Monochrome Watercolor Portraits: A 7-Day Challenge for Artists

1. Introduction: 7 day Watercolor Portrait Challenge: Watercolor lives in a space between control and chaos, which is perfect for capturing the raw expressive nature of the human face. Hi, I'm Jane. I'm a watercolor artist from Slovakia. My favorite subject by far is the human face. Portraits are endlessly expressive, and painting them with watercolor is both joy and challenge. Over the years, I've experimented with many approaches, and one thing has become clear the fastest way to learn it is to paint a lot. That's exactly what this class is all about. Through the seven day challenge, you will build momentum and confidence by painting daily while simplifying your process and limiting your palette to just one pigment at a time. We'll start each portrait with a pencil thumbnail, breaking the reference down into just three tonal values, light, meat and dark. From there, I'll guide you through painting with watercolor, exploring effects, stylization techniques, and different ways to express personality through a single color. Class is designed for intermediate artists who are ready to practice their portrait skill in a consistent and creative way. I won't go deep into drawing fundamentals in this class, but I will include real time drawing demos and downloadable sketch if you want to just trace the sketch and jump straight into painting process. If you are completely new to portraits, I recommend that you start with my earlier class that covered all the fundamentals of portrait drawing and painting in great detail. But if you're ready to challenge yourself, create a beautiful body of work in just one week and unlock a new level in your painting journey, let's get started. 2. Class orientation: First of all, thank you all for joining this class. You've made a wonderful decision to challenge yourself creatively, and I'm genuinely excited to see what you'll create. Taking on a daily painting habit, even if it's just for a week, it's no small task. Each portrait demo in this class can take up to 2 hours depending on how much time you spend drawing and painting. So please know that it is okay if things feel a bit challenging at times. You might feel really proud of some of your pieces and others not so much. That is completely normal. And honestly, it's even expected. Watercolor is a beautiful medium, but is also a fickle one. Even experienced artists repaint their work sometimes. It doesn't mean that you're failing. It just means that you are learning. Every portrait, even the ones that you're not happy with, is still training your artistic muscle. So if a portrait doesn't work out the way that you imagine, do not get discouraged. Just move on to the next day. You can always come back and repaint it later once the challenge is over. Do not judge your progress until you finished all seven pieces. And of course, if you prefer to take longer breaks between paintings and complete the challenge at your own pace, that's completely fine, too. The next lesson, I will walk you through the materials that I'll be using for this class. So make sure to check that out and prepare your setup before you begin. After that, you will find seven lessons each for one day of the challenge. Each lesson includes the full drawing and painting process, so I recommend working alongside Ni As you Watch. These videos were filmed to accompany you as you paint so that it feels like we are painting together. For every portrait, we will begin with a quick pencil thumbnail where we break the reference down into three tonal values, light, midtones and dark. This step is very simple, but very extremely helpful. It builds clarity and confidence before we even touch the paint. Then we will move on to the painting using only one watercolor pigment. You'll see how to stylize your portrait through brushwork, water control, and small effects unique to watercolor. That said, feel free to stylize your portraits however you like. My results often reflect both intention and the unpredictability of watercolor, but you are welcome to try different approach. This is a project based class. So I strongly encourage you to upload your process in a project gallery. You don't have to wait until you finish all the seven portraits. You can start your project with your first painting, and you can continue adding the paintings as you go. I absolutely love reading about your experiences and how you're feeling throughout the challenge. I personally respond to every project, and your reflections help me understand how to guide you better. Okay, that's everything that you need to know to get started. I will see you in the next lesson for a quick materials overview, and then we will jump right into painting. 3. Materials: In this lesson, I will share a list of all the materials that I've used throughout the class. Start with watercolor paper. I prefer using caten paper and 300 GSM because it's more durable, it allows you to experiment with techniques. It can withstand more water, more experimentation. So I like to use this brand, professional watercolor paper by Windsor Newton, but you can use any caen watercolor paper. The size of my paper is 30.5 by 40.6 centimeters, so it's about a three size. You can use smaller size to be able to finish your portrait more quickly. But for me, this size is standard. Besides watercolor paper, I will use it's just paper for sketching. It is like regular printing paper. I cut it into smaller sized pieces, and I will use this to create those five to 10 minutes portrait thumbnails. Lastly, I use and always have on my table these tiny little cuts of watercolor paper. This just spare bits of watercolor paper that I used to test my paint and show you a bit of the brush strokes before I applied the brush strokes into the actual portrait. This comes in very handy. You will need some drawing materials, pencil and eraser. I use black wink. Those are very soft black pencils for sketching. But for watercolor paper, usually I prefer to be mechanical pencil. I have three types of erasers. This is a hard eraser. I use it to get rid of a pencil mark completely. Then this is a precision eraser. It is eraser in a pencil. You can do tiny little details with it. And this is kneadable eraser to lighten the sketch. That is what I most commonly use on a watercolor paper, and this is sharpener for your pencil. I have a masking tape here. I only use it to tilt my watercolor pad a little bit, this is a scalpel and I use it sometimes in just a couple of portrait bring some light and tiny little white details back into the painting. Since this is watercolor, you will always need a jar with clean water, you will need a absorbent sponge or the paper towel, something to wipe the excess water. We also need some brushes. The actual brushes that I paint with are mostly these two is two round brushes. One is Winsor Newton, the other one is linear. This one was cheaper. I do not really see much difference between these brushes. If you prefer to paint with different type of brush with flat brush, it's okay. You just need one larger size and one for smaller details. Preferably the smaller one should have a tip. You should have a wider, larger brush to apply paint to a larger area. So I use this professional watercolor, synthetic sable brush for that. I have a script brush. This has a sharp tip, and I just prefer to sign my paints with it, so this is not a necessary thing. And these two synthetic chip brushes, I do not actually paint with, but I scrub off some exo pigment because they're a bit rougher than regular watercolor brushes. So if I need to correct something or remove, I'll use this. So if you've got two round brushes, you're good to go. And then we have the actual watercolor paint. This is very important for me to say because this is monochrome painting challenge, which means you will only need one color for your challenge. Any color that you have is suitable to do the entire challenge with. Do not feel pressured to buy anymore paint. Important thing is that your paint the paint that you choose for this challenge cannot be something like yellow or orange because these are way too light. You need something that can produce a wide range of tonal values, you need to search for something darker like paints gray, Van **** brown. However, I took the opportunity that we have seven days and I tried to experiment a little bit because my studio is filled with these paint, some of them I never used before, I wanted to try what the portrait will look like if I use this or that paint. So I've chosen Mars Black, paints gray. This is lunar violet, Zois genuine, Prussian green, deep scarlet and purlin violet or my seven portraits and I will introduce each color as we go. I thought it might introduce some more fun into this challenge, but this is not a necessity for you. Some of them I hate and I will never use for creating a monochromatic portrait again. I will have my reasons which I will mention throughout the challenge. For mixing my paint, I use this plates. I prefer to have the plates white so that I can see the color. By the way, a full list of all the materials you will find down below in the projects and resources section, you can download it and check, but this is truly a low material class. I was hoping that you could just do the class with minimal amount of materials that you have at home. I think this is it. I will see you in the next lesson and we'll start our first portrait. 4. Day 1 - Creating a value map (thumbnail): Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first day of our watercolor portrait challenge. The main idea behind this class is to learn by doing. So we will be spending less time on theory and more time painting in real time, experimenting, observing, and growing through practice. We are starting right away with our first portrait, and I've chosen this beautiful reference photo. It is a profile view which I personally don't find too challenging. It's a nice, approachable way to ease into the challenge. Before I start painting any watercolor portrait, I almost always begin with a quick pencil thumbnail sketch. This is very simple but powerful step, and I found that it really improves how I understand and interpret the reference. Think of it as a chance to observe, simplify, and make a plan before the paint starts moving around. And I really encourage you not to skip this step, but also do not overthink it. Keep it quick and loose. This is not about perfection. It's just a map to guide your painting. Now, I go much deeper into tunnel values in my previous portrait class. So here I will just give you a quick recap. To paint this portrait, we first need to identify the areas of light and areas of shadow. That's all that we need to do. In between those, we have mid tones. These three basic groups, light, meat and dark are what we use to build our entire painting. Technically, there are many values between pure white and pure black. But for this class, I want to show you just three because they are enough to create a strong and beautiful result. Limiting your values helps you see more clearly, simplify your decision, and focus on what matters the most. Please follow along and we will create this tiny little value map from this reference photo together before painting our first watercolor portrait. First, I'm just going to follow some lines, try to do very loosely, but sketch this portrait. In a simplified way. So here is going to be here. And here, as you can see, I'm using straight lines as much as I can. It's going to be hair, here and here, and it kind of is going to fall this direction. But the hair is not our concern right now. It's more about the proportions of the portrait. This is very simple way how to sketch a profile view. But now we have to do some lines to map out where the eyebrows are here. This part I think is a bit too long, here is going to be our nose. It's going to carve out this line that connects the nose to the chin. We're going to now carve inside it. I'm going to find the entire mouth. Here's going to be a small indent for this area that's below the mouth. And as I said, you don't need to do this 100% precisely. We're going to focus on doing a better sketch later when we sketch on watercolor paper. I just want to place features. And this part, the e, I'm going to find and try to place this kind of simple geometric shape is like here, here, here, here and here. It's like like that to make it a bit more simple for us. And here we can find already the rest of the eye rest of the eyebrow. And here is check, check. And the ear a bit better placement than before. Okay. This is my very quick sketch. You can lightly I used a lot of these straight lines to help me find the features, feel free to either erase or leave them. Sometimes I leave them. I just now try to work a bit more clean than what I usually do just for clarity. All right. And now the most important part. I think the ears just a tiny bit smaller than what I sketched here. And here is this shadow area. So the neck will kind of start here. Here are three levels. So now that we have the outline sketched, the most important thing is to do tonel values. So first, tunnel value is white, and it's going to be the white of the paper. These are all the areas where with watercolor, we will not cover them with paint. We'll leave them white. So you can map them out actually. You can do, like, here's a bit of tone, but this area, for example, very lightly, this will be white. This will kind of have some sort of tone. Another area that will be white is this area here because these two areas are very close to the light source that's coming from here, and therefore they will stay white. There's a bit of a highlight here in this area around the eye, and then on the nose, this area is quite light, this one. Then there is area on the nose, two of them actually here and here. Now, this one is not like that. The nose curves, so the highlight will be here. And then this area over here is also going to be quite light as well as this area. Lightly, you can even sketch some areas that will stay white on the ear, here, here, and a little bit here, little bit here if you want to. Everything else will be covered either in mid tone or in dark value. What I do is after I notice, go over the reference and I notice which areas will be totally white. Then I will just lightly use my second value, which will be mid tone. Is going to be something like this. And then even with pencil, you can lightly use your pencil and kind of do some hedging everywhere else, but the areas that you just kind of assigned the lightest value, everywhere else, but kind of the areas that you now assigned is going to be white, you don't go in there, you can leave them out. But