and kind of lose the edges of all these different shapes. So we've got some windsor lemon and yellow och in this mixture, bit of titanium whites. Let we start paling this color a little bit. As you can see as we come above the chin as it moves into the lights, and we've got these lighter and warmer yellow colors, GS at the very top, blending with some of those deeper reds and pinks that we have beneath it. So as we start to move into more of the lighter side of the portrait, we're going to be adding a little bit more titanium white to our mat, right now, putting in this rather light pinkish sort of color, as you can see I'm just turning the brush on its head. That's going to give us a much more controlled, not so large for this area. Now, in that transitional section just as it comes around into the highlight, we're going to be adding quite a bit more stronger red. We want this to be quite vibrant. Just in this little gap here. Then we're going to be adding some more winsor lemon just to give it a lighter more orange shade. The transition that inside the light colors. The bridge of the nose, we've got this very slight shadow that just extends up from this corner. This corner is very dark on the left hand side of the nose here at the eye, and this extends up a little bit further into the nose with more of a ocher color. Taking some yellow ocher, mixing that with a crimson, maybe a touch of burn tb there. You may even just try and kill this color a little bit with some ultramarine blue. I should make it quite a bit more murky. Let me just taint it a little bit with yellow och a bit more. One of the concepts that I would like to talk about at this stage is the idea of working from the inside outward. What I mean by this is just the range of tonal values of the porch. I want to try and keep things closer to a midtone at this stage. Then as we start to layer over and get further into the painting, I'm going to start taking those ends of the tonal scale and just extending them further increase in the contrast as we go further down the road. So we don't want to get too light at this stage. We're going to try and keep or preserve the tones and colors a little bit, and that way we've got room to go in the later stages. That way we should also be able to help with the effect, the tonal contrast, it quite a bit more vivid. One of the things that I wasn't quite so happy with in the grazie that I want to change as we're putting in color is this little section within the lighter side of the face. Basically, I think that this shadow coming underneath the cheek was just a little bit too strong and it was or intensifying thee in the skin. This needs to be a slower internal difference, the skin will basically look a little bit smoother. So that is something that I definitely want to put in in this layer. So if we look at the hues that we've got here, we've got some very light pinks along the edges. We a few deeper yellows coming in as well. Maybe we can get a little bit stronger with our pinks just sitting underneath. Hanging a little bit more red in there. And maybe some yellow tinges coming through here and there as well. As I'm mentioning you want to avoid there being such a harsh line here separating the shadow on the cheek and then the high light just above the mouth here. Again, just in those transitional areas as we go from the shadow to the high light, we get these much more saturated and vibrant hues coming through. I've got some really strong oranges and yellows just in this section, which we're going to be hinting at. Obviously, this is also where the intense highlights are as well. Now, this area just above the eye becomes quite saturated. We've got a lot of oranges and stronger reds showing through here a lot of ocher colors. We definitely when we're putting this in. I've put the lighter color, just stting above it, and we blending into that with these deeper tones. I think we just think can increase the level of lights that we have up here. Now we've got a few subtle shadow tones just coming through in the bottom part of the jaw line, right out here. I've killed the tone quite a bit with ultra ring blue. We're going to be pretty neutral in temperature here, and we don't want it to be too strong. Again, let's keep things quite subtle here, we want this area to be quite smooth. Then we can use some of this titanium white with this pinkish color and hopefully try and blend into that a little bit. Moving a bit further back to the top of the portrait. Wow start getting in that darker transitional color or the darker shadow just at the hair line. It's got quite a bit of red in there. I'm going to increase and red of this darker mixture we have with some of in crimson. Maybe even we can add a touch of winsor lemon. We give it slightly more of an orange shade. Then It's going to be a fairly harsh line as it is a pretty dominant shadow caused by the hair. And as we get a bit further over to the left hand side, we can intensify that. Maybe I'm thinking we can increase the amount of orange in the forehead as well. So just going over, I've added some winsor lemon to a lizard crimson. Increase in the vibrancy of this area, and it does actually get a little bit lighter at the very top. So just adding some more titanium white, we can bring this tone ad. That's going to also help separate the shadow above it from the mid tones of this orange we've just put down. Okay. I'm going to move on that, and I'm going to start to work a little bit in more detail around the facial features. I'm going to move on. I'm going to start to work a bit more on the facial features. We're going to begin to work on the eyes, which we haven't really worked on GS yet. The first thing that I'm going to do is to redefine the shape of the eye. I'm going to take the start color and just on the left hand side here, we're going to start putting in that crease of the eyelid. Just to start hinting at this, maybe increasing the amount of red again. On this side, Normally around the eyes, it becomes a little bit more saturated in colors. The skin is quite thin around these areas, the blood underneath gets a little bit more illuminated than in other areas, making it look quite red and just quite vibrant. Keeping that in mind of adding the highlight in here, that may be just a little bit too strong, may go back into this orange and use that to spread around this light tone. And it falls into shadow pretty quickly on this slide, so we can just extend this shadow down a bit more. Same story for the eyelid underneath. We're going to be taking some strong reds, maybe some of the million red in there as well. Just mixing that into some of this darker color, and let's start hinting at some of these reddish tones. In this end. As it curves around, it becomes quite a bit lighter, so maybe more of this orange. Now for the actual eye itself, the white of the eye is far from being white. Again, it's more of a mid tone, but again, it's quite a warm color. I'm thinking we can use some burn timber and ultra, that will kill the saturation levels and we can use it as a base tone, but we want to maybe add some yellow och. Shade, it's quite murky as well, so this will end up working. And I'm going to be using that in just the corner of the eye right out here and then we can continue to add some titanium white to this. Maybe touch more yellow ochre just to warm it up. That ended up being quite light, so now we can just subtly blend those 22 tones together. Now, I can see the actual s is a pretty similar color. I'm going to be using Windsor lemon. It's a little bit more green, more of a hazel color. Windsor lemon with some tran blue is going to give us a greenish. Tone, I'm going to make it. I'll kill it a little bit with burner, make it ale bit more. Then we can use this es. And maybe add some more yellow ocher and Windsor lemon to create a little bit of a lighter and earthier color with some titanium white. Just on where we can see, it gets a little bit lighter, so maybe somewhere here. Just add that variation there. Okay now we can just do the same to the other eye. Again, we're going to be taking some of these reds, increasing the saturation levels of the zone. H Moving on to the eyebrows. Again, these aren't quite actually as dark as we've got them. They're more of a earthy reddish color. We're going to be using some of this murky greenish shade that we had. I'm going to add maybe touch of sarin crimson to this and maybe add it to that dark mixture that we had. With this, we're going to be just lightening this area in parts, maybe increasing the saturation of red in certain levels as well. We're going to have some of the skin tones showing this area as well. Again, we don't want it to be quite so dense, adding some of those skin tones in lightening in a few parts as well. Again, we've got some of the colors coming through stronger oranges. Very subtly showing through in amongst some of those darker colors. Again, we don't need to get too detailed at this stage. Here we can let a bit more of those skin tones show through. There isn't much detail in the ears. This is more of a darker reddish tone that we can just block in. So just taking some zarin crimson, darkening it with burn timber. Don't need to get too precise about the exact tone here, maybe darken it a little bit more with some ultramarine blue. Then for the ear on the other side, this is in much more high light, so, using our lighter shades here. Got some windsor lemon and yellow ocher in here. Can use this. It's mixed into some of the reds as well. I'm not going to worry about going over the hair strands that we've put over the top. It's more important to get the right color sitting underneath, what we're going to be focusing on here. Getting some stronger reds as well, but the areas in shadow, G got some really strong reds and oranges. This is another one of those areas where the skin is quite thin, so the blood underneath gets iluminated, creating those really strong and vibrant colors. Now I'm going to move on to the mouth. And this is one of those parts where we can get quite a bit more saturated with our colors. A lot of reds in here, obviously. I'm going to start with the shadow tone. We're going to be taking some ronacomagena. So ultramarine blue. We want to get deep purple color. The Cronacom will definitely help with that mix with ultramarine blue, and then we're going to just darken the color with a small amount of burned t umber. So that should give us a fairly dark, muted brownish purple. I'm going to be applying that to the shadow side of the lips. So now that we've put in the basic shadow, I'm actually going to alter the color a little bit. Going to take some amilan red. I want to warm it up a bit more. Thinking it was looking a little bit too purple. So hopefully, it's familan red will solve that issue. Going to lightly go over it in certain parts. Especially on the right hand side. You can see you've put down a bit of a shadow here. And there is a shadow on the underside of this upper lip, but it's no way near that cool of a tone. It's quite warm. So we want to be kind of going over that. I think that's looking pretty good. Then in the lighter parts. Again, we need to be analyzing the different tones that we have. So we've got quite a vibrant really strong red at the very top of the lower lip. As you start to come towards the center and a bit on the bottom here in a bit more light. These areas are not quite so saturated, more of a kind like a pale pink color. So going to keep that in mind. I'm going to use some vermilion red again, mix that with a lizard crimson. This is going to be for a very saturated red color, and I'm going to put that at the very top. Dot that in there. I can see we've got this color just at the very bridge of the upper lip, that crease in the center, just on the other side, we got that. Quite a vibrant saturated shade of red. Then all we're going to do for the paler colors, just add some titanium white. That sho desaturate pale color. Maybe we