everything else will kind of have this mid tone value. Here, here. Because it's best for us if we simplify everything. And three values are not a lot. Even the neck will have Everything. Even the hair. I when I sketch, I kind of don't do the mapping of the hair very much, especially if they're chaotic like this. Even hair has values, of course, lightest, mid tones and dark, but it can be very time consuming to do them with pencil. I'm more or less focused on the face and the hair. I do a bit more abstract. Now that we have the mid tone value and the lightest value. Now we find areas that will have the darkest darks. That will be the value of the color that's very dark. Sometimes it's shading like here. The value of this shadow is very dark. So this is shadow that we will be adding here. But sometimes it's just the color of an object or some part of the portrait, like the eyelashes and eyebrows, which are naturally a little bit dark. And so it's everything that you can perceive as very dark or darker on your reference. There can be a gradient in between the mid tone and the dark value. You can also suggest that. You can notice that, you can add that to your reference to your sketch. You can add that to your sketch. Here is dark. Here is a slightly darker hair we do later. Now I do the face. When it comes to the ear, you can clearly see the dark values because these photos lucky for us, it has very strong light and so it is easier for us to identify where there is light and where there's shadow. This is very dark value here. But as we approach this area, the value is very dark here, but a little bit lighter in here, there's a gradient. I'm going to try to even notice that and do that in pencil just like I see it on the reference photo. Here slightly darker. And in between is some sort of transition between the mid tone and the dark value. And here, just some folds on the clothes will appear a little bit darker and the mouth, the upper lip will be darker, and then this area below, the lower lip will be darker. Other things will be more or less in mid tone. There's just slight darkness here on this area. And then hair, there are parts of the hair like here that are slightly bit darker. And then they get light as they turn away. And here it's just slightly darker, slightly darker here and around the ear, they're very dark. So we can just notice that we don't have to be precise about it, but this is done. This is our sketch. Sometimes I go and just clean the silhouette a little bit. Don't have to do that, but you can if you want to. This is my very simple imperfect mapping of my reference photo. This kind of mapping, I was hoping that we will do throughout the entire challenge because it helps us a lot. It helps me. Every time that you paint or draw something, you don't have to figure everything out on your first try and when we paint with watercolor, there's a lot of things to pay attention to like the flow of water, how wet or dry is your paper. And it helps a lot when you already familiarize yourself with the value structure of your reference. But I would like to keep it quick because some of you might struggle with time. We do a seven day challenge and every portrait will take a bit longer to paint. If you work on an initial sketch for 30 minutes, then you might not have enough time to finish your portrait that day. If you can, I highly recommend to do it. I highly recommend to do it as loose as you just saw me do it and try to keep this under 10 minutes and more think about what you're placing here. Then try to make a good drawing. I'm sure that all of you will have so much fun during this challenge. So after you'll do this, tiny little thumbnail, or we're going to sketch the outline of our reference photo for our final portrait on a watercolor paper, and I highly recommend to do it with a mechanical pencil, not the black wing that I'm using for the sketches. This is a very broad tip and it's very soft graphite, and so that smudges my watercolor paper too much. After we do that, we can do our quick portrait painting for today. 5. Day 1 - Portrait sketch: Lesson, we will do a portrait sketch on a watercolor paper as a base for our watercolor painting. When I draw, sometimes I place this masking tape underneath my block because that helps me to see proportions a little bit better, or you can also draw standing up that helps. This format of the paper is about 31 to 41 centimeters, so it's pretty large. It always helps if you don't stand too close or sit too close to your painting. When mapping out proportion, a little bit of distance can help. So let's do this. I'm going to use a very similar process like this one. Going to make the face slightly larger than it is on the photo, and I'm not going for 100% likeness. So yes, let's get started. I will probably start with mapping out these lines like before. Here, here's going to be the line for the eyebrows. There's going to be a line for the nose. And then this line for the chin and everything, mapping everything very lightly. This is gonna be mouth area. I've been f loose with this sketch. When I want to find this spot, this line and this line connect, I can sometimes do a vertical line to find out what it relates to here. So if I make a line here, no, that's bad. It needs to be here. That also helps me kind of position the rest of the face. Now I know that this is a bit too far. So I have to bring this a little bit closer to the face. This as well. And this should align with this. So it does. Luckily for me. Yes. I'm not really going to sketch many of these hairs. Here I just map out how they connect to the head and then I'll just let this part kind of flow. Not important. This is my very rough outline. It's truly rough. I have to now clean it up and I will do that with my needed eraser. I'll try to erase all of these imperfections and double lines, triple lines, and kind of go over the sketch one more time to create a better outline. I think the nose is very wrong. Still, it's not quite how it's supposed to be so it to reposition. Here. This internals, we can imagine one bone is being over here and then another one over here. I want to do this and then just go around this form. Sometimes for cleaning of the sketch, I might use this precision eraser to get better lines. A little cleaner lines. All right. I think this is very close to my final sketch. Did not take that long. I think it's 10 minutes. 10 minutes sketch. For our first demo, it will be just fine. Now, if you want to join me for painting, you can prepare all of your painting supplies. I will also take a photo of this drawing. Those of you that did not join me for the drawing exercise, they can copy or transfer this drawing to their watercolor paper directly and just join me for the painting part. I am excited to paint this portrait with you. In the next lesson, I will show you what color am I using for today's monochromatic portrait. And we will start painting it. 6. Day 1 - Watercolor painting (part one): Lesson, we will be painting our first watercolor portrait. My approach is pretty simple. I try to keep it to two layers. My first layer is very quick and loose. It helps me block in the mid tones and clearly avoid the lightest areas. The second layer is where I go in with the darker paint, adding the deepest shadows, details, and more definition. By the way, having a clear process like this and keeping it to just a few steps as possible. I can really help when you're trying to build a consistent painting habit. It removes the guesswork and lets you focus on just enjoying the painting. So let's get started. Now that I have my schedule ready, I want to show you what is my painting setup for this portrait. I've already showed you my materials at the start of this class, but the setup is also very important just to have the right flow so that the process does not slow down for you. In some stages of the painting process, you will need to have your block directly flat on the table. But mostly I paint with my masking tape underneath my watercolor pad, and that is to create a slight tilt so that the water can flow a little bit towards the bottom of the page. That is important for some parts of the portrait because it helps unify this wash of paint. I have my three brushes here. Since I'm right handed, most of my tools are always on the right hand side of the table. There's a sponge, absorbent sponge, my clean paper towels, my jarred clean waters, also here. And I have a simple this porcelain palette. This is just played from Ikea very cheap. I like to mix on porcelain. I want to start very simple with my first portrait and I'm going to use Paints gray for the first monochromatic portrait. To complete my setup, I put a little bit of the paint aside on my palette here. I also have my reference here usually on the left side so that I don't spill water on it or something. Besides the reference photo, I also need my a little sketch and color value map that I created, that's very important. I usually keep it here just above my pad so that I can see it properly because even if I did not have reference, with this little sketch, I could create a very nice painting. We created Chinese sketch using three values, we're going to do exactly the same with watercolor. But first wash, because this is day one, I'm going to help you a little bit and I'm going to first demonstrate how this is going to work not to the portrait but to a separate sheet of paper. Calor does not use white pigment. Usually it does not. You white value is going to be your clean paper. If you want to help yourself. Just like we mapped here, you can lightly map here the same areas that we did for the thumbnail here. You can't really get rid of the pencil. After you place paint on it, the lines will slightly shop. If it helps you, then do it and don't care for the tiny little marks that you're going to create on your paper. Like that, you can map out. And here just so that you barely can see. On the ear, I think the highlighted areas are so simple that I'm just going to remember where they are quite simple. That's my first value. We are not going to put paint where we have this area. We're just going to paint clean water in that area. Everywhere else, we're going to place our middle value. Middle value is what we call mid tone and with watercolor, it is our color paints green in this case, and it's going to be watered down like this. So when we replace the mid tone, the color is going to be, you're going to be using a bit of pigment and more water like that, and it can be much more watery. It can be watery, I can flow. The third value is going to be the darkest darks. When you work with darkest darks or just generally with darker pigment, you are going to be using a bit more pigment and less water, which means that your paint is going to be thicker, is no longer going to be water here. Sometimes we even going to use dry brush technique, which looks like this. But most of the time when you apply to the face, it's going to be a little bit of water, not too much. And pigment. What helps you to control amount of water on your brush? Usually it's this over here, it's the absorbent sponge. If you paint watery wash, you don't have to care so much. You can just directly from the palette, take your brush that's filled with paint and water and painted with it. But when you are doing these darker tone values, we're going to take a bit more pigment, less water and before you apply to paper, almost always, we will dab the sponge or dab the tissue and then apply to the paper so that we don't have excess water on our brush. Besides this, this is the entire technique. We're just going to place the values here in two layers. So let me walk you through the process now afterwards, after we paint the first portrait, I think it will be a bit more at ease because you already will be familiar with the process. First, we mapped out the highlights. Now to this portrait, we're going to apply the mid tones. I said mid tone is color plus water, and we don't have to dry our brush before we can just go straight or directly to the paper. So let's do this. I'm going to usually start at the top of the head here, applying to every part of the face, even here without making distinctions between parts of the face that are supposed to be in mid tone, only avoiding the areas that we marked as these will be the highlights. See, but you have to have a bit more water on your brush, of course. Like that, here we avoido one, but do not let this dry. We need to do clean water little bit of this excess water, you have to dab your brush to the paper towel or to the sponge to get rid of it. Then this part, you have to connect this part and this part with clean water on your brush. Again, here, if you don't have to talk like me, it's going to be easier for you because when you wait for too long, you might get cauliflowers or the blooms. But this is going to be spontaneous pot, so we don't have to care so much about that. Now I continue here. Lots of water on my brush. Here again, there's this lighter area that is on the chin, so careful like that. We just clean water that I add here, I connect everything. Then we continue here. This area is going to be darker. Be careful about the silhouette. Try not to go too away from the silhouette. And now help me with the ear. This is going to be all in meton the rest of the ear is going to just be clean water. I put clean water here. You don't have to really care about it being bleeding into one another, will be fine here as well. I'm going to do a little bit of stylization for the portrait. I will add these splatters of paint just to create some flow and we can add almost abstractions as part of the hair. But for the hair, you can do these dry brush brush strokes, a couple of them so that you have some texture here. Most of them will be truly abstract. Like that. Basically, we're going to create a mess on our paper. Now, sometimes I grab a smaller brush and I try to add a bit more of these tiny little hairs, but the brush needs to be almost dry, not too many strokes just like this tiny floating hairs because she's got them all around her face. Here connect some of these. All right. Now that we basically have this layer finished, everywhere where I see excess water, I will try to take out that water with my brush with a tip of my brush like this so that this layer can dry. I even here a little bit here just so that when you grab the hair dryer, it does not spread more. It should be safe to hair dry. That is the purpose of this lifting of the excess watch. Okay. That was pretty easy, wasn't it? This particular layer is nothing to worry about because it is so abstract. One mistake that you can do is to put too much pigment. If you put too much pigment, then it becomes very dark and you have to lift some of it in the next layer. The first layer that maps that maps out the mid tones needs to be this fresh, transparent color. We are going to layer a bit more of paint later after this is already completely dry. And we're going to do that in a minute. I'm going to grab this hair dryer and just dry everything now. I forgot that we can do one more effect. You can put a bit of excess water into some of these textures. If they are not completely dry, then this nice effect will form. I don't do it for the face, the face is already dry. I just do it for the hair and the abstract part. It helps to create this beautiful flow. I believe this was not so scary for you. Now the second layer is going to be tiny bit harder because we have to apply the paint with a bit more control, but luckily not in too many areas. The areas of mid tone on a face are always a little bit larger than the areas of the dark tone unless you have a specific very dark lightning situation. But look at this map of tone values that we created. There's a little bit of darkness here, a little bit of very precisely place darkness around the eyes, bit here underneath her nose, then the top lip, the bottom lip. This is very small areas we're going to work precisely with tiny brush and I'm going to try to not work too much and just show you that to create a captivating portrait, even a portrait that looks a bit realistic, you don't need to work a lot. You just have to think where to add the darkest darks and you don't really need as much detail as you might think that you would. We're going to work a bit more around the eye and probably most challenging will be this shadow over here, but even that one, I have a way to do it, that's a bit easier. Carefully watch. I'll try to paint very slowly, and we're going to do first these spots because these are not so hard and then move to the bottom ones that are a bit larger and slightly bit harder. So I hope that you know exactly what we're going to do and let's see what this portrait needs to call it finished, quick study. Let's start. I'm going to actually so that you can see better, I'm going to do this and replace it side by side, even though my sketch is not 100% proportional, but I'm going to put it side by side so that you can see exactly what we're painting here. At least for the first one for the start. I'm going to grab this tiny brush and we are either going to apply paint that is dry like this. In that case, you will grab a brush, you will grab a bit of pigment and you dry it like that. Either use your sponge or use your paper towels. I always have one of these tiny little watercolor papers by my side because I can test what kind of brush stroke I'm getting from the paint that I already have loaded on my brush. Or we're going to do a brush stroke that's a little bit just a tiny bit wetter. It includes more water. It has more water like that. But in this third layer, it's rarely going to be watery. Usually, it will be something in between. But for the eyebrows, we will use dry for the lashes as well, dry brush, and for the tiny little shadows, we're going to use a bit more water. First, I'm loading my brush with pigment. I'm going to grab another one of these pigment with a bit more water on it. That does not completely produce a dry brush. I'm going to start applying it because there's a shadow here. From the darkest area, to go towards the lightest area is always the best that you can do in watercolor because watercolor can create gradients on its own. Now I get rid of pigment, just clean water, and I get rid of excess water and now I go back here and I gently just rub the edge of this new added shadow that we included here, the edge will spread. You will get a soft edge here like that. Now I'm going to do just the same here, a bit more water and a little bit spread clean water on my brush. Always dab it away because then you can control a little better if you don't have a ton of water on your brush and gently rub. See? We got this new area of shadow that's a bit blurred out. This is what we want. I'm going to do one more because that is here below the lashes is also one area that is slightly more spread out. One more area, slightly bit here, clean water and you just lightly touch the edge of this shadow. That is done. If you have a hair dryer, you can do this very quickly. Because if you do that, you do not risk that when you place the dry brush stroke on top of it, we are going to paint the eyebrows that it does not spread. For details, I like to control it this way. I like to use a bit more controlled approach with dry brushing and always paint on a dry surface if it's possible because that helps you control the end result and make sharper details. Now I grab a bit of darker pigment for my brush. But you can see that this brush is now much drier. It has darker pigment, but is drier. With this type of stroke, we're going to put lashes and eyebrows. We have to be a bit careful. I don't want it super dark, but it is slightly darker than the shadow beneath it here like that. Even here on the other side is a little bit more. Browse present. Actually, I forgot this tiny part that is here, we have to put tone there like that. More brush stroke with dry pigment and I'm going to do lashes, just emphasize this because this dark part of the portrait and we need a bit more focus here. Just do it like this with a couple of strokes is too much. If you do it like me and you have too much pigment, you can try to wrap it a bit with tissue. Then below the lashes, this is one tricky part of the portrait below this Zoom, painted photo. There is a shadow that drops on her skin, that cast shadow from the lashes. I need to use pigment, not dry pigment, but color like that. See a bit more water, a little bit less than this because this is the lash and this is the shadow underneath. 7. Day 1 - Watercolor painting (part two): I think the entire I area is done. There's just enough information to communicate what this is all about. Nothing more to do. I'm now going to show you how to fix tiny little mistakes. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But even if your first layer dries a bit weird here or here even, this I'm not sure if we're going to be able to fix, but this we can. You can use brush that just has a bit of clean water on it and you can rub this, just wet this and gently rub the weird cauliflower edge of this effect sometimes completely disappears. Sometimes you just rub this away like that. I can even add a little bit more pigment this side of the face so that it shows a bit more volume. Now we can dry. That was the ice, not so hard. Now nose, it's not going to be hard. For the nose, first, we're going to do these shadows on the nose that are a bit more profound than in the first layer and I'm using watery paint for this like that. See, a bit more water not too much water, but enough so that the brush strokes connect. Here, when you do dry brush, they don't connect. They leave out the light texture, but here they connect. Always test the brush stroke first on this spare sheet of paper, and then we can do the nose. I think the nose usually here has a tiny bit of shadow and has a tiny bit of shadow here as well. A little bit over here. I just place these shadows, how I see them on the reference photo, and then I clean the brush. This is just clean water. Don't paint with excess. Just gently with the tip of your brush, just rub the edge of these newly placed shadows here. Even if the texture is weird, when you squin your eyes a little bit and look at the reference, you should clearly see the values. The values should be darker here, darker here, darker here. If they are then everything works. Now with a bit more dark pigment. But still, we're going to paint this dark shadow. You cannot use dry brush strokes for this shadow just like here because there's a shadow, it's connected. We need to have a little bit of water on our brush still. It needs to connect. The brush strokes needs to connect and we can now do it. We can do it like this. Now there's a tiny bit of shadow here. I'm going to add some pigment careful so that she does not look like she has mustache and we can continue adding more pigment to the top lip. Again, just notice that we're not using dry brush stroke, we're connecting brush strokes and the top part here from the top lip is a slightly bit lighter, put a bit more water and a bit more pigment is in the middle here here and here, just a bit more pigment. See? That is all that we need to paint. So yeah. Now I'm going to paint these tiny little details of the bottom lip here here here a tiny bit of tone in this area of the lower lip. Lower lip has some volume also. It has a bit of tone, but not too much because it catches a lot of light since it is oriented towards the sunlight. Then there's a bit horse shadow is underneath the lower lip here. I'm also going to gently wrap the edge of it with clean brush. If you paint along with me slowly like this, you will have success with placing your pigments, I'm sure. Sometimes we put just a bit more value very light in the corner of the mouth so that this form is shown a little better. Here, when it dried, I think it should have just a bit more tone. This is the face part of our face, so we pay a bit more attention to it. Since this is profile, a bit more attention will also be on the ear, but we don't have to be so precise like here. By the way, this is painted. I'm not going to paint anything more. Now I'm going to go inside this ear. And we're going to figure out the values just like we did before. First, in this area, there's going to be shadow. This is by the way, the insides of the ears. They can be so abstract. It's like you're painting nothing that makes any sense. You just need to follow these shapes here is one shape, here is another shape. Here is an oval shape here is almost like a heart shape. You have to think in a way that's not this is an ear that I'm painting, but very abstract. And then you will succeed. In the end, if you place them correctly, you will have a working part of the face. I started from placing the darkest values first because that makes sense to me and it's better for me to then know where I am and orient myself. These two need to connect a little bit and here is one more part. You can already see, by the way that that's an ear. But we're going to grab the brush with clean water, always dry a little bit, and let's add some blurred out details. Just a tiny bit, connect them with the zones that should be a bit more light, but there's a gradient, mid tone connecting the lighter parts with the darkest parts here also. This entire part is a little bit darker. It's covered by hair so Makes sense that it's a bit darker. Okay. And sometimes watercolor fades after it dries, I'm even shocked how much it fades and if you feel like it faded too much, you can add this darker accents again. Even though this is profile view and the ear can look like it's the most important thing because it's so close to us, the viewers, you do not have to actually use that much darkness in here. It is better if we let the viewer focus on this part. I'm going to dry this and that's one more part than this one, will be a bit more complicated. But I will now try to fix this. This part is supposed to be a bit mid tone, but there's a weird brush stroke that I accidentally put there and that is dry. Always for bigger parts of the portrait, grab a bigger brush. I'll see maybe I will make a big mess. Of all of this. When I want to place a large shadow that has edges that are blurred out, it is best if you grab brush with clean water and first clean and just wet the entire area around it. Not the details, but this area around it with clean water. Don't let the water drip too much, add a bit more clean water. Some of that clean water will help you fix these edges and if it doesn't fix because this one is unfixable. We will now place a bit of color inside this wet wash. Here. I want the cheek bone to stand up a little bit more like that. Just put it there inside the wet wash and let it be. That should fix the weird streak on her face. Now, this I dried did not fix completely, but at least does not really bother me all that much anymore. I will try to do one more thing and that is with clean brush to bring a little bit of light back in this area. You can actually do it if you have good paper that will let go of your pigment just with a bit of rubbing with clean water and then drin with paper towel and then you can you can get a bit more light in some of the face areas. So now the most difficult shadow, and that is this one. I just want you to take a look at the shadow just a little bit before we paint. So here on this side, since it is cast shadow on the face, it has hard edge. So the part that we paint here needs to be on dry surface and it will not spread. This edge will be okay if we keep it sharp. But this edge on this side is very particular. That's the hard part. It softens as the face slowly turns away from the light because this form shadow and so for this part, usually I put a little bit of clean water on this side so that we can connect it a bit more smoothly. So let's do that. I'll just put clean water here, clean clean water. Not too much water and not too much water, just a little bit of water. And then we can start painting. Do not forget that this shadow here is very dark, so we need to grab a darker pigment, but we don't paint like dry brush. Okay. So the shadow starts here. And since we pre wet it this area on the face, you can see immediately how it starts connecting to the face. Here. Here. Here it connects. And as we paint this shadow here, careful here about the silhouette of the face. You can dry your brush a little bit. And here where we have a little bit lighter part of the shadow, you can just lift some of the pigment very gently. Just lift it from the paper. Here. And then here we just clean brush, we gently rub. Okay. And this part here, we have to kind of this part I disperse. There's the hair part. I do not want to destroy that little effect that we had going there. So I just with clean brush, I try to go and do this try to spread this a little bit. Okay. Now, I probably need to dry this so that it does not spread too much. Believe it or not, but most of our portrait is now done. You can even leave it like that if you want. It is a bit abstract, but the face is done. The rest, what I'm going to do, I'm going to play around a little bit with darker values around the face. Do a little bit of dry brush strokes to show the hair a little bit more. But under no circumstances, do too much detail here because look at this. This is just fantastic spread of paint that is spontaneous and helps your painting