can add maybe let's get a bit, we'll add some yellow ocher to this. And Let's use this color so. Maybe that's a little bit too yellow, and may go back in with a bit more lizard and crimson. Let's try this one. I think this is working well here. We're going to start applying this a little bit higher up as well, so getting a little bit warmer, adding a touch more yellow ocher back to this mixture, at the very top. We're going to just be using the very tip of this brush to get a little bit more control in these areas. Then we can get a bit of that highlight coming in with some stronger amount of titanium white in this mixture. Again, we're not going to be going to the full extent of our tonal range. This isn't pure white or anywhere near it. We're going to be preserving our tones throughout this process. That's going to give us a lot of options later on. I'm just working at b just in that shadow just beneath the lower lib. I think we can lighten this tone a little bit more of an orangey brown. Kind of lose a little bit of that separation between the lip and the and the skin tones behind it. Now that we've worked over most of the face and the skin tones. Let's begin to work a bit more on the hair. So we're going to be trying to get down these really nice, golden brownish hues coming through the hair. Make sure we're keeping that tonal definition as well. So there's going to be a lot of yellow ocher in these mixtures. And we can also see again some quite warm reddish brown. So we're also going to be taking some burned timber, and I think we're going to use a lot of a lizard and crimson as well. To begin with, I'm going to be just mixing a small amount of these colors into each other. We want this to be predominantly more of a yellowish shade. Got to be careful with the amount of lyser and crimson we add to these mixtures. I may also just put in a small amount of this brown in there as well. Then we just want to be going over these areas just tinting. These shades, this more of this golden color. Again, looking at the reference photo to see where exactly these more yellowish shades are more dominant. Particularly in this area in highlight, as we're transitioning out of some of these darker brownish colors. This is predominantly where we can see these yellowish tones. As we start to come down the side of the head here, it comes a lot more red. We can start increasing the amount of sum crimson, maybe even adding some million red in there as well. It does also get totally darker, so maybe some brown in there. The thing about painting hair textures is that we don't want to completely blend all of these different colors smoothly into each other. We want to be leaving some of these harsh edges and lines sitting between all these strokes. That's really going to help. Convey the texture of the hair. It's not going to be completely smooth and flat. It's going to have lots of different varieties in these places. Definitely going to keep that in mind as we're working here. We can also maybe mute this color a little bit further. Maybe even add a touch of ultramarine blue into this mixture with some more burned timber. On the other side, this area is more in shadow, can be muting this, but again, it's still got that warmish glow, so it's going to be predominantly made up of these warmer colors. Now we're also going to need a tone for our shadow color. We're going to be taking a lot more burnt amber traing blue. Again, we want slightly more burnt ambern here just to keep it in that warm temperature zone. Maybe we can tint it with small amount of magenzar and crimson. This is going to be our darker tone that we can use to blend into from the shadow areas. Got a few of these streaks coming up into the lighter portions of the hair. Going to make sure we get those in. Again, not blending too much for this area. Maybe we can start to increase the levels of light within some of these zones, just adding a bit more titanium white over on this lighter orangy color. Maybe you touch more windsor lemon in there as well. Let's just start to highlight some of these areas. Again, going for that streaky, a p of gaps between our strokes. You want just subtle hints of these lighter tones, just flicking up and around. If you think about where the light source is coming from the right to the left, it's going to be cat on this part of the hair as it's coming over. I want to be highlighting some of those zones. Moving on to these skin tones at the neck and chest area. So predominantly, this area is mostly in shadow. But again, we do have quite a bit of a variation within these tones. So we're going to start off with our basic shadow color. So again, it's going to be some kind of murky reddish brown color. So I'm going to mix that in here, just got some burn tuber, ultra blue, and I'm going to tin that with a lizarin crimson and vermilion red. I also just make it a little bit more earthy with some yellow ok. It will also lighten it quite considerbly. I think that this will be a pretty good color to use as our base tone. Again, it's going to be very similar to the color that we had down for the zi. It's going to be spreading this around. So we're only want to be paying a conscious attention to the subtle tonal shifts within this tone. So this color that we've got right now is quite dark comparatively. So we're only going to be putting this in the darker areas that are a little bit more red in hue. Then for some of the other areas, we're going to be increasing the amount of yellow within this tone. A small amount of windsor lemon, more yellow ocher, just going to be putting that off to one side here. This is going to be slightly lighter, a bit more earthy. Maybe we can even add just a touch of titanium white. A tiny amount. You can start putting that in here. This area is all pretty smooth, so we're going to be starting to get some nice blends going between all these different tones. A So just going to putting some of the lighter tones in here as well. So this area just catches a bit of lights, got a bit more in this zone, a bit lighter here as well, we can get And at some of these high points in the form here, catch a bit more light also. We can highlight these ever so slightly. Let it blend into the surrounding colors. As we start to transition into some of these lighter tones, we want to get quite saturated in the amount of red and orange that we have. This is probably the most saturated part of the whole zone. I'm using some vermilion red, winsor lemon, just a small amount of lizard crimson. Quite a bright yellowish orange. You may even lighten it with titanium white. I think as we start moving down into more of these mid tone colors, it becomes quite a bit more muted. We definitely want to start graying out the levels, bit more burn tamber, a bit more tran blue and white to lighten it back up. We should get color. We can just add a little bit more red as we started transition back into some of those shadows. Now, for the really light areas, they get pretty close to white. Again, we don't want to go all the way there, yet. Everything is muted so far in terms of kind of like the brightness. So we don't need to go to light, Jess yet. But just hinting at some of these light tones coming up here. We need to blend very softly into this yellow strip that we've got a bit of a crease there, casting a bit of a shadow, and we've also got that slight shadow just underneath the jaw line kind of helps to separate the high light on the neck from from the jaw. I'm going to move on from the skin tones and start to work a bit more on the shirt. Now that we've put in the colors of the skin, it started to create much more of a separation between these two zones, which is all well and good. Now, the color of the shirt is what you'd call white, but one of the rules for painting things that are white is to never actually use completely white paint. Because then it will look very black and white. In fact, we can see a lot of Other colors within this white shade. The colors are actually very similar to the shade that we have in the skin tones. It's just going to be predominantly quite a bit lighter. So we're going to be using quite a bit of titanium white. There's no way we can avoid not using the white. But if we look, it's very warm, quite gray as well, but got strong yellow hints in there. So we're going to be toning it down, creating our shadow color first. We're going to take some burn timber, small amount of ultramarine blue, and then we're going to be mixing that in with some vermilion red, maybe some yellow ocher and winsor lemon. Then we're going to be mixing that all with some titanium whites. So we're just going to try this color out. I think that may be a little bit too light, so let's tone it back down with some burn timber and timing blue. I think this may be good. I may just increase the saturation levels a little bit, bit more of million red. Let's just use this. That's not too bad. We're going to be covering over the majority of the surface here. Again, this is going to be our shadow color. A good way to judge whether you've got a decent color to use is that it needs to be quite a bit totally lighter than the skin tones that we have in the shadows. If you can get nice separation between these two tones, it's going to be somewhere close. Skirting the highlights that we have. Going to need to get quite a bit lighter before we can put those in. Now I can also see a lot of subtle variations in tone. In here. Obviously, we've got the very subtle creases, but even in the flatter planes of the shirt, we start to get a lot or just slightly in this little zone here. I'm going to be putting in that separation there. Maybe putting some subtle hints of some other varieties within these zones. Again, it doesn't matter if it's not exactly the same as what we see in the reference. Maybe we can even get some strong red, getting a bit of a reflective light the very top here. It's putting in some strong that blend into some of these other tones that we have. Going back to that darker color to put in that shadow. Now, we do have quite a bit of a more definitive shadow just on the underside here. Putting that in, it's going to be a pretty sharp edge as it curves around. Something along these lines, and then we can start to just pick out certain parts, which may be just a little bit lighter to taking some more titanium whites, increasing the tonal level here, adding a very soft highlights here and there, just some parts which are sticking out a bit, a tiny bit more lights. We want to be blending them across, getting some nice smooth transitions going. And for the lighter areas, again, we're going to be taking some more titanium whites, kind of mixing it into this rough mixture. We're going to start increasing the levels of light here. I May just tint it ever so slightly with some yellow ocher, maybe touch a windsor lemon, just to increase the warmth. It's not quite such a harsh edge. There's a little bleed between these shadow colors and this intense highlight. Just going to work the edge ever so slightly to create that. Okay. So for the other side, again, this area is mostly in highlight, but we do have some pretty strong shadows as the shirt curves around. So seeing some deeper colors here, it's got slight shades of red and yellow coming through. So we're going to be lightening the whole area. But I want to make sure we're getting some of that saturation in there. Small amounts of yellow ocher and zar and crimson. Maybe a little bit light. I'm going to try and tone that back down. I want to continue that as we come up and around this shoulder area. As we start coming closer and closer to the areas in highlight, again, we're seeing a lot stronger colors in the shadow, so getting a bit of this pinkish orange. We can even start adding some more yellow o here. The thing about white is that it is very reflective, so the colors that we have around it will be influencing a lot of these tones, and we can see stronger yellow colors in this larger