much more than whatever you can do with your tiny brush. So I'm going to do a couple of additions, little bit of strokes to define the hair, especially around the face a little bit, tiny bit. And then here, there's some folds of the clothes, but none of it will be very precise. It's just going to be loose. Most of it is going to be with this brush, and none of it is actually needed. You can even if you have little time for this challenge, you can leave the portrait like this and it's going to be successful because it's done. So what I'm going to do now to not kill the portrait but give it a little bit more volume is put a little bit more paint here so that I show that the neck kind of turns away from the light. These washes are not controlled. These are very light washes. Here a bit of this spontaneous dry brush just to define how the clothing goes here, and here a little bit like that. Sometimes I apply something then it does not look so great, so I use clean water to spread the brush stroke around, lose it a little. Here, I think we're done. And I wanted to define the hair just a tiny bit more, even in our sketch, like the thumbnel sketch. We had a little bit of darkness here going on in this forehead area, so I want to do that to define it a little bit here. You have to use dry brush for this because the hair has some texture that we want to at least we want to at least, suggest like that. Sometimes it feels like I'm destroying the portrait, so not too many additions, just a little bit. Maybe a bit more of this. When we're done, I think we're done. Maybe tiny brush and add just a bit of this here. Okay. Sign the work. And here it is. So here is the finished portrait. I do not think it took more than 1 hour, and I'm happy about it. The more you paint, the more expressive your brush strokes can be the more you loosen up, you will see that your paintings do not need too many details. You know exactly where to place them. Still, even after years of painting, I find this little analysis before the painting process tremendously helpful. In watercolor, you don't really get exactly three tones or three tonel values. It's like even if you work in light, midtone and dark, there's always going to be these nuanced tones in between that are caused by just water running and these gradients will create more values than just three. In pencil, it's very three. The result is a bit more graphic. But I think that's what makes watercolor very interesting and really useful for this type of quick work. So tomorrow we're going to paint something else a bit different. I'm going to choose some fun reference for you and I hope that you will return and continue having fun throughout this challenge. So join me for the next lesson, tomorrow, during which we will get a concrete with another reference, do a quick tunnel value map, and then again, paint our watercolor portrait in a different color, not paints gray anymore. And I will see you in the next lesson. 8. Day 2 - Creating a value map (thumbnail): Come to second day of a watercolor portrait challenge. Let's get started with our second portrait. Going to draw this portrait that I've chosen looks scary, but it's not I've chose a male face because I want some variety in this challenge. What I like about this reference is that there's strong contrast between light and shadow, and there's a lot of simple geometric shapes that we can explore and incorporate in our portrait. Like here is almost like a triangular shape for the head, another almost triangular shape for the face, and even drop shadow below the face, it's kind of easier to reproduce. It's not a perfect face that would be completely round and hard to shade. So I think we're going to have fun with this portrait. I also would like to in the painting part, incorporate some of the background and show you some nice effects. So let's first do our thumbnail, have this tiny little piece of paper here, and I will start sketching very loosely. I think I'm going to do just what I mentioned, and that is simple geometric shapes for everything for the face, and then kind of just adhere the ears in a very, very simple way. And this is going to be a shadow. Another ear. Use straight lines whenever possible. Here is going to be the nose shape like that. And a drop shadow will be louder nose. And then a mouth shape is basically just the middle part that is a little bit darker. Here is going to be some mass of the facial hair and facial hair here. And the ice that you can actually block has these simple shapes all over it. The entire shape can be blocked like this. It looks almost like lassies. And then just carve out the darker shape and this triangular shape that looks like ice here. Don't focus on details in this portrait very much. This is not going to be a focus. And There is also some wrinkles on the face, even though this is not an old guy, there's gonna be some wrinkles that will we will have the opportunity to explore how to do that in watercolor. So the heat Now we can be a bit more precise about the shape of the hat. And there's the drop shadow below the face here. I can do that. I sometimes mix up the blocking and then and the shading, mix it up just because the earlier blocking and shading of some shadows like this one, it helps me see the features a bit more clearly. So here's a shirt. Here's another part of the shirt. Shirt is not important. We don't have to pay too much attention. Let's just do it like this. Okay. This very, very simple outline. Now we're going to focus on the tunnel value. First is white. What we have to do is kind of block in the whitest parts. So here is one, here is one on the nose, this is the one. Here's another one that's going to be lighter and here. Then we have this lighter part on the forehead, one, two, three. This is all in shadow. And the bottom lip, I think, will be here will be light part. There is also lighter part, not a highlight, but lighter part on the head, but we'll put that in mid tone. Now, everything that is not lightest, we have to put into mid tone. So you kind of just have to do a bit of tone here. Like that, even the ears. And here, actually, if you want it to be precise because with watercolor, it's going to be easier to do, but we also have to block in the background. Just do it with white pencil strokes, something like that. Here is another shadow that's going to be we have to block this in. Okay. And on the hair, everything that's not white has to be mid tone, so we have to do everything. Besides what we marked as lightest, this makes it just easier for you to think about these tone values like that. Looks weird, but don't worry. We will add the darkest darks very quickly. Now, the darkest darks will definitely be here. This is below the heat. So now we will actually be able to see the heat. This all will be dark. There will slightly I can't really say that this will be three values because there's slightly dark. There's dark and there's total blackness. I think there will be fourth value needed at some point. And here on the head. Total darkness will also be the background, but I'm not sure if I want to if I want to do it all with pencil because it does not have to be so precise, I like to sometimes just more focus on the face itself. So here's going to be the shadow. Eres will be in the shadow. This part will be totally black. This will be very black. This is very black part. Now let's focus on the face. Just below the nose, there's very dark shadow. This one is very important for us. And here are slight tiny spots of shadow around these nostrils here and here. They kind of shape the nose. Eyes are very dark inside, and here will be the corners of the eyes will be very dark. And here as well. Like that. Now, the facial hair will also have darker parts which are here around the mouth. But this part will be more in light. So here's going to be a little bit more light, a little bit more shallow, but here is going to be just texture. So I think this will be fine. Oh, I forgot. Mid tone, and now these are the darkest darks. Here, with watercolor, we will put a very dark color here around the hat. We'll maybe let it a little bit bleed a little bit, but with pencil, it's very hard to get it also dark. So this is just an exploration of the ton values. Here we'll be it will be dark and here they will be incorporated into the background. But the face is the most important for us. Think a little bit more about the tone values should be placed on the face because this is our main focus. Here should be a focal point. I don't think I'm going to leave the shirt completely white. I think more or less it's going to be in mid tone or we'll do some abstractions there here also. We'll see. But again, face is most important. So this is my little sketch. Helps me a lot to figure out where to place the tunnel value. So now, as I sketched, I was thinking about it. This goes here. This goes there, and I kind of remember at least a little bit of it. And then when I'm painting, I do not have to figure it out all over again. I kind of explore that and experience that already. You do your little thumbnail, and now the time is up for our sketch on a watercolor paper, and we will do that with mechanical pencil again. 9. Day 2 - Portrait sketch: Son, I will show you how I sketch this portrait out on watercolor paper before painting. I'm painting on the same watercolor pad, but I will do a love portrait format. Going to place this masking tape underneath, and hopefully you will still be able to see what I'm drawing. Let's start sketching. So I kind of just want to quickly plan out how I'm going to place this portrait on a page. So I think like that. Think like this. If the ears are here, more or less, then the nose is going to be a bit lower because we are looking at the face slightly from above. So that causes the nose to move a little bit down. So the nose is kind of long. It's a little bit longer. I like here. Is the faithful hair here? And so here we are connecting the eyes. I'm still being very loose with this. I sometimes do these vertical or horizontal lines just to figure out which part of the face lines up with what. And this up this part. But how far are they like that probably? So the eyes are not too down. And here Here's the shadow of the face, and the face is pretty long as well. So yes, here we have to do a little bit shorter. Op. Okay. So here's the ear. Okay. Here, there is a this wrinkle wrinkle, and then there's hair. So here is going to be the heat the headline. No No here. It's very hard to do it correctly. The proportions are very important when it comes to portrait, but if you do sketches and quick sketches like this for a challenge, we do not have to be 100% precise. You don't have to worry about that. You can just do quick sketch, and I will be very happy if you do your own sketch because that is much better practice than if you just paint. But of course, it's up to you and even the painting itself will give you a lot. But if you can also draw it every day, that you'll see in seven days how much ease you will have at producing this kind of portrait. I thought it's going to be a bit easier to sketch, but it's not like it's hard, but it takes a bit more time because there's more things like head to line up with everything. I think every time that you have a portrait that has a bit more features like you have wrinkles on the face and you have cheek bones and stuff like that, a bit more visible. This structure of his nose is very well visible and that helps you so much to draw this. Here you have triangle, here you have one visible cheek bone. When you have people who are too perfect and too round up, there's nothing really, you have to think a lot about the structure that's underneath and that's hard to figure out if you don't see here. It might be a bit more work. But in the end, this kind of portrait is a bit easier to get right than a flawless magazine photo. If you use that for painting, you might have a hard time. Here is the drop shadow or cast shadow underneath his face that sort of reflects a little bit. Hi, like, chin. It ends up I don't know where. And here we have the here we have the shirt. I think this made him look a little bit too has had a bit wider neck that was necessary. I find it very hard to produce an outline for an image that is very contrasty and that has a lot more filled areas of darkness because I can't really see all that very well, all that well, I mean. We do not really see his hair, so I'll just leave it like this. I think we're very close to finishing this sketch. Here I can't see. Here, I barely can see. And there's just a few more of these wrinkles. I think will be good. Here, there's a darker area. Here is a darker area. Okay, this is our sketch. Maybe I'll just fix this this one I a little bit. Don't forget, you can download this sketch along with all the others from the challenge down below in the Projects and Resources tab. Feel free to use them to trace or double check your own sketch before painting. I will clean the sketch from excess graphite that I smudged, go clean my hands because this always happens to me and we will continue with painting process. That one might be a bit more fun than the drawing process as it always is. All right. I'll see you soon. Finish your drawing and I will see you in the next lesson. I will show you what color we're going to be using for this portrait. You can use whichever you want, so I'll see you in the next lesson. It 10. Day 2 - Watercolor painting (part one): In this lesson, I'll walk you through the entire watercolor painting process for this portrait. So get your materials ready, and let's get started. We're going to use a different color than yesterday. Here's my paints gray, but we are going to be using Mars Black. I wanted to paint one monochromatic painting with black paint, but this one is even more interesting because it's slightly granulating. And so it should give us some extra effects. I don't know how it's going to look. I've never used it for a portrait before. So we'll see. I'm going to first test the color out. Here. When you use it thick, in a thick mixture, it looks black, like the wash is homogenous. But when you dilute it a little bit, it starts to spread and you will see the granulation effect in a bit and it should be even heavier when you add more extra water. We're going to use white paper and not cover it with paint just with clean water for the first value. Just like yesterday, we will dilute our paint for painting medtns. So our metons will be a bit more granulating. Then thicker paint in a thicker mixture, maybe even larger wash of nearly pure black paint we're going to use for some of the background and for the darkest parts of the face. Now I need to think how to do this because I want