area coming out of shadow here. So we're going to be putting that in. Again, stronger shadows just underneath. This little crease that we have. We do want to be paying special attention to our tones. So we don't want to go anywhere too dark. Everything has got to be lighter than the skin tones that we have, so we've got to be constantly keeping that in mind as of putting down these colors. There needs to be a definitive separation between these tones. Now we need to start transitioning a bit into these lighter colors. We're going to be just tinting this ever so slightly with ronacu magenta, just giving it a slightly pinkish cast, and we want to be using this color in this area, blending that softly into some of these yellows. Again, it doesn't have to be quite so even, but at the same time not too rough either, there's going to be very subtle folds and tiny creases that will be affecting the way the light comes across this area. One of the things about this sleeve area that we're working at the moment is that the tonal separations that we have in the folds in the craters here are just very dominant, more so than the art in our reference. You're going to be trying to the different tones, make the transitions a little bit softer. And generally lighten this area. You're going to be pretty much blocking over the surface. I'm going to get a soft transition into this shadow as occurs around to very red shadow, lot of reflective light in there. Maybe you can even put a bit of yellow ocher in there as well. Obviously, the more we come round into the highlight, the more white that we need to have in our mixtures. Now that we've pretty much gone over the whole area and added some color to it. It's a good idea at this stage, just before we finish, take a step back and view the painting as a whole. You're going to be trying to view it with fresh eyes to see basically if there are any improvements to this initial stage that you can put in, that will benefit the painting in the next layers. For me, I've analyzed it for a little bit, and I feel that we can just increase the saturation levels of the side of the face in highlight. It's looking very gray, a lot of cold, muted colors. If I look at the reference photo, I can see quite a few much warmer hues coming through. We've got some really nice pinks coming through under the cheek bone and some more yellowish colors coming from the shadow of the lower part of the jaw. I think putting these in now we'll just help the painting in the next stage as we've already got the nice tonal transition between those two tones. Then we can just alter the intensity 18. Day 6: Lesson 18 - Refining : Welcome back to day six. This is the second day of applying some color. I've left it for a couple of days and now the paint layer has become touch dry. It should be fairly easy to work over the top and start creating some layers. In this layer, we're pretty much going to follow the same structure as what we did the day before. I'm going to start working on the head, try and get a lot more affinement in there. Then once I'm fairly happy with how that's looking for this layer, I'll move on to work on the neck and shoulders. The goal for this there is that we want to start refining some of the colors, start building up a bit more of a three dimensional form, so definitely increase in the total contrast of all these different colors, maybe starting to get in some textures in there as well. The colors that I have out on the pallet are exactly the same as the previous layer. What I wanted to do to begin with is just to start by increasing the tonal intensity of some of these highlights. I'm going to be working in these areas on the forehead and the top of the nose, and maybe the cheek as it starts cving around, I'm going to start intensifying that, and then I can work on the colors around that. That will give me something to work with to judge how all the other tones should interact with it. To begin with, I'm going to take some titanium white. We can put that on the palette. As you can see, I'm using a size two ivory flat is a little bit smaller than the ivory dagger brush we were using before, should give us a little bit more control. So I've got some titanium white. I'm going to be warming this up a little bit, so we're going to add maybe a touch of Windsor lemon. And let's try some milion red. We don't want too much of these pigments because we don't want to overpower the white that much. That's looking very yellow. I'm just going to add a touch of a lizard and crimson. Not too much of this color again, it's quite strong. So I think we've got the right sort of shade, but we want to lighten it again. So adding more titanium white off to the side, Letting that mix with the color on the bush. I think this color should be good. So we're going to begin by just highlighting these areas. You can see how much lighter this is than the previous color we put down, so it's going to make quite a significant difference. So we've got that sheen off the forehead, gest in this right corner above the eyebrow. We can even extend it a bit further down into the eyebrow. Leave something to work into. And then to create a smooth transition to the areas surrounding it, and going to deepen the color with some more of these reds. Maybe add some yellow ocher in there as well. I'm going to kill the saturation a little bit with burned timber. One of the dangers of doing this is if you make everything really saturated in color, then it lose the effect that the saturation needs to have. In part, you do want to kill the saturation a little bit so that those other areas which are really saturated can really pop out. I'm going to lighten this color a little bit with titanium white. And then I may just increase the amount of yellow okra in here. Get a fairly warm tone, just coming down the side of the slide of the head. Again, I'm applying this paint quite thinly. I'm spreading it around quite a bit. This is so that we're leaving our options open, so if you want to layer over this later on, it's going to be quite easy to do that. St paint is a lot harder to work over the top of. We need to start conveying a bit more of the shape of the right eye. The eye sits quite deep in the eye socket. We've got a pretty prominent contrast between the area just above the eye and then the brow area. It's quite light coming at the top here. Then we want it contrast strongly with some of those deeper tones, deep reds and browns beneath it. Again, I'm going to be working into the eyebrow a little bit because we do have some of the skin showing through underneath and it needs to all work together, be the same tone. Let's get a bit more of this light color and we can start by increasing the light intensity est of the cheat bone as it curves around here. It comes up towards the eye. ' a So we're going to need some deeper tones for those darker shades within the eye. I'm going to be taking burn umber, let's mix that with tramon blue. Then let's tint it with crimson. Maybe a touch of as well. Mix those together. I also may just add some yellow ocher, g est off to one side, and mix that in. This is the tone that we're going to be putting down on this side, we're going to be blending that into some of other lighter tones that we have. Let's continue this yellowish mid tone, maybe just get a little bit darker. I can see we've got some pretty strong and saturated colors coming through in this one. I've just added some yellow ocher, got some vermilion red here or a warmer red. Just putting that down here. It's going to be a little bit lighter than some of the deeper shadows that we have. We can put those deeper shadows just in the very crease on this side. Using the blade of the brush to get that nice chiseled edge. We can bring that up slightly. I'm going to need that darker line to continue all the way around. It becomes quite narrow on this side. And with this mid tone, we can start to kind of reshape that area to how we like it. So again, we want most of these transitions to be quite smooth. Not really any harsh lines apart from that line separating the eyelid. I'm going to continue working around the eye, start getting some of these light tones within the nose, pretty much the same process here, starting off with this light color, and then we can work our way around it and get all the varying shades of mid tones within this area. We've got a very subtle line that just hints at the side of the nose. We've also got that lighter color which comes up around this little area here. We can use this fairly neutral mid tone color. I think we can even lighten this a little bit, just adding touch more titanium white, and we can use this in transitional area right here. Because it's right next to two areas which are in intense lights, should still show up a little bit darker. We'll create that separation between these two zones. We've got a fairly dominant shadow, es, little corner bit, so we can use this darker color. In here and it curves around following the curvature of the face. Again, it's not entirely a harsh line there is a, very slight blend going on between these two tones so we can just work the surface a little bit. Let those colors mix together. Okay. Let's begin to work a bit more onto the eye itself. We need to get quite a bit more detailed here. I'm going to still use this ivory flahad brush to begin with, and we can use this to put in the main blocks of color at first, so I'm going to start by putting in the highlights just across the center part of the eye. And the upper fold as well. Then we can use more of the mid tones, more of these pinkish fleshy tones to just transition and badly graze in the surface using the corner of the brush here. I've rotated it slightly, and I can get a much more precise mark that way. So the other side, again, it falls into some pretty deep shadow, but nothing too dark. Maybe we can use this deeper or richer tone of red for this area, again, just marking in the basic shapes. Then once we've put those in, we can begin to work the surface a bit more, making sure we've got those transitions correct. You just pulling and pushing the colors into each other until it looks how we like it. I'm going to work in a bit more detail. I've got out the ivory rigger brush I'm using some liquid in the mixtures as well. Liquid will help the paint flow, make it easier to spread around because the brush isn't very strong, but this is a really good brush for putting in some of those really precise marks. Where the creases are, for example, you can draw and really thin lines here. Of course, we don't want these lines to be so sharp against their surroundings, so we need to get a slight blend going on, especially in the areas above it. So I'm going to try and work the surface a little bit and try and create that soft edge, pretty much just tapping the surface. We don't want to lose its definition or anything like that. But hopefully just push into the surroundings. We can also use this on for the eyelash. Right at the base of the eyelid where the eyes start coming out, we do have a rei glow. Again, it's pretty subtle, but we can just put this in the blended out ever so slightly. It's these tiny little details that do help to round out the overall figure or the overall form, can make it look that much more realistic. These tiny little hints of red showing where you probably wouldn't have thought to put any. I pretty much is going to follow the same process for the lower eyelid. I'm going to use the rigger brush again for the thinner areas. I got that quite bright highlight on the lower eyelid at the very top. It's catching quite a bit of light here, but not too much, so that's pretty much all I'm going to do there. Then as it goes back into the shadows, we can start blending it into some deeper reds and oranges. As I mentioned before, around the eye, the skin is very thin, lets a lot of the blood underneath to be illuminated, creating those really rich tones. U. I do think we need to get a bit darker for some of these areas. Right at the fold here, I mix a darker tone. It's got more burn time brown tran glue but I have mixed it with a bit of a lizard crimson to give it that the warmth. Put down a bit and then we can blend that out with the rig brush just by slightly going over the surface. And I think we can also use this tone just underneath that the lightest part of the eyelid. So I'm pretty much just tapping this. It's going to create a pretty uneven mark, but very thin. Moving on to the ti duct, I think we can lighten this area quite a bit more. We've pretty much got all the dark tones in already from the previous layer, but I'm going to add a bit more of these more saturated reds, just hinting at them in a couple of places. Then we can just start to increase the definition of these areas. I'm going to add a stronger highlight with some of this white color. And then we need a stronger shadow separating these two zones as well. I'm going to also increase the brightness of the cornea of the eye, the whites of the eye. By adding this in. We need to extend this round a little bit. I'm going to leave a slight shadow just at the very base to separate it from the eyelid. And we do have a shadow that extends down from the eyelashes. So going to leave a shadow. In this part, maybe we can get a bit more yellow in there. We got a stronger separation between these two tones here. L et's leave the eye there and begin to work a bit more in the areas above it. Let's start with the eyebrows. Now that we've got this area a little bit wet. We do have something to work into. I'm going to go in with this darker shade of red, reddish brown color. We can use this to begin putting in some of the deeper shades eyebrow is a little bit thicker. I'm using the ivory flad brush to do this again, making short little flicks with my wrist to try and get uneven and feathered edge. I'm going to be extending this over and into some of the skin tones. And again, we don't want this to be quite so even either. There's going to be a lot of gaps and breaks in this zone. I'm just looking at how far over the corner of the eye this eyebrow extends. It goes a little bit further. So I'm going to take that tone just a bit beyond the very edge. So we can use something like this. Now I'm going to mix another color. I'm going to take some vermilion red, and I'm going to mix that with Quaca. Yellow cha and whites. And I may add in let's just warm it up with some alizarin crimson and winsor lemon. You want a fairly light orange pink mixture, and this we can use for the center part of the forehead. This area isn't quite as light as that sheen across above the eyebrow. Well I'll start spreading this around, pushing this into that lighter tone. Again, at the very top, we've got more of a reddish shadow being cast by the hair. We're going to be putting this in now. Start blending it across. It's got a deeper red color here. Again, we're going to be blending it into this mixture. As we start moving a bit further over to the left hand side. You start transitioning into more of an ochre color. I've got another color mixed out here. T we can get a little bit lighter. It's got a lot more yellow och in there. I have also just killed the saturation a bit with burner. Start blending these two zones together. It's going to be a very gradual and subtle transition. As we start to a bit more into the shadows, you can see increasing the amount of reds. In here, we've got a very reddish orange in this transitional area. Even in the shadows, it doesn't become too dark. So think we can use this brownish red color just transition into here. Again, it's going to be pretty gradual for the most part. We've got a very subtle highlight just extending out right above the eyebrow. That's very very subtle that highlight, so we can push a lot of those shadow colors into that area. So as we begin to move more into the shadow side of the portrait, we can see a lot of these shadows have very reddish tones. We've got a slight little highlight just above the eye here. Again, we've got to be a little bit careful because we don't want to go overboard with the highlight. Uh We do have some pretty strong, saturated reds, I'm going to try and put that in now. A lot more of 1 million red in here. Just put in a little bit. And then let's get in that deeper shadow on the other side. To blend back into this tone. Again, we're going to try and keep this relatively light. We need to look at the surrounding areas and we do have the crease for the eyelid at the top of the eyelid, which is significantly darker than even the shadow side of the skin here. We need to be keeping that in mind and leave room to go even darker so that that crease will show up. Got a lot of warm reflective lights coming out of this area as well. I just getting some stronger reds on this side of the head. Again, we got to keep everything pretty muted in this area. Nothing too strong. So Let's go back to this rigger brush and some liquid. Use this darker tone more burn timber and tran blue in here. Let's try and establish that crease a bit more. Maybe we can get a bit of a lizarin crimson and ronchm agenda just to give a slight reddish. Again, just push those edges, create a very sharp but soft blend go between everything. Again, we are going to want some of these tone just coming in between the eyebrow area. If using some of this lighter reddish brown, putting in some of those skin tones, darker skin tones in amongst this darker area, so we can show some of that skin showing in between some of the hairs of the eyebrow. So we can take some of this darker color once. We've got down the skin tones. We can go ahead and just dark in a few areas, using the same technique, just tapping more or less with the blade of this brush here, getting in some of those darker tones to indicate the eyebrows. Again, it's got a bit of red in this toe. Working in and around the eye, let's go to the bottom, then I'm going to start putting in some of these warmer red tones on this side. Again, just establishing those colors and going to work them in a bit better once they've got the other tones. Got some light more pinkish flesh tones on this side as we start facing more towards the light. And we do need a bit of that shadow just coming on the underside here, extending outward. Working a bit more on the eye. Again, we're going to be generally lightening some of that shadow color. To begin with, let's take some of this murky pale color. This is what we're going to be using to lighten the white of the eye. So it looks significantly lighter, but it is still quite a murky color. Ly. And this is going to provide the base to blend into. Once we got that in, let's get ale b d still, similar to some of these flesh tones we're using. I think we can get even darker than that. I want to start blending into that we or that lighter color. It needs to be a fairly sudden transition it's not quite so gradual. B at the very bottom is very subtle again, but I do see some reflective lights. We got an orange glow just coming in on the bottom here. You can put a more vibrant orange down here and let it blend in. It's going to be barely visible again, but that's another one of those small little details that will make a bigger difference than you think. Bit of orange in there. Then it's going into that really dark color to re put in that shadow to define the edge of the eye. With that, I think we can move on from the eye area. Let's begin to work on this triangular area of light that we've got on the left side of the face. Again, I'm going to start with the lightest area. It's not anywhere near as light as what we've got on the right hand side, but it's quite saturated a lot of reds and oranges again. I'm going to start by taking some of the million winds lemon, lizard and crimson. Let's use this is a very strong envibnt red or orange. We're going to be putting that just along the edge. This can act as the transitional shade between these tones again between the shadow and the highlights. Then we can also get a slightly more pinkish shade at the very top, get in some of that variety in hair as well. I think we can also start lightening this shade a bit. Now we've got down the base color, and we've brought it all the way up to the eyelid. But with this base color, I think we can just lighten it a little bit, especially as we come just to highlight this bone that comes up in the corner of the eye here. Let's try and get some nice blends going to round out this form. Pretty often, I'll just wipe my brush clean before I start. Blending these out because I don't want to keep adding more of that color. A cleaner brush just helps move what is already there. Around a little bit more. You just get bit more control with you blend if you do it this way. Putting in some stronger reds here as well. You can see some very strong vibrant colors just in this shadow part of the face again. I'm using pretty much pure vermilion red to put this in. But because it's sitting over the top of fairly dark, color that is influencing this vermilion red we're putting down. The layer is quite thin as well. Showing a lot of what's underneath, which is making it is why it still looks like it's in shadow. Even though I'm using vermilion red. We do have some pretty definitive shadows just coming in the corner part of the eye here. I'm going in with some darker tones to establish that and we need to blend those into or some lighter but kind of deep reddish tones. The transitions are quite subtle, but let's get some more vermilion red, stick that in here. We need to get that really vibrant and bright shade just on the edge of the nose. So just as it turns into the highlight, we've got this very warm and saturated color. Let's try and transition that around. And then we need to blend it into some more, more muted tones on the other side. Again, it needs to be a little bit lighter than that very dark tone we've got for the of the eye. I'm going to go back into some of that light tone, that really intense highlight color, and I'm going to push back against those reddish tone or vibrant tones that we've just put down, get a slight blend going. Try and lose any of the harsh edges that we may have Now on this side of the nostril on the left hand side, this is predominantly in shadow again, but we do have some fairly light tones, more of these reflective lights, pretty much that we can use to give this area some definition. So it's going to be a little bit lighter than that shadow of the crease coming around the nostril. We've also want to leave a little gap for that shadow which would be on the underside of the nose as well. Coming up here, moving into those rich colors, I'm going to be working in a bit more detail here. I'm going to switch brushes to the rigger to give us a little bit more control. Give a little bit of a highlight est of the very rim of the nostril. As it curves around here and go into some of that deeper shadow and maybe darken this area as it curves around. I think we can also add a little bit more light to the center part of the nose as well. We don't want such a hard line going between the bridge of the nose and in the end of the nose, but there is a very subtle definition going on there. Can extend this a bit further. The shapes of our shadows and highlights here is what is really going to help give the form of this area. So how the light curves around the form is going to provide a lot of shape to the nose here. So paying very close attention to the reference photo to make sure we're getting most of that correct. I'm trying to pick out a lot of different color groups. So I can see just at the corner here, we've got very strong reflective lights. Of course, there are a lot of differentiation within the hues here, but I'm just going to block it in with this color tone and then above it. We've got that lighter pinkish fleshy tone. That comes up the side of the nose here. Just trying to see those separations of values O Now, I think we've got a lot of