to include some background, and I think we should start with that. Just bear with me. We'll figure this out. I will use one of my larger brushes, this wash brush for the background. I will do the painting in two parts. So I want to first apply the paint here all over this and just leave out this part of the face. Everything else will be covered, and then we will return to this part, and we'll finish it. So first, I will start with clean water. Maybe add a bit more pigment so that you see where the wetness goes. With this pale color, you can actually cover the head because the head is not completely clean, like white, and I really want to see where the paint goes. And here here I'm going to stop the wash. Here I went a bit too far, but I want to stop the wash at that shadow that we have here. So it'll be like this. Yeah, everything else will be covered, and you have to keep this very water. You have to keep this wet so that it does not dry on us too quickly. Here we cover the ear, very careful around the face, and I will even with just a bit of pigment, I will even cover this part. Clean watcher, we can do a little bit of this drips, drops. Mm. It is going to be a fun portrait. I don't know how that's going to look, and we have to be a little bit and go out of our comfort zone and have to be a bit more curious when doing this sort of challenge. Maybe it will not work, but we'll still have great experience. Alright, now I'm going to grab really dark pigment, like, really, really dark mars black here. And I'm going to go apply the dark background here into the white wash. You have to be very careful around around the head because the head we do not want to cover completely. I want to play around with the pigment a little bit. And as the water and paint, it starts to dry, then we can go a little bit closer to the head. We can even do the faults on the head like here a little bit here. I will really let this bit more loose, nice and loose. And even bit more of the pigment here around these parts. And here we want to really, really make this dark It's going to be a bit tough in this area, but her almost is dry. It's very difficult. We have to add more water if it starts to dry on us. Yeah, and these parts, I try to do with bit more water, slightly bit more water here this year as well. I will now do a little bit of splatter on this background. And with this brush, I will try to add here just a tiny bit more of the mid tone like that to make it a bit more round. Hop. Hop. Pure pigment almost here as well. And here, as well. So everything that's now wet, we can kind of move the tunnel values around. We can modify a little bit. This was not my intention to do dry brush just enhance the blackness, and now I have to grab a bit more water and dilute Okay. You can even grab a nail and you can do these little scratches here because the silhouette the silhouette here has a little bit more of the facial hair showing, which are almost white, so you can do just a tiny bit like that. This is not wet anymore. I'll try to maybe wet it a little bit. Again, it's not ideal, but is to do it in one go, but that's impossible because depending on what's the temperature in the room that you're painting in, here is quite hot and it dries very quickly. So maybe we can try to put this and this And I kind of just tried to do these folds, but not a lot of them, not too much detail, just a couple of these foldings so that it is at least obvious that it is a shirt. And here, it's just a tiny bit of texture. Now we probably have to dry because all of this is done in one go and this part is the thing that we are going to paint next. This can be very loose. Don't worry if it doesn't happen exactly like it happened for me here because this is watercolor effects. So it happens on every paper and every time it's different, so you'll get your own original piece. But try to do wet everything, but this part, it needs to be completely dry when you're doing this part. After we dry it hair dryer, then we can focus on this particular part. So I have to admit that the moment I placed the values here to the background, I started to feel very awkward about the face and I noticed that my schedule was a bit off in some areas. I tried to lower the eyes just a tiny bit and also I think that the nose that I originally had sketched was a little bit too wide. Since here is just pencil and it's not being covered by paint. I did some changes because I could. That happens. It's very hard sometimes to figure out the proportions, before you have values placed because the values change, how you perceive the proportions so much. That sketching with tone like this can be much more precise than just sketching with line. At least I personally find it very hard. If you check your portrait and if you find mistakes, even met process, you can still do that and change it because it's going to be very hard to change after you place down the paint. So I did that, I have to admit. I'm going to erase just a little bit and we will now paint the face. I will now use larger brush to cover everything but the white areas. You notice the white areas that we mapped out earlier is on the cheeks, mostly here, this part of the nose, and some parts of the forehead, so we will cover everything up, but these parts like this. This is all covered up here, here, here, all covered up. But I will not wait and cover this with clean water rather sooner than later because the paint will just keep on drying. So we still have the darks, like the mid tone and the light, but there is the line between them is now a little bit blurred out. This area, this area, this will be a bit lighter. Here is going to be lighter area as well. Clean water, clean water. C. This and this all of this is going to be in the shadow. Here in the shadow as well. This part is just clean water. Here. This is definitely midtone part. So I get these highlighted areas and I get these areas that are a bit more dark. Here is definitely a lot more darkness. But we're going to add texture of the facial hair just in a minute. 11. Day 2 - Watercolor painting (part two): So I think we've got that covered up. And now we will focus on adding a little bit darker shadows around the ice. Let's start there. So here is darker paint, but we still need it to be a bit just a little bit flowy, more flowy. I do not want to add way too many layers, so that is why. I'll start adding here because this part of around the ice is very hard to get proper darkness there, and it's very dark like that. And we should connect with clean water. Here, bit more darkness. Here a lot more darkness. Go. Same on the other side. Very dark here. Like, truly. This shadow should be connecting here, I have to add a bit emphasize the shadow a bit more. With a bit tiny brush, I can lighten this area, but also return with some of the pigment because I want to fill in this shadow here. Like that. Okay. I can do it wet in wet now. On this other side, I also use the shadow to connect here. This side should be a bit more like dark. And also, you can get the smaller brush with a bit more pigment to go inside and add these shadows that you see here. They will look very dark at first, but they will spread. Spin with spread. And so we can use this a bit thicker pigment to sculpt in these parts of the face. Like that, I think that's going to be sufficient. Okay. Here is just slight shadows below the eyes. And And these tiny little shadows around the nose, they're truly best to do if you have slightly wet the surface before applying here. There is one dark shadow below the nose that we can add. The guy is starting to look quite okay, but we did not add his mustache, so he looks like he just shaved, or we will add the mastage in a bit. Do not worry, I will not forget. And here is another another. He has got this nice structure of the face that I kind of like to paint. While we still paint stuff that are a bit more dark with thinner brush, we can do that and paint this part of the mouth that is going to be a bit more dark. And here is shadow that's basically a cast shadow. And here is a cast shadow as well. We do not use the dry brush technique here to paint shadows. We use a bit more water, and then we will do the dry brush on top to create the hair itself. Still, here, I'm adding a bit more thicker pigment because this place underneath the nose is very dark. I think that I put two little pigments and then now it looks like it's very pale. Tiny shadow here below the lip and the lip, you can define just with a bit of tone, but not a lot because in previous portrait, the lower lip gets a lot of light. Really here should be a bit of a highlight. And this part also got less dark than I was hoping for. So I need to go back and fix. We're almost done. Just the mustache and the eyebrows will be done in a minute. Maybe these two wrinkles need to be edited, and there's a little bit of a wrinkle in here that we can actually do with a bit of dry brush. Then I will show you one more trick to make this portrait pop even a bit more. One part that we still have to add is the facial hair, and I'm going to try to do this with this kind of brush. We have to be very careful when adding facial hair because facial hair, especially this part, imagine it's one object that kind of turns away from the light. So it will get lighter here, and here is getting a lot more shadow. So we have to do, it's a round object that is light at the top and a bit darker at the bottom. So we'll try to start with the top lighter part, use a little bit pigment and make sure that my brushes. Almost dry. And I will just try to kind of do a little bit of texture here. Not here, but here. Here. Just a tiny bit of texture. There. Here. And now with a darker pigment, but same dry brush. So this type of brush stroke, we will do the bottom part of the the darker bottom part of the mustache here. And I will try to do a little bit of these tiny individual hairs in between. Yeah, Lighter, again, it's going to be here. And again, I have to try to do a little bit of this tanning lighter areas. This can be hard, but it's also just texture, so it does not have to be precise. And I think his masterche has these two corners that are like, slightly more dark than everything else and connects to this kind of dark here part of the cheek. Hair should not be so hard, so dark. Here also. Okay. Maybe a bit more shadow here. While this part catches more light. I do not think that the portrait needs way too much detail. I think this should be just fine. Probably just have to correct this shadow over here. This shadow over here could also be a bit darker just slightly. Now, if you want this portrait to have a bit more detail, we could do I don't think this is necessary, but we can play around. Sometimes when I'm cold up and I want to do a bit more tiny brush, I can do it very light dry brush. I could try to do the pattern of the clothes. It's just like this. Here. Here like that. And like that. And even here. But do not think that this is necessary and also you can do this buttons or just suggestion of the buttons. Did not add that much to the portrait, but maybe defines this very large negative space a bit more. Clearly, one more thing, I have this stiff brush, not for painting. This is synthetic brush with stiffer bristles. And sometimes when I have a lot of pigment that is covered, something that I want lighter, I use it to scrub off some of the pigment and return light to the scene like here. Can scrub it off. And kind of reveal a little bit more of the slight part. It depends on how realistic I want this portrait, but we forgot the brows. The eyebrows. I did not even miss the eyebrows, but you can do a little bit of drybush here just to add some texture here as well to make him feel a bit more rough. For what it's worth, I think this quick portrait was a lot of fun. Will I keep on adding details or will I stop? I don't know. Here maybe just one more. Okay. This was quick work. This was 40 minutes of painting, and look, we are not that far from photograph all that much. Point here is that you can work in three values. You can even work quickly and you can just focus on mapping out the dark mid tone and light area to achieve look that's 90% close to your reference photo, especially if you have a reference photo that's with high contrast that has this kind of value distribution that you can work with. These are very nice effects. Hopefully, we will get to use them in some other portrait as well. I like that this granulation paint, it works with the character of the portrait. It probably would not work with some young woman depending on the situation, but definitely works with him and his facial expression. I liked and enjoyed using the Mars black paint for this particular portrait. When you pose your project, you can let me know if this was difficult for you or if this was more fun. Tomorrow, we will do a whole different portrait in a whole different color. I think you already are starting to get the hang of this. I will see you in the next lesson, we'll explore tonal values of yet another reference and I will see you tomorrow. Bye. 12. Day 3 - Creating a value map (thumbnail): To third day of our Watercolor portrait challenge. Let's get started with the third portrait now. I have chosen another reference for you. This one because I want to experiment with background, a little bit of layering. I don't think it's too hard or too difficult, so we will see how that will go. However, this is one of those pass that is near perfect means it does not show a lot of structure inside. We will have to do very smooth gradients here. The shading will be a bit more difficult, but I'm sure we'll still have a lot of fun. First things first, I want to create this little sketch to just map everything out. So we'll probably start with doing a chin chin area. We'll do another line here and here to map out where everything is. Here is going to be the hair takes up a lot of space in this photo, so we have to kind of already account for it early on in the sketch here and here. This and this and now we can do this is going to be the hair for the brows. And this is going to be the line for the nose and the line for the eyes. So our eyes will kind of sit here and here, we'll have our nose. It's going to be very soft and mouth, lips. Can now get rid of these guidelines and try to see if everything works. Yeah. Basically, this is the face. Everything else is hair. So that on that. And here. So we can start mapping out the highlights and metons. Maybe this will be a little bit smaller size. Yeah. This part is very round. It's part of the nose, and it will have a bit more light on this side. Here will be a small highlight as well. There's gonna be tiny highlight highlighted area here and here. But