the right tones around this area. I'm going to start by lightening it a little bit further, particularly on this area at the top. Get a bit of a light and yellowish color coming here. May just tone that do ale bit. Again, I think we want to to f. Let's just also put in that really bright glint just along this tip of nose with some thicker white paints. Again, I don't want it to be so harsh against the surrounding areas. I'm going to go around the edge and make subtle blends in the k. So I'm going to leave the nose there and move on to some of the other areas. Let's continue going a bit further down the left side of the cheek. Again, I'm going to be starting to put in a bit more of these vibrant reds within this zone as we come down towards the mouth. Oh. We just want to be hinting at some very subtle different shades within this area without them being too dominant. I've got maybe a darker shade in the center part, not quite as saturated with red, and then on the edge. Now you can get a little bit more of an ocher color coming very subtly. That is pretty strong. We probably will tone that down this color. Might just establish that tone first and then blend into it to tone it down. This is almost like we've got a bit of a reflective light coming on the draw line here, which might not be such a bad thing. I might might be good to emphasize that sort of thing. We're going with a bit more of a darker tone, try and blend into that. Again, we're still using pretty sparing amounts of paint in these areas. We're not going too far with anything. Just keeping our options open, if you want to layer over it and change the change how it looks, and we have the option to do so. So I'm liking how that's looking at the moment. I think it's going in the right direction. So now just following the different tones that I see. We've got a slight highlight that just bleeds over from the other side here. It's subtle, but again, it does stand out quite a bit. This little section just above the lip between the nodes, is quite a complicated area, a lot of different shadows and hues coming through here a lot of very s variations. So we're going to take it step by step. I'm going to begin by putting, I can see we've got a very yellowish transitional shade between the shadow of this ridge and the high light. I'm going to go in with some of this stronger yellow color, mainly yellow ocher, touch of 1 million red, and Winds a lemon in here. I'm going to try and blend that into some of the highlights. Can even see some pinkish shades through here as well. We probably don't need to get anything looking exactly as it is, as long as it's somewhere close, it'll look. Making sure we get all the shapes, right. I'm going to switch to the rigger brush to give us a bit more control as well. In fact, once again, let's start by putting in the highlighted areas. So it's going to be marking in the zones first with this larger brush, and then we'll have something to work with to try and get the other shades in. A key thing I'm noticing is constant really saturated red color coming through between as we cross over from high light to shadow. There seems to be a prominent throughout the whole. So we're going to be doing here, adding in some of that red And this shadow is not a dark shadow. It's more of a mid tone with some lighter streaks coming through. So going to be pretty sparing with our dark tones in this area. Okay. I'm going to move a bit further onto the lighter side of the face, working on the cheek a bit more. Going to extend some of these lighter tones down a bit more into some of these mid tones as it curves around here. A. We do have some of those pink sitting underneath. I'm going to go into some of this mixture that we have. And use this to establish some of the tones sitting underneath here. Again, we want this area to appear quite smooth. So no jagged edges or anything like that. Start blending up into those lighter highlights. As we start moving down the side of the face here, we want to be getting some of those creases that we can see. They are very subtle, nothing too dominant here. But we do have a definitive lighter area just the corner of, line, and that definitely needs to be light in the rest of it. Using some more of these midtone flesh colors that we have on the palette, going to be using those to put in the shadow side of those zones. Then hopefully, this lighter color we put down, we just sit against it, creating a bit of a bit of a separation there. So we do have a strong and definitive der mark just sitting underneath the jaw that separates the jaw from the neck. I'm going to be putting this in with the pretty dark tone that we have, cutting across with the blade of the brush. Then it moves pretty sharply into more chary mid tone colors. Blending across there. I've been working a bit more on the chin here, and as you can see, I've got the familiar theme of working with some deeper reds into light oranges and then into that warmer fleshy highlights. But one of the things that I'm also looking out for paying special attention to is I'm trying to see if there are any reflective lights within the shadows that we can use. I'm seeing a lot of these quite deep red colors coming out along this side of the chin, and again, it's within the shadow side of the head. So they're going to be pretty dark. I've just put down some Million red. Here, I'm going to try and push those back a little bit with some of these dark tones. We can also put those dark tones just underneath underneath the lips here as well. This area causes a pretty prominent shadow. But again, we got some strong red toned reflective lights coming through within this shadow area that we can put in. Again, they're not going to be very bright. But they are going to be quite saturated. Then I also think we can start to increase the intensity of this highlight. I'm just going in with some thicker titanium white on this light mixture. We can layer over the top here. Again, this is one of the perks of starting with a thin layer of paint, and then we can work over the top with thicker layers. We'll be able to retain a of the intensity of that color without it blending too. I think this area is looking pretty good right now. Now before we move on to the last feature of the face, which would be the mouth. While we've got the skin tones out and I want to work a bit more on the ears. Again, these are mainly obscured, so we don't need to be too precise with these, but we do want to definitely refine this area a bit. I'm going to begin with some of the lightes lighter yellows just to highlight some of these areas. And we see a lot of reds and oranges, again, lots of vivid, bright colors coming through. We're going to do the same again on the other side. Again, this is in much more shadow, but I think we can lighten it a little bit. Get a bit more of a definition on this side of the head. Some of that list, and that's pretty much all we need to do there. Let's move on to work a bit more on the lips. Again, I think a lot of the colors are pretty close. I just want to probably lighten the whole thing. It needs to become a lot more saturated with reds as well, and maybe lose some of the definition going be the skin, the lips, make it a lot more. Get rid of those harsh edges and lines. Let's use a bit more of these red colors. I'm going to make a bit more of this shade in here. Use some of all the reds and let's darken it with burn timber, touch of ultra Maron blue. Let's go over the shadow side of the lips here. Should be a little bit lighter hopefully. Let's push it up into the skin tones and that harsh edge that we had. We get a few very subtle lighter shades in the middle there as well. And the same on the other side. Bit more of those reds, bring the whole thing across a bit more. We do have a bit of a stronger shadow peering just in the crease between the upper and lower lip, and it extends down just a little bit at the bottom of the lower lip here as well. Again, to get a bit more precision, we can switch ing the brush, start blending some of those areas out to some more precise shapes. And then with some stronger reds, let's put in some of the lighter mid tones that we can see coming through this zone. Again, we want a nice and more of a rough sort of texture here. The lips are going to be too smooth. Again, at the top of the upper lip, it's not going to be a harsh edge. You want that to bleed into some of the skin tones, very subtle and gradual transition going on between these two areas. Now just mixing a bit of a lighter shade as we move more into the areas in highlight. Again, starting to put this in with the larger brush. Then we can blend it out a bit with the rigger. And as we start to move back into more towards the right hand side, starts going into a bit more shadow, extends outward a little bit more as well. Again, trying to get that soft blend going between to round out, working those skin tones into that red. Once we've more or less put in the red tones, let's go and start to highlight some of these areas. We've got this pinkish tone that we can use in a few places. Start highlighting just a few tones. We don't want it to be too strong, so we want it to blend a with the red is there. We don't want it to lose its fire, it's seen become too pink. To avoid it becoming pink, we're going to be using a bit of winsor lemon instead that should keep up the warmth of the tone, but also make it totally lighter as well. You can use this and begin going over some of the reds to lighten some areas up slightly. I know you got the small highlights down. Let's intensify these. We got that stronger glint. We can use the stronger white colors. Up here and put a few flicks here and there as well. Again, a quit a of gaps between these strokes. So while they've got all the skin tones out, I'm going to move on and begin working more on the neck and shoulder area. This area should be a lot easier to do than the head, a lot less detailed features that we need to worry about. Again, I'm going to start this the same way that I approach doing the head. I'm going to begin by intensifying the highlights. In the lighter part of the head. Remixing our lighter color. I'm adding a bit of yellow ochre in here touch of vermilion red just to warm it up a little bit, and again, it needs to be quite light. Quite a lot of titanium white in there. Once we're happy with the shade that we've got, we're going to start by going over this zone, getting in that highlights. Again, brushing it in pretty broadly. We want to bring it right up to this darker shadow. We can get a bit more of a harsh line here to indicate that separation of the. We can bring that all w. Again, keeping the paint quite thin to begin with. As we start coming a bit further down, we start entering into a lot more of these warmer mid tones, a lot of ocher colors. We need to transition into these areas. I'm going to bring this highlight down a bit further than it needs to go. We've got to blend into. Bring it right down across here. So getting more of these earthy tones in here. So we're going to be trying to get somewhat of a smooth gradient going. But at the same time, we do have differing levels of variation. So sometimes the oak colors will extend a bit further into the highlight than other areas. So we don't want everything to be too smooth and the same. Again, it's worth paying pretty close attention to your reference so that you can see whereabouts those transitions occur. As we go further into the shadows, we can begin increasing the amount of red that we have in these mixtures. Again, we've got a lot of the stronger, more vibrant colors coming through just in the transitional areas between the shadows and the highlights. We can start increasing the amount of milion rezar and crimson in those areas. We do have that very slight shadow coming down the side of the neck, where you have that prominent tendon causes a very slight shadow, more of this earthy ocher color. Again, it's not a solid line, either you have a little bit broken in parts. You have that highlight just extending further around in certain places. Now, this area of the shoulder isn't quite as light as that vivid highlight that we've just put down. So a lot of these warmer earthy colors in there. We ought to be constantly trying to balance the tones and temperatures to the other areas of the painting. Now this area is in quite dominant shadow. Again, in that transitional area, getting some of these more vibrant and saturated reds and oranges. So moving on to work on the collarbone, I'm going to be putting in some of the stronger reds, just that the transitional areas again. Mainly the million red, just a touch of a lizard and crimson in there as well. Get that richness in tone. Now we need to blend this into that shadow mixture. F the highlight of the collarbone. It's nowhere near as light as some of the other areas. Much more of this yellowish ocher tone. So I've just gone in with a bit of yellow ochre, mix it in with a small amount of a lighter shade we had on the palette. And this is pretty much all we need for this area. Again, it's not too light, but it is light enough to be well defined against the surrounding areas. Can blend it out, and then I'm going to just increase the level of light in there, a bit more titanium whites in this mixture as it comes up, make it a little bit thicker at this end. And then let it blend into some more of these reds. For the most part, in the chest area, this is predominantly this shadow color, we're going to be putting in does have a few lighter zones within. I'm going to be mindful of those. I'm going to be working around those mainly. But blocking it out with this deeper reddish tone. This is more of the darker shade. In areas where we do have a bit of that reddish hue coming. This is what we're going to be concentrating this color. A lot of this has got a lot of octones in especially in the center part of the chest. We're going to be reserving this more redish shade for the darkest areas. Just makes a bit of a daco here, a lot more burned time red traen blue in here. We can use that for these areas just by the shirts. Let's get those deep tones. As I mentioned, we do have a lot of those cha tones coming through. Be adding to the touch more yellow ochre to this mixture, maybe a little bit more vermilion in there as well. Get a little bit lighter maybe with winds on. 19. Day 7: Lesson 19 - Detail : So welcome back to day seven. This will be the third day of putting some color into this portrait, and we're going to be continuing on from where we left off. We're going to be working a bit more on the hair and the shirt. Those are the two areas that we didn't get around to working on in the previous session, so we're going to definitely want to put a lot of refinement in those areas. We're also going to be putting in a few of the final details within some of the skin tones. Any of those minor adjustments that will just really help bring this painting to life. So I'm going to begin by working a bit more on the hair. Let's begin by mixing a few colors for this area. By looking at the reference photo, we can see that a lot of the hues are very similar to the skin, they're very warm, lots of reds, earthy yellows and brown, some oranges in there as well. You're on the whole, very similar to the tones you've been using for the skin. I'm going to start by mixing our darkest shade. So we can see some areas which are very close to black, quite a warm dark tone, but nevertheless, still pretty close to black, especially in the areas like the parting, and some of the areas where it sits a little bit deeper, gona gets folded over. Those areas are very dark. So we're going to start by mixing that color first. I'm going to take some ultramarine blue. And we're going to mix that with burnt umber. This is our standard darker mixture. Because it's quite a warm tone, you want to be adding in some red, I'm going to use some zar and crimson for this just to tint it to a warm and reddish shade, but it should still be pretty dark. So now from here, I'm going to mix another color, slightly lighter, a bit more red in there. I got some alizarin crimson, burn timber, trane blue, but it's got less ultramarine blue in there. Much more red and brown and we can also lighten it just a little bit with yellow ocher. Those are going to be our two darker shade, and of course, we can always tint these a bit later on. So to begin with, I'm just going to work over with this darker tone in those areas, and this is going to provide just a base for something to blend into. So as you can see, I'm using the dagger brush for this. It's a slightly larger brush, and we can get much more of a chiseled point and line thin line with this brush. So I think it will lend itself well to doing things like hair. We've also got a little bit of liquid that we're going to be using. Just in the initial stages to help the paint spread around a little bit because we're working over a dry surface, I just help increase the flow of the paint. It's just putting in some of those dark tones, following the curvature of the hair. That's very important. We want to make sure we get in the right direction, just pulling that darker paint out and over some of those lighter tones. You can see that we're getting some very textured marks. This brush that I'm using this ivory dagger is actually quite old. As you can see the bristles have slightly splayed apart, which is getting these very broken lines on the canvas, which is actually really useful for doing things like hair. We get that sense of unevenness and it just helps build a lot of the texture, lots of gaps in our marks, which is really useful for doing things like hair. So now that we've established more or less where all the darker shades are. Let's go and mix a few warmer colors and light colors. We're going to take some all and crimson.'s mix it with vermilion red. We're also going to want to mix it with yellow ocher. Maybe a little bit more vermilion red. This is going to be for the transitional areas just coming out of the shadow. They're going to still be pretty dark. Going to add some burn timber to this as well. It's got a lot of red in there, and we can just pretty much do the same thing, just following the curvature of the head or following the direction that the hair is going in, just make short little strokes, coming back out again, making sure we're getting in that broken texture. A key part of doing hair is just making sure we have differing levels of light. Some of these darker tones are not going to stop at the same spot. Some of them are going to continue on where the hair is sitting a little bit deeper. It's not all it's not going to be completely flat all the way, it's going to have different parts don't catch as light and other parts which catch a bit more light, just creating a very uneven surface. We can also do the same thing on the other side. It's getting in that darker tone. I'm looking constantly at the reference photo to make sure I get the and the right shapes here. Obviously, if you think about where the light is coming from, it's going to be casting a shadow on the left hand side, but this area, which is coming up ale bit is facing a bit of the light, is going to catch some of that and illuminate that area. I'm going to leave plenty of gaps in this little channel here where the hair lifts up and catches a little bit more light. It's also sometimes worth making a few alterations to the colors. I'm just getting a slightly lighter shade with some yellow ochre. Maybe we can even get a tiny bit of titanium white in there. Slightly lighter shade. We just want to start defining some of the more prominent shapes of the hair. This area on the left hand side is predominantly in shadow. We do just have a few whisky strands of hair, which stick out a little bit at the front. They don't sit flat against the forehead or anything. They lift up catch a little bit of light, and it is one of the areas which is probably one of the most defined of this area. So I'm going to be leaving a little gap underneath for some of that shadow. For the most part in this area on the left hand side, this is falling quite heavily into shadow. We're using some of this darker mixture that we had, pretty much just going over this whole area. We're going to be leaving a few gaps here and there because we do have a few lighter strands. Here and there, again, it's very muted. Can't really make much detail out here, so we don't need to be too precise with anything we do. As long as we get that differentiation, that texture, then that will be enough to give the impression of what this area is It does fall into or kind of blend in with the background. The background is very dark, so it's very hard to make out the kind of like the different shapes of hair that we see. So once again, ah, we don't need to be very precise with this area. Now that we've put in the majority of the darker tones. Let's go back and start to or relighten some of these areas with some more vivid colors. I'm going to take some yellow ocha. There's going to be quite a lot of yellow ochre in here. We're still going to be using some reds. Got some alizarin crimson here, bit more yellow ocha. Let's lighten this a little bit with titanium white and some windsor lemon. So with this, let's start to put in some of the lighter streaks that we've got coming through in this area on the right hand side. So can we being a little bit more careful with our brush strokes here? Because this is how we will really start to define the shape of this area. Also added a bit more titanium white to help it flow a bit more. Using the blade of the brush to draw that thin streak coming down. Good way to keep the brush quite chiseled, especially if they're quite old, because it does have a tendency to play a part and you get that broader stroke. You want to be keeping quite a lot of paint on the brush, and when it's loaded up quite a bit, you can see that at least at the very tip here, it's stuck together in a chiseled blade, and that is what I'm doing to try and get these marks. Just using the very tip to get these really thin, small little strokes. Obviously, the more paint we apply to the brush, the more it's going to stick together. Quite a bit of a highlights on this front area right here. I can also get a bit more of a mid tone like a lighter sort of mid tone. So milion red, a lizard and crimson, quite a bit of yellow ochre. We can get a more earthy color, some wind in there as well. You can see it's quite a bit lighter. And then we can use this in the transitional areas just before we come out of the shadow, or just before we come into some of those lighter tones, so we can just streak these in, try and blend them into those lighter tones we just put down because it is going to be a slight subtle transition because it is going to be the same strand of hair. It's going to be smooth. Let's try and curve these mid tones out from these really really deep shadows. Now, working on the hair to get the right effect that we're going for, is going to require a lot of layers. The danger is that we're going to work on this area quite a bit. It's going to become very thick with paint, very wet, it's going to be very difficult to layer over. As I'm working, I'm constantly trying to keep my paint mixtures quite thin and not work on them too much just to avoid that from happening. So once again, we can start to take some of those mid tones out and over the top. Some of those shadows that we've put down just to start the area a bit, giving it a bit more definition. I'm trying to work by putting in more of the midtones first, and then once we're happy then we can kind of layer over it with some of the intense highlights. So often find working from the insight outward in terms of tone kind of works a little bit better. As they move towards more of the wispy hairs that just stick out at the sides. Mostly it's in shadow, but we do have just a few areas which catch a little