everything else, like this area is a bit more light and this as well, but everything else is kind of in mid tone. So here are another highlights. So we can sort of do this. And these parts of the hair are a bit more light, but these they will need to ton value. This is also light. This will be very hard to do in pencil. We'll take a bit more time, so I don't think I'll just map it like this. These parts of the hair are all in mitum or darker. This will be very dark. And these parts here will be lighter. Even background afterwards be dark. I think there's nice balance between lights and darks going on in this painting. I'd like to focus on it on a painting, not just do the face area, but, take it as one painting with very nice value structure. Here, here and here will be light. Not even on the chin, no. There's no light. B here and here. Here just a little bit. This is going to be very dark. And here we need to add a bit more dark, a bit more dark. And this is total darkness. Here as well. Here is very much dark and here as well. Again, it repeats over here. Then here and here are the shoulders. But right behind them, there's dark again. Like that. Now on the face, these parts, there's a gradient and then here on the nose. Below the nose, there's darkness. See, we have to notice all of these changes. And then darkest part of the mouth is usually the mid part like the part that's dividing the lips and here at the bottom. I kind of gets darker. But then top lip is dark, bottom lip, not so dark, but it has value that's slightly more than the mid tone, and that is also because because the light is coming from the front and the face is slightly tilted away from the light. So this part does not receive as much light as it usually does. And I already like this as a painting, I already love this. It's very interesting. It will be fun to paint, even though I think I find these positions of the head when it's photographed from the front, is a bit boring. But if it has a nice black and white or some nice color going on, then I find it very fun to paint. So again, we have lights. The lights are here, is here, here and here, a bit here. This is not exactly light, but that zone is not so dark. There's a little bit of light going on here and here as well on the bottom lip. And this might be just slightly lighter. Just a tiny bit. I already love it. Let's paint this. Before we paint this, oh, I forgot. Mid tone, dark darks. Before we paint this, we need to sketch it on the watercolor paper. Let's do it. 13. Day 3 - Portrait sketch: Lesson, I will walk you through my process of sketching my third portrait onto a watercolor paper. Let's do it. I'm going to use a tilt here to see my drawing a bit better. I'm tempted for this one not to use my mechanical pencil. Use wider pencil, so I'm going to do it. This not what I usually do, but I feel like when I was sketching this, it has the head of flow. I don't think the precise line will do it good. I will try to do some harsher lines just in spirit of experimenting for the challenge. We'll see what that looks like. I will try to map it out. I be high here and here. It's actually So just trying to map out everything very loosely, actually. I'm not sure if that's going to work just like I wanted about well we'll see. One highlight to the er highlights. So I roughly sketched something but I don't like, so I am going to erase some of the lines now and we'll have to make the portrait look a bit less crazy. So this is too large, is too large. I'm here. A very round mouse, but nice one. Here. Verticaline vertical line should be here. There's a corner of the eye. You're here. So let's continue. Okay. No okay. As is too far. Here I'm just mapping the flow of hair. How exactly the hair is going to flow? I do not know yet. I think we're very close. But again, I have my eyes very high, way too high. This is a common mistake. It's very hard to judge this. Sometimes it helps to just measure it. If this and this are here, then the same distance will be ester too far too high, should be here. Which means that everything is high. Yep, now it makes more sense. So here is corners of the eyes. This and this is the browse. Okay. I'm going to get just a little bit of the mechanical pencil lines in the end. I'd be a easier to paint than draw this portrait. Don't like when the skin is just so flawless. Okay. I'm happy now. Finally. This more of a naive portrait, but I like very much this type of style. I even added a little bit of freckles with pencil even though we're going to paint them as the paint covers them, they won't be so visible, but still we can include them. I think gave the sketch a little bit more definition. We can also do some hatching around the darker areas and we can definitely do this to map out the lighter areas that we want to keep here, here this area and kind of this area I want to keep a little bit lighter. This area is lighter. What else? Where else? I think that is it. Here I can't forget about this. And we can start painting now. It's a little bit more messy sketch, but still. 14. Day 3 - Watercolor painting (part one): Lesson will paint our third portrait together. I will use different approach than before, just to see what is possible and get new experience with the medium. Let's get started. For this portrait, we will be using different color, and I prepared something that I have in my collection and it is shadow violet. Again, it is going to be granulating color, and it is slightly purplish. This is what it looks like. When it's dry. I don't know how that will look. You can use any type of paint that you want and have at your disposal. You don't even have to switch your paint. You can do every portrait with just one darker paint. We are going to be working wet and wet, I think. I'm going to now wet everything. But the areas that we said that are going to be white. So you have to go around them. And it would be great if we could use a lot of watery paint. Here, very careful around the nose. I want to work a bit more into wet area. There because it makes it more fun. Uh, but this dries so quickly. So we're going to have to go around the area like that. Woo. Here. Here again, I leave out the highlight, see what's going to be nice like that. Here at the bottom, I can kind of leave this paint to be a little bit more scattered. We will experiment with different effects. And I will start to add a bit more dark color here. Dark color here to the background. Just like before. And a little bit more darkness. I'm kind of following this map that we applied here and also looking at my reference to see which areas are very dark. And you can try to test how it spreads when you apply it. So if it spreads too much, I hesitate to place too much pigment in there. But as it dries, you can place more and more pigment. Like here. Here. Here not because it spreads. Now, it's very hard. Now it's very hard to control how it spreads. So we have to just wait a little bit. But she has these darker parts of the portrait right here. So I want to kind of add this before the paint dries. We'll now get the smaller brush and we'll start applying with a bit of smaller brush everywhere where I want a bit darker, like here. Now, because it's been how much, it's been 3 minutes at least since I wet the page, the new paint, it does not spread so much. Now, it's great time to add new paint. It will spread, so you will get soft edge, but it's not so bad, it will not spread all that much, so it's better for control. Here. Here, definitely. It only looks like it's very dark, but it will fade like crazy. Here, where I applied near black pigment, it faded already. And so we truly can be a little bit more direct with these choices of pigment. And here I'm going to do a little bit of these splatters to do some interesting background effects. Now, as the paint slowly spreads, I will add minton to the face a bit more here in this area, this area will be a bit more wet. You can add a bit more pigment to the lips. And you have to have a very tiny brush to be able to apply the darkest pigment now because it spreads like crazy. I here a bit. And below the nose, it is still wet. So this is perfect for applying these diffused shadows. Here as well like that. Drybush is not going to work for us very well right now. In some areas, we can already suggest the hair because in some areas it is already dry or drying. You always have to test. Place your pigments and see what it does. You'll have to add more pigment. And here. Here around the nose again, apply very little pigment and also make sure that your brush is just not filled with water too much. It's just damp. This she's got lips that are actually a lot more a lot less light than usual. Okay here and here, a bit more. Everything that you apply into wet paper will be soft. This is what we can use that to our advantage here. These areas were not supposed to stay so sharp, so I will use clean water to kind of cover them up because they are lighter but not so sharp. And here I think this portrait is turning out a bit more expressive than those before. I will start here to add a bit more of the brush strokes for the hair just to show a little bit of flow here. And that these are actual hair. Okay. Okay. Now I dry, maybe just a bit of splatter here into the face. We can get now rid of some of the excess water if we still have some, but I noticed that here in this part of the painting, I still have a lot of floating water. And now I dry and we'll see where we stand. I've dried everything now just to be able to see exactly how I manage to distribute the tone values and check everything. When you work like this wet in wet, it can be very hard to control the final effect and how the color leads from one area to the next. I want to show you one technique how to clean your painting. I use some sort of synthetic brush, either this one or the flat one. Put it in clean water. You can wrap the painting with this damp brush and use your tissue to lift the paint. You can create some additional highlights, lighten some areas like this. Especially with this pigment, this lunar violet that I'm using, it is very easy to lift it from the page. So you can lighten something. But you can also create these tiny little hairs that you want, highlighted hairs. Just use the damp brush to lift the pigment off of the page. Maybe here and here we need some extra highlights. I can also use it to clean the shape of the face here. Like that. Around mouth, I think we have it quite right. But then we have to grab our brush and try to finish this painting. I'm going to do it with this smaller brush. I will add some details. We'll probably still need to go back in with bigger brush and kind of try to fix this shading around her cheeks, there should be a bit more tone here. Maybe we should start with that, actually. And I will add like that. I will add some shadow here and we'll add some more shadow on the other side as well. So add shadow and with clean brush, lightly touch this edge so that it dissolves. Yeah, a bit more on the other side. And I think that it would be great if we made this bottom part of her face a little bit darker. I'm here as well. And a little bit here, actually. And the mouth. I'm adding a bit more pigment. And I will now dry this. Thank you. 15. Day 3 - Watercolor painting (part two): All right. Now, with a very tiny brush, we can now add details. And for a bit more details, I'm going to use dark pigment that does not contain that much water, and you can even do it with almost dry brush like this. This is going to be the brush stroke, definitely for the rows and for the eyelashes. We have to use almost like pure pigment for these kind of last touches. The portrait is almost finished. It does not really need all that much work anymore. But here, since this is a close up, this is one of the portraits, we rarely actually paint eye lashes and these tiny, facial details to a portrait because only if it's a close up, you can really see the lashes. Usually, you just see kind of a darker area in the like around eyes. You think they're supposed to be lashes, so you paint. But if you look at the portrait from a bit afar, you don't perceive the detail from that kind of distance. Can actually take away from your portrait if you do too much detail. But this is a close up. We see these details very precisely on the reference photo. And so I draw the lashes like this with just the tip of my brush. And now the browse the eyebrows, little bit of a dry brush technique, one side and the er side. And the middle of the mouth, again, I lost the darkness a little bit. This part I cannot get right. These pigments that are easy to lift, they're great because you can correct your painting. But at the same time, when you want to put more paint down, you have a problem because sometimes they lift way too easily for you to create successful layers and glaze. So I think this is problem of shadow violet, but it's really beautiful pigment. This and this, these two areas in each eye, we can sort of make it a bit more dark to emphasize that this part is round here as well. It should be more dark. Around nose, we could emphasize a bit more, but it's not all that necessary. We could emphasize a little bit of this darkness below the nose. Other than that, I don't think that this important area to spend more time in. And I could do a bit more freckles with my tiny brush, do it like this. And I will dry. The rest will be optional because we've got the face. If you don't have much time for today's portrait, then you can just leave it like this. I think it's charming in a way. But I want to do a couple of things and additions. I want to experiment a bit more with the background, but I will take no longer than five to 10 minutes to do that so that I don't destroy and overwork the painting. So first thing that I would like to add is just a bit of little bit of folds here to say that this is clothing, that this part is actually clothes. Maybe we could even, even though on the reference photo, there's nothing like this. We could add some stripes to help direct the eye of the viewer somewhere. Here. Here maybe add a bit more shadow to create a natural border between the neck and the shirt, a little bit more probably the hair around the face. And I will try to add darker background to better frame because I really loved the framing, the very simple framing of this reference, and now this feels a little bit more chaotic. Maybe maybe this will not look good. So that's why I'm saying that this is optional. You have to judge your own portrait and kind of try to forget about the face and just view it as a painting. So I really like the contrast between the lights and the darks. I was trying to find some good balance, and this feels very orderly while