bit of light as they curve around here. What I'm going to be putting in right now. What I'm going to do is put this in because this is going to be sitting behind the dark hairs in front. I'm going to be putting these in and then we'll probably go back over it with some of the d colors just to push those back a little bit further. I'm going to be continuing some of those more mid tone colors a bit further down into this little corner area. Think that this is a little bit too dark. We want this corner to be quite a bit der than the surrounding areas. This side needs to be a little bit lighter to contrast. We can even extend some of these darker midtones a bit further over. Straight those into that shadow area at the parting. And just to further create that unevenness. That layered sort of texture. So over on the other side, I'm going to use more of this darker mid tone again, just to put in the areas in between. We've already put in some of the shadows, so using this color, I'm thinking we can just kind of define some of those edges just a little bit more create more of those transitions going between. Maybe we can just highlight a few of these areas a little bit more just by tapping with the brush in this area that sticks out a little bit more. So at the moment, I'm just remixing some of this mid tone color. I think overall by looking at this one, I think maybe we've just got a little bit too textured. So what I'm going to try and do is to just kind of work over the sce with more of a mid tone, push these colors back into each other a little bit. Lose some of the texture here, so it all looks a little bit flatter, smoother, without losing the definition entirely. So just lightly going over the surface with this mid tone, And hopefully, because we haven't used to much pain in all these areas, it shouldn't spread around too much, should retain a lot of the tones and hues that it had. We can start putting in a few of the highlights within some of these streaks as they come down here just to lift up some areas again. We've pushed a lot of them back, but we just need some parts to just catch and reflect a little bit more light just making short flicks, trying to get a very thin mark, just highlight in certain parts. We can also just even just tap ever so slightly. Getting quite a bit more titanium light just tapping with the blade should leave a pretty light pretty light mark. As I mentioned before, at the very front of the hairline, we've got a few of those wispy hairs that just stick out, and catch a little bit of light. I'm pretty careful, just trying to use the very tip, creating these tiny little streaks of this highlight color just where it catches at bit more light. You can accentuate some of those marks here. Trying to get them all going in different directions. So different lengths. I'm also going to switch to using this rigger brush, just to again, get a little bit more control with my marks. I'm going to be mixing more of a midtone color. Got some yellow ocher, alizarin crimson. And it's mixed in with some burn time brand, some liquid original as well. So we've got a pretty muted mid tone. It's fairly light in tone. But I'm thinking we can use this to put in some of the wispy strands which just overlap at different angles. For example, we've got some whisky hairs. Just coming up and around here. I'm just using the very tip of the brush, curving these marks, grouping them together. Maybe we can get a bit more red in there. Trying to make these as thin as possible. So barely graze on the surface, the liquid should help the paint flow. But I think you'll definitely need to use some paint thinner to put in these marks, otherwise, it won't show up. Get a bit lighter as we cut back across some of these zones. Into some of the skin tones as well. Got a few of these wispy hairs coming out of the ear as well. Just overlapping. These are the sort of details that give it that life look. It's not going to be perfect. The hair, it's going to have flyaway hairs that just catch a bit of light here and there, creature, breaking up some of these larger blocks of color. We want these hairs to appear a little bit darker against the skin tones. Because the skin tones are quite bright, the overlapping hairs are going to be just appear a little bit darker, then the skin tones. Whereas the hair, which is a b, the overlapping hair strands are going to just appear lighter against that. We need to alter our tones in accordance to what the hair is sitting over the top of. Now that we've got in some of the wispy strands. Let's go back and start putting in some of the more finer details of the hair. So we're still using the rigger brush. I'm just using a lot more titanium whites. This is to get some of the intense highlight glints, that will just be reflecting off some of the strands of hair. Particularly in this area, I'm going to be layering over the top. I'm going to have to use some thick paint here to get it to take over the surface because it is quite wet at the moment, so it'll be a little bit difficult to keep up that intensity. A. I think the hair is looking pretty good as it is right now. I'm going to move on to work on the shirt. What I'm going to do to begin with is just to start increasing the tonal contrast. I think we've got all the shapes we defined, but I just want to increase the levels of light. Especially on this area on the ryan side, which is in a bit more highlight. So looking if you compare the shirt to things like the skin tones, the shirt is very much lighter than the colors that we've got in the skin. So we need to try and convey that as well. So now that the paint is dry, we should be able to lay it over it and really start to intensify some of those light colors. I'm going to use or continue using the ivory dagger for this, and I'm going to take some titanium white. It's going to mix with some of the colors left on the brush, so it's not going to become pure white. But we want it to be. And I'm going to start by establishing those extreme highlights. So start on the right hand slide. I'm going to begin by establishing or re establishing the edge of the collar here. So again, using the blade of the brush, you should see that it's standing out quite a bit lighter than the color underneath. You can see it's got this corrugated shape, so some of the darker colors wear it before every little bump. So we don't have to as we're lightening this area, we can leave small little gaps to at some of those shadows. Some of that dark color underneath to show in between. So as we start turning down and away from the light, the highlights obviously become much less intense, and we're going to start reducing the how far all these come down. We can also use these light tones. I'm going to start by establishing a bit more of some of those lighter creases in this top part of the shirt. It comes down a bit further than I've I'm going to accentuate this light tone and bring it further around. It does start transitioning into some of those colors, more of these reds and yellows. Again, it's quite light still. And then we want to transition that further into more of the shadow mixtures. But again, these shadow mixtures are still going to be quite a bit lighter, and then some of the other shadows we've been using. We're just going to be picking out the lightest points in this area. Then again, I'm going to start by spreading out the paint quite thinly to provide room for me to be able to layer over this if I want to increase the intensity at all. So in this zone, it becomes quite ambi. We've got some very definitive intense lights coming through here. I'm going to be putting these in first and then we can start rounding out the With some of the darker shades. So you can also intensify some of these lighter areas on the sleeve here as well. So again, this is pretty much a pure titanium white I'm putting down here, establishing the high light side, and then later on, we will go back and round it all out with some of the mid tones. O So now let's start mixing some of these darker tones with some of the shadows. Again, we've got this color. I'm going to just tint it slightly a bit more red, and I'm also going to gray it out a bit with some ultramarine blue. Maybe a touch of Again, it needs to be fairly light so we can add some white to it as well. Maybe we can use this for some of the shadows. We're going to start by working on those areas in between some of those lighter shades and just work that in to that gap. Now, we need to get a slight transition going between this darker shade and the highlights to start rounding out that form of the crease. I think we can bring this color up a little bit in the middle portion bit here as well. There aren't really any harsh creases within this zone. They've all got a very slight blend going between all these shades. And then obviously some get darker than others. Maybe we can darken this shadow color a little bit here. Not too much. And then once again, let's try and blend that out. Just turning the brush upside down on its head. And we can work back and forth until we're happy with how the blend is looking. For this case, it actually doesn't catch much light according to the reference photo. It's going to remain more of this kind of midtone color, I'm just adding a little bit of light to this area. Going to be trying to get all different color varieties within this one. Adding some tones which are a little bit more yellow, some which are more red, and some more neutral brownish or earthy colors. Just trying to build up that color variety in here because the white of the shade. It does reflect a lot of the tones around it. So it's going to have all the different types of skin tones hidden within within the shades here, very subtle, but but again, those sorts of things do end up making a bit of a difference. To really start to highlight some of these areas. We're going to have to start using thicker paint. F these areas in the sleeve here, I'm starting to leave a slight and pasted mark, and that's and reflecting a lot of lights, making it look very bright. We need to do this just so it will stand out and it's better to do it when it's not quite thick on the canvas. Because again, it's a lot harder to layer over thicker paint than it is thicker paint. While the paint is still pretty thin, this is a good opportunity to really start to burn out some of these areas with some of these lighter tones. So I'm going to start layering in some thicker paints. I'm across the shoulder here, just to increase the intensity of light in this area. I'm going to make it a little bit uneven, to create some texture. It's not entirely smooth, it is yet more of a textured fabric. Going to be letting some of these darker shades just show through some of the gaps. Let's just see what effect this has can smooth out some areas as well if we get a bit too textured, create some very subtle creases in here as well. And then let's get some sly warmer mid tones. We can go back in and start pushing some of these lighter colors back a little bit. On the left side here, I'm just adding in a little bit of this white highlights just across these areas which catch a bit, to intensify that color. And also make it a bit more in keeping with the colors that we have on the right hand side. I'm going to move back and start to work a bit more with the rigger brush on this area. Again, just using the smaller brush to get a little bit more control here, using some thicker paint to highlight some of these zones. As I mentioned, these highlights become ale bit more sparse as we start moving further down and around. I think we also need to just intensify some of the creases as they come down here. So take a bit of this light color, just going to extend it down and around the color here, transition that into some of those lighter colors. I also think we need to do the same for some of these other folds as they come down. Can we bring in this one down a bit. This is not anywhere near white. Again, because