this feels just so messy to me. So I will try to add and clean the background a little bit more. And sort of like place a bit of darker color here. And also, on the other side, And I will now dry and we'll see what that looks like because now the water kind of reflects reflects the light, so I can't really see if the tonal balance has been achieved. We will see in a minute. Okay, so this not quite done yet. I will try to balance some more so that I'm completely satisfied with what I created. But not every painting will be successful. You always have paintings that will not quite work out. It's best to learn from them. This might be one of them for me. With this painting, we also need to kind of get back a little bit of highlights. This highlights it floating hair that we have on the reference here around her face. So I'm going to use my scuple for this, and I will just basically draw with it. You have to try how that works on different papers. It can be either easier or more difficult to do these kind of strokes. So if you have too high texture, that might be a bit more challenging. But anyway, you can try. You'll see how that works for you. For me, usually, it works quite okay, and I can create these tiny little details, some highlights, emphasize a couple of important parts of the portrait. The sound can be terrible. Okay. And the portrait is not done. Sometimes when you finish a portrait, and you have this wash of paint that's kind of dark and you want to break it with some interesting texture. You can use a sprinkler. This is just clean water in it. I kind of like this one because it has larger drops of water, quite heavy ones. So I will just use it for this painting from a bit afar. I don't know if you can see but it produces drops like this. Especially with pigment like this one, you can utilize this for texture. Then you let it sit for a minute or so, and then you just put the paper towel and lift the excess pigment. And sometimes it leaves behind this very, very interesting texture. See? It's like here some more. I don't have to spray everywhere, but in some areas, it really helps to produce this beautiful texture I like very much. This was today's portrait, and I will see you in the next lesson tomorrow when we will draw and paint another one. You have three portraits on your belt, and you should be feeling a bit more at ease with the subject. Hopefully, you do. Let me know how you're feeling. You can post a project down below with just one portrait or you can add second and third and let me know how your challenge is progressing. I'd be happy to hear how you're doing. Looking forward to see what you've painted. Bye. 16. Day 4 - Creating a value map (thumbnail): So excited to meet you here at the halfway point of our watercolor portrait challenge. How has it been going for you so far? I would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your experience, your biggest challenge or anything that you've learned so far when you pose your project below. Today, we're painting a really cheerful portrait. It's lighter, more relaxed process, and a great one to just enjoy the flow. So let's get started. I definitely wanted to paint this reference as soon as I saw it. Like this composition. I like the mood of it, like the character very much. There's facial expression. Before we sketch it and paint it, we need to create a little thumbnail in pencil. Just to explore tunnel values, this will be lighter painting, so less pigment. Last one that we did yesterday was very pigment, heavy, was very dark. I'm looking forward to this. Might be less work than we think. Most of the entire composition is just a hat. So it takes up a lot of space in this photo. And I would think that like here could be the face. And here would be the glasses, one and two. Here could be the nose, and my schedule is so very loose. I don't even pay all that much attention to the proportion. I just want to explore tunnel values just like what we normally do. Here will be another part of the glasses. Here is ear, nose, da da, da, There's cheek, one cheek, the other cheek, and the chin, they're quite visible. Like different parts of the face. They can be more easily mapped out. Here will be the mouth. And now the eyes that are quite above and they just love the expression of these eyes. This will be quite an eye study that will be required of us. And another one here over here, And browse. Something like this. He's going to be a hair area. Here's another hair area, another part of glass or glasses, here's going to be the head. Now, we could draw these parts of the head. Here they appear almost straight these lines on this side, they get a bit thinner. Here they kind of turn. We don't have to draw all of every circle, but just make note of the direction. And then there is the like this part of the body and probably clothes. I like this very quick, but I like the composition of it. Now let's explore the ton values. First is the very light part, and there's a lot of light places. This is light. The clouds are in light. And this entire area will be light. There's a lot of light also here on the chink. Quite a bit here, but since the light is probably coming from here, this will be a bit smaller zone. Here probably will be a bit more light visible here. And these eye whites, at least this one will be lighter. There's a background light also, but we could do it to be in mid tone so that these areas pop a bit more. So mid tone these areas might be a bit mid tone. This middle area bit darker, but not all that dark. Our darkest darks in this painting will not be so dark. And the face will be probably mostly me tone. Besides these areas that we assigned the lightest value here will also be me tone. Okay. Now let's find those darker areas on the face. Definitely will be the eyes, the insides of the eyes and some area here around the eyes will be a bit darker. Here, these areas around the eyes, they need to be a bit darker as well. So here, especially this is the area that is inside the glass, the glasses. The frame of the glasses is a bit more dark. And this part of the face, which is basically side, that's a little bit more dark. And then there's one wrinkle here. Mouth will be darker. Here is another one. Below the nose, a little bit more dark. And around these glasses, as they sit on the face, they produce shadows around. This entire glass will be a bit more in darkness. The brows will be a bit more dark. This entire area falls into shadow here. A bit more. This can actually be very similar value. And here just can be a gradient. So I think we're pretty close, and I Yeah, why not? Probably like this. It will be lighter painting. I'm looking forward to it and we will use another pigment that we did not use yet. I did not use this pigment. This is very new tube that I got and I wanted to use it in a painting and it's called Zoste Zosyte genuine. It's another mineral color from Diel Smith. It granulates when you dilute. But it can produce darkest darks. I assume that when it comes to the lifting ability of this pigment, it's going to be similar to the purple color that I used yesterday, the lunar violet. But this painting is not going to be so pigment heavy, so I do not need to produce such deep and dark tones. Next time I do a painting like yesterday and I really need to do deep as darks. I will not choose pigment that can be easily lifted because I will probably be trying to utilize the layering a bit more but for lighter painting, the pigments that can be easily lifted is better. You can correct more and just looks great when you dilute the pigment. With that, we have to create sketch for the painting first. I'll grab my watercolor paper and let's start it. 17. Day 4 - Portrait sketch: Lesson, we will draw together and create a light portrait sketch for our fourth portrait session. Let's get started. I'm going to use my mechanical pencil. We'll first start mapping where to position the face. What I see on the reference photo is that this side is a little bit shorter than this side. The face is slightly a bit off center. But also up here. So I guess it's going to be somewhere in here. I really like to sketch this even though it looks so chaotic, but I like to position everything very loosely. You can erase easily. So I'll probably start with the glasses here. And I don't know. I like that. I sketch the cheeks and here we will have to map everything so that the ice will fit here and they should fit above the glasses. O. And a little bit of highlight in the eye. And I think the mouth is a little bit too way too much down. So I want to adjust. We still can adjust everything here. And the brows and the browse on this side. Kind of like this roughly sketched pace. I just I have so many lines in here. You can see that many of them are wrong. So I now will go over this with my mechanical pencil and we'll make the sketch a little bit more precise if I want to. But I like the imperfect expressiveness of this pace that I sketched before. And glasses I find very hard to paint and sketch. They're so perfect. The shape is so perfect that I never get it quite right. Let me know how the glasses went for you. Okay, this will have to do. So the eyebrows, I will sometimes I will use a bit more lines in areas that normally would still be dark. And the eyes will be quite round. Okay. Now the head, but before that, I want to add the body and the clothes here. Like here. And like that, nothing more is needed, I don't think. Okay. And the heat. So a little bit of the straight line a little bit more of a straight line. Here. Okay. And this is our sketch. Even if your sketch with this kind of subject is imperfect, you feel like it's not 100% up to the reference proportions. I kind of has a character, and if it's not a person that you know, you can leave it like that and just paint because I like it like this. I don't know exactly how that appears. If it is like the reference, we will see once we cover it with paint, and I will go prepare my painting setup and we will get started. Join me in the next lesson for the painting part. 18. Day 4 - Watercolor painting (part one): Alright, let's paint our fourth portrait. This one took me about 35 minutes, so it's a bit more chill today. Get your materials ready, and let's go. So I have my reference here, my sketch here. If you want, you can start by mapping out the highlight. I will not do that anymore. I will start directly with painting. This is the ZoysitGenuine, and I will just create a very light wash and I will start from the face. Almost entire face was it was light but had only a few of these insanely light areas. Here was one. Everything else I kind of cover in mid tone, including everything, even ice. This part, I do not want these edges to be too rough, so I cover that with clean water, and we can continue down here. And careful here because around this cheek, we also have another light area, another clean water to cover this up around nose again. And clean water here. This that's too much pigment. Never mind. This area is mid tone. Here, it's definitely mid tone. Here is another lighter area here. If I have my sketch here, I don't have to do it with pencil because I remember where they are supposed to be. Once I map it out, that helps me a lot. Then here. And this is more of a mid tone. This is light, but here we have darker mid tone, I would say, let's put our paint here. Carefully touch, it doesn't matter if this is light. It might bleed, but only on the edge, it will not go too far. Here we connect this area, clean water. I will get rid of this excess water so that it does not watercolor bloom here. While this pigment is a little bit damp, maybe we could go in with a little bit more pigment and put some more contrast here, maybe around the lips here in these corners, it's almost dry. I don't know what happens, but today's probably a bit warmer in my studio. I will cover this area with a tiny bit of extra pigment. This is not precise. I just, like, block in some of these colors and let it do whatever it wants to do. Here might be a bit more and especially this area. Area. These are dark. I don't know what's wrong with the paper today, but it dries like crazy. Here was very wet just a minute ago. And now we try to work out this area with mi tone first. I think this should be a little bit darker, but try to do wider brush strokes. Here I want to leave out some parts of the hair because the hair there, they are lighter. Here again, is very dark. I want to even leave it like this, a bit more expressive, less control, and into this, I will place these strokes. Now, here we have to add more a bit more color. In this area, we have darker parts of the head. And here I want to add darker pigment. On the reference photo here, there should be mid tone, but I want to go a bit darker to create more contrast. We don't have to go far. We can just frame the head and leave it like this. And on this side, we have this part that frames the face. I will use tan brush for these strokes inside the area that's whiter. Okay. We can now grab this excess water remove. I think we will have to do a bit more tone here as well. Just with clean water. This color is reminds me of olive green. I like this type of green, and it granulates. It's not unlike olive green in that regard. Has very nice texture. Here we should a bit more contrast. Okay. A bit more of the hair. And I want to even add a dry brush for the eyebrows. A bit more pigment. Dark accents here. I probably do that better with tiny hair brush. Yeah. I will now dry everything and we'll add little details in the end. This is basically first stage that's finished. That was one layer of paint. And now I want to add a bit more details in the face, kind of try to shape it a bit more, but I really do not want to overwork this painting. So what I want to do here is I think the eyes are always the most important part of the portrait. Here we could work a little bit more around the eyes than the shape of the entire face. We need to add some shading around the face so that it looks not flat, but a bit round. We have to add some textures for the hairs and we definitely have to add frame for the glasses and a little bit of wrinkles and structure to the face, not too much. I do not think at this point that I will touch the hat anymore. Let's do it and we'll see what the painting looks like afterwards. 