we're going further around into the shadow side of the shirt, we're going to be using a lot more of the mid tones. And it's going to have quite a lot more color and color saturation in here, going to be using a lot more yellows and reds to just try and deepen the tone here. Bringing that round, we can get a little bit lighter as we come up here. Oh. I'll work on this area. I'm also going to just mix a darker tone very close to black again, and I'm going to be using this just in this area. I think we need to just crop the shirt at this little corner point here. R, hopefully, something similar to that skin shade that we had, that really dark skin shade. I'm just it so slightly. I'm going to move on from the shirt and begin to put in a bit more refinement into some of the areas in the face. On the whole, I think it's very nearly done. But there are just a few areas which I would like to tweak. For example, I'm not such a fan of the very bright oranges that we have in a few of these places. I think it doesn't quite fit with the skin tones that we have on the right side of the face. I would like to change those, make them a little bit more muted. Maybe increase the amount of red in them. And also in other areas. So I think the neck could do with a bit of refinement as well. Mainly just to lighten that area a bit. But the first thing I'm going to do is to actually work a little bit more on the intensive highlights that we have. So basically, I want to increase the light intensity of some of these areas. So on this little area of the forehead where the sunlight is glinting off the skin. I want to increase the level of light there and also in the cheek, maybe as well. So I've wiped the brush clean as much as I can, and I'm going to go into some pure titanium whites. We'll spread the paint out quite thinly to begin with. We want to take a slow approach to this, and I'm going to be using dry brushing technique. So the paint underneath is fully dry, and all I'm going to be doing is just going over with a little amount of paint just over the top. And when I'll be spreading it out quite thinly to lose some of its harsh edges. So just ever so slightly working that surface and the ends should just fade away into the colors which sit underneath. So that's all I want to know at the moment. I've wiped the brush clean of all of the white paint that we had. And this is essentially a clean brush, but we're just going to be working the edges again, just pulling out those ends, diffusing them into the surroundings. That maybe a little bit too much of an even shape even little strips. I'm going to go into some of the lighter kind of I try to match this color that we had. Again, using very sparing amount of paint, but it's got a bit more pink in there, and I want to just push back in certain parts into this strip. So then we can do the same thing for some of these other areas. Again, taking some of that white, putting down some marks and then we want to smooth this out, diffuse it into the background. I'm also going to try and widen this jaw line a little bit. This isn't using the white paint is more of this brownish midtone. Again, just s over the top, this brushing technique, widening. Bring it down and against the neck area. Then I also think we can take some of this white color again and just intensify the highlights just at the top of the neck and also narrow that shadow that we have coming down here as well. My, The next area that I would like to work on some of these transitional areas that I mentioned before, these very orange tones that we've got coming out between the shadow and some of the lighter colors. I just don't feel it fits with some of these lighter skin tones that we have on the right hand side. What I'm going to do is mix more of a neutral color maybe it needs to be a little bit more red or pinkish. I'm going to mix a new color. I'm going to start with the mean red. Mix that in here. And we're going to be adding a touch of yellow cha. I'm going tone it down, need to get pretty dark. So let's use some burned tumbrn here, and maybe some lizard crimson. Just using a small amount on the brush here. I'm going to just try this color out, see what it looks like. It doesn't seem to be too bad. I'm going to work with this for the time being. Cover over some of those orange colors. This one is a little bit more neutral in temperature, so it might end up working. Once again, using this dry brushing technique of just spreading the paint out very thinly across the surface. Maybe we can get a little bit lighter, taking some more titanium white, bit more of these yellows, yellow ocher, winsor lemon, and again, let's just tint it with a touch of nacena. And use that to blend across. Then we're going to get more of that pinkish tone. So more titanium white, gnacogita, lizard and crimson, plus mix with some of those yellows left on the brush. Let's get a little bit lighter here. And I'll push this color just a little bit further over. It's working in very small increments here. In fact, with this darker color, I may just increase the amount of burn tuber, isarin crimson, milion red. Mix that off to one side, and I'll just may use this in the shadow region just by the hairline. Again, just scraping over the top just trying to make it in keeping with the rest of the skin tones. Maybe we can use it a little bit in the corner here as well. Push it down. It doesn't matter if we go over some of those hair strands that we put down. We can always work into that again. I'm going to follow the same procedure for this area just in this triangular region. I'm going to be going over this orange toe with some of this darker color that we have. Again, we're using sparing amounts of paint here. To be honest, I think we can just get a little bit lighter in this region as well. So taking some of these lighter colors can always blend them out they are a little bit too strong. I think we need to get a little bit more red in here as well, so take some more of 1 million red and veering crimson. Let's get back in the transitional region. Stronger red color. The other areas that I think we can touch up is just this area in the eye on the left hand side. Basically, I think it's just got a little bit too bright. I want to try and tone it down. I'm going to be using the rigger brush, using more of a neutral color, so killing this reddish brown tone with a bit of ultramarine blue. I'm using the rigger brush to do this and we'll try this out. I'm just going to cut in a little bit. That's actually looking pretty good. It's pretty similar to the shade we had before. Just lightly scrubbing over the surface. To just try and tone down that lighter shade that we had. And I think that's pretty much all we need to do. I may just go ahead and get a bit more of a lighter shade in there, just in certain parts, not much. And I think we can pretty much leave that there. The other area that I'd like to work on, very tiny little alteration is in the part of the nose. I'm just mixing a deeper brownish red tone, bit of ultramarine blue in there again. I'm thinking we can just use this to crop into this lighter shade of the nose ever so slightly. Going to lighten on one side with some vermilion red. And I may also just lighten or widen, sorry, this nostril ever so slightly. I also want to just lighten a few of the areas, especially on the shoulder part here. It's not anywhere near as light as some of the highlights. And the stronger highlights in the other areas of the skin. For example, in this portion of the neck, it's nowhere near as strong as this. But I'm just going to lighten it a bit. You can use maybe some of this color, make it a bit with some yellow ocher. Let's just see if we can just lighten this zone just a bit. Get ale bit more titanium white in there. Again, we'll just scrap this over the top. And let's go into some of these deeper colors just on the side. Have something to blend into. I think we can also just get a little bit more red at the very top here. Go into some of these tones that we've already mixed and we'll blend into some of those lighter shades. The last area that I'm going to work on for this portrait is just going to be the loose strands of hair, which are going to be overlapping some of the skin tones. What I'm going to do is use the rigger brush and put in some of these dark tones. It needs to be than the skin tones because the skin tones are very bright. That's going to show up darker against it. Using more of this brownish color using the rigger brush. Going to use quite a bit of liquid in here as well, just to keep my paint mixtures quite thin. I want to be fairly easy to spread around here, so I'm going to make deliberate strokes with the rigger here. Overlapping this area. And then we're just going to highlight some of these hair strands in a couple of places. Maybe as it just comes down here, we're taking some pure white. This is the brightest value that we can use. I want to be highlighting these in a ps everywhere. We can put a few wispy hairs coming out here as well. Not going to be quite as light as the other areas. Something like this. And you can use your finger just to push some of those areas back a little bit. To finish this portrait off, the last thing that we're going to do is just to clean up some of the edges and give it that finished look. In a few places, we've extended over the line for where the skin ends, and also in the shirt as well, we've gone a little bit over. I want to try and clean those up. I'm going to just mix darker mixture, burnt tuber ultra and blue. Let's warm it up with just the touch of alizarin crimson. Use some liquid in there as well just to help the paint flow. Try and keep it pretty dark. And then we can just use the dagger to just work in against some of these areas, reshape them, get some nice crisp edges. I think I'm going to leave this painting here and call it finished. I can't think of anything else I can do to this to significantly improve it. When that happens, it's usually a good indication to set down the brushes. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this has turned out. I'm really liking the color shifts and transitions, along with the overall vibrancy of all the colors. I think that it's all working very well collectively without anything being overbearing. I also think that the tonal values are nicely balanced against each other, and we have a good distinctions between the lights and darks, providing a very convincing light source. I have artificially intensified the lighting dynamic, giving the piece a bit more contrast, but I think this further helped to round the form, making it look more three dimensional. 20. Day 7: Lesson 20 - Final Thoughts: Well, there you have it, that brings us to the end of this portrait course. I hope you find that helpful and that you've managed to produce something that you can be proud of. As I mentioned before, the human portrait is extremely difficult to paint, and one of the hardest subjects, and it's taking me a lot of time and practice to get to where I am now. So if you're new to portrait painting, first off, well done, there are a lot of artists who never even attempt it. So definitely well done for that. And also, don't worry if it's not a photo realistic representation just yet. That will definitely come with time and practice. The main thing that I wanted you to come away with from this course is the process and methodology of painting a portrait. So starting out in the sketchbook, breaking down and analyzing our reference photo to fully understand the subject, and then transferring that knowledge onto Canvas. I feel that having a process like this to follow really helps you improve a lot faster and achieve that success that you're looking for. So, once again, well done for making it through to the end, most importantly, I hope you've had fun going through this process with me and make sure to keep practicing, keep having fun with all painting, and I look forward to seeing you in future classes.