19. Day 4 - Watercolor painting (part two): So first, the ice, the most important, I want to pay more attention to them. I will add really dark pigment inside here, one and two, and add some structure to the lens, a bit more darkness. I'm using dry brush for now, but I will get a bit water and just try to water what I placed there and and try to darken the iris of the eyes. It needs to be completely round, especially if you have a fazy expression like this one. They're very round. You can see top and bottom of them, you will have to pay attention to this shape so that it's as good and round as it gets. Because this is our center. All right. Now when we have that, we can add some volume to the eye whites, the round. So I will add some pigment here at the edges. And with clean water, I will dissolve. So that should give us some volume. There's a bit more of pigment over here. More details. These faults around eyes, they usually get a bit more dark as well. And this tiny it's not even tiny. It's quite large. Shadow around the eyes. We already added paint there, but as it was wet, it faded a little bit. So we need to add some more also this area of the nose bridge of the nose needs to be a bit more round, so I'm adding paint here so that it shows a bit more volume. This part also needs a bit. Here is a fold that's a little bit darker. Do not overthink this, add the pigment there like that, add some pigment. With clean water, smudge the shape a little bit and you can leave it like that. Below this eye here also gets a little bit more shadow here as well. And when we dry this, we can add some lashes, think here, just some suggestions. And here even the little tiny ones at the bottom. I'm happy with the ice now. If you want to add that white detail and make it a little bit more distinct, we can use the scalpel again. Here, and even just add some more texture here. Good. Eyes are done. Let's move on. We have to shade around the glass before we add the glass frame so that it remains sharp. Here, the frame will produce shadow here and here. When I place the shadow, just with clean water on my brush, I smudge this edge a little bit so that I incorporate this new shadow into what I already painted. And just like that, we can do it here, bit bit here. The glass is transparent so you will see the shadow on the face even here. And the nose kind of has a little bit more shadow. Like that. I will graduate quickly because then you get these large brush strokes that look a bit more fresh. So you don't really have to care all that much about this. Here I add more shadow. This is quite an area with a bit more shadow. Sometimes we maybe we could sometimes try to leave out the brush stroke and not smooth on the edge that sometimes looks very interesting and nice as well. Here, this part of the glasses actually is a bit more in shadows bit more dark than this one. So we have to add more pigment. And this part needs more shadow below the nose. And I want to use dry brush kind of for these wrinkles. Here, there's a bit more of them. Here, just like that. Smudge them a little bit because they do not have to stay completely straight line. And bit more texture here. I will add some more watercolor here to make the cheek a little bit more round on the other side as well. Here more. This side has less light. Okay. Good. We can finally do the glasses. And for this, I like to use fresh paint very dark. And let's see what that will look like. One, two, here, here. And here, Okay. And when I have this dark color on my brush, I will try to do some of the hairs here. In this area, the hair is or appears a bit more dark because it's in shadow. But then in light, we will have to do we will have to do a bit less color and a bit more lighter hair here. Here as well. Okay. Kind of like the result. This ear, I'd like it to be a bit more a little bit more dark than the cheek because it's a bit far behind. This part of the face as well. This is the side. Here is a bit more shadow. And I will now do this tiny little here. Okay. Just a few more drops, and we're done. I dry, and I think I'm done. This portrait is now done, and I hope that you enjoyed today's painting session. I will see you back here tomorrow for another one. I 20. Day 5 - Creating a value map (thumbnail): Welcome to day five of our watercolor portrait challenge. We only have three portraits left to go, and today will be a bit longer and more challenging portrait. But it's also one of the most beautiful ones that we will paint together. Personally, I always try to welcome challenges like this, even when my lazy self kind of wants to avoid starting a harder piece. I know that without pushing through moments like this, regardless of the result, there is no real progress. And so with this thought in mind, let's begin today's practice. Think the main challenge of this particular reference will be to kind of forget about these details and focus only on the areas that light and shadow creates, that should help us. But since she is one of those perfect faces, this might be a bit more difficult to draw. Just like always, first I'm going to try to block in the facial features, maybe including the hair. There is this one line. I'm following straight lines first. Here another one. Here is another one. And this entire part is kind of dark, so I'm going to sketch it like that. Here's the forehead. There's a triangular part. Then here. There is no nosline mouth. Here will be another shadow shape. It will be very hard to sketch in just pure lines, so I start to tone and add a bit more of these shadows very early on. Here is another part that is in shadow. Well, the eye, one eye and the other eye, they're entirely in shadow, so you could just add this as a shadow area, shadow shape first, and then you can carve these darker parts into the shadow shape. That might be easier for you than try to invent the lines. Okay. Yeah. And here we have another hair part. Here is this darker part where the hair kind of falls into one area and the other area. There's this shoulder part which I don't really want to paint all that much. Here's probably going to be just abstract part of the portrait. So this is my first initial sketch. I took me about 3 minutes to sketch this. And now, what I care about in these little thumbnails, I want to identify the shadow shape and the light shape. So when I squint my eyes, this entire part of her face is in light. It's very strong light. But I cannot include all of these parts as one light part. We have to kind of watch for the side planes, the side plane of the nose here will be a little bit more in shadow. Here will be a little bit more in shadow. Otherwise, the face will be flat. Here I put a bit of tone, but this entire part more or less will be light. This part will be light, here will be light. The rest of it will be in very light mid tone, but very light. Top of the nose, here, there is light. And here, this and this will be the strongest, very strongest also this part. And everything else is in mid tone. Careful because we have highlights on the hair as well. So these parts will be highlighted. This will be area of the hair, parts of the hair that will have some light in it, even though the hair is dark. Now, everything else will be in mid tone. And even though the neck is light here, I'm going to put mid tone because I want face to stand out a bit more, very light mid tone, but still mid tone. Now I want to add the darkest darks. I'm going to start by adding the darkest darks in this area because here, this part kind of defines where the forehead ends. So this is dark part of the hair. Another dark part of the hair is kind of here. And then here, as the hair kind of divides into two parts, it gets very dark. Now, here is mid tone light, again, mid tone, and we are moving on to darker part here. So this will be very tricky. But I think it should work like this. Here I went a little bit too far with the silhouette of the hair. It's just something that I want to correct. Here, the darkness of the hair again defines the silhouette of the face. It's very important for three quarters view to have this silhouette nice and clean and defined because it's the focal point. And here again, dark, mid tone, a little bit of light here, and again, darkness as it falls down. See how it starts to shape very nicely. So around the corner of the nose, we have again here in this area. We have again darkness there's a lot of darkness. And this area though, it's in mid tone. The darker parts will be the iris and the line for the eyelashes here. And here again is a bit of shadow that is quite dark. So we have to look at the reference and define these areas. Then quite dark is again this shadow here. This is cast shadow from the nose. And it drops down across the upper lip, a bit of lower lip, and again, underneath the area of the chin here, a little bit here. And again, very dark, it gets here, underneath the chin on the neck. This. Here is going to be very dark. Here will reveal a bit of reflected light. I already like this. Even if this part will stay a bit more vague, I do not even think that I want to do a lot of tones here, we probably just do something abstract. But let's continue with the rest of the face. Here there, we have some darker strands of hair like this and they cast shadows onto the face. The shadows will be slightly less dark than the hair itself, but they're there. We can play around with smaller brush here and do this nice here also. The cast shadows and do this nice pattern made from the shadow that the hair casts on the face. I think that will make a nice focal point for our painting. Here again, there's shadow from the hair. And this area itself is quite dark. So you barely can see the eye, but if we wanted to, we can find eres again that's slightly bit darker, the brows and the eyelashes slightly bit darker than everything else. So you kind of see the eye, but not really all that much. Here again, in the dark is the nostril and a little bit of mid tone is present. On this bottom part of the nose. Almost always, you can see that part being a little bit more in the shadow. Then the mouth, we just continue to add a little bit more shadow here until the corner of the mouth. This is our portrait. If we could paint it simply like this, we would have a nice portrait even without that many details. It's all about light and shadow. I'm excited to paint this 11 more time. First value one, two, three, four, five, here. Those are the very light parts and then again on the hair, a bit here. Then we have mid tone, which is everywhere else, basically. And then we have the darkest darks, which will be almost black in this case. And these are present in a couple of areas on the hair, especially around the face, the hair gets really dark, like, here and here, and then you have to pay attention to these drop shadows. And the drop shadows are like around eyes, here and here, little bit coming from the hair, then from the nose here. Top lip underneath the bottom lip here and on the neck. Follow simple structure like this for the painting process and it will be easy. Let's do a pencil sketch on a watercolor paper using mechanical pencil not the smudgy one. 21. Day 5 - Portrait sketch: Lesson, we will do a portrait sketch on a watercolor paper as a base for our watercolor painting. Let's first map out the entire portrait. So I'd want the portrait to be like this, here and here would be the face, something like this. And I'll start defining the face from the nose area. Here's gonna be the line for the nose, this and this. O and the other, these are the areas for the eyes. So the nose Without these drop shadows, at least at least suggested, I really find it very hard to draw m. I think the face will be a little bit more like a bit tighter. I will clean this a little bit. And These corners I sketched with way too much pencil. I need to clean that line a little bit. I still don't like this line. It's may be a bit better like this. Okay. And the nose is a bit too far, actually. Here. Look. And this one also a bit too high. So I knew this will be a bit more difficult to sketch precisely. But Okay, so I need to sketch the hair. Otherwise, I can't rejudge all that well if this is correct or not. Here is the cast shadow from the chin. I don't think I can do any better today. I think if I measure and check the proportions, more or less, they will look similar to this. Maybe the chin scale is a bit too low, corrected 100 times. We'll see what that looks like when we put down the paint. Here is a little bit more of this shadow, but I'm not going to do with pencil just with color, but maybe we could map out. This might be a bit too far. Yeah. We could map out the highlights. So here is very, very, very, very lightly. Here is the parse. It's going to receive a lot of light here as well. So a little bit of highlight here. This part of the nose is very light. And then here here we have light. Here we have a lot of light, actually. Here. And on the chin, most light is in this area. I still think the eyes are a bit too high. I will still try to lower the eyes a bit more because when the sketch is wrong, then you can't really fix it later on. I feel that we have a nose that's way too big for this lady and that this entire area of the eyes is just a little bit lower than what we thought I might not even sketch the eyes this time. I just will probably try to sketch with my brush. That means that even this part is slightly bit. If this is here, then this might be here. Right. I think this is my final sketch. It's one of the most messy sketches that I've made during this challenge. So we'll have to do a lot with our brush. Even this kind of process is just part of everyday practice. Some days things fall into place quickly, and other times nothing seems to work. That's completely normal. I think it's important to share our struggles as much as our proud results because this happens to all of us. And so with that in mind, join me in the next lesson where we'll paint this portrait together. 22. Day 5 - Watercolor painting (part one): Let's paint our fifth watercolor portrait together. For a painting part, we will use this color that's called peril and violet is one of the rare reds that can give me darker tones if I need. This is what the color looks like. So before we paint, we have to check the tunnel value map that we created earlier and see where there is lightest areas and everything else besides the lightest highlights that we selected, will be covered with mid tone. Preparing my paints, this will be the mid tone. Let's do this. So I'll start with the hair. Maybe give them a little bit texture here, here, here, definitely, because these are the lighter parts of the hair. And then and then you can cover these parts with paint. Add in a little bit more pigment, but I want to just block in the mid tones here. And here I'm going to move to the face. I will add a bit more clean water here in this area. This will be covered with mid tone, and around nose, we have to start being a bit more careful because the nose gets a little bit of a little bit of mid tone here, but there are highlights on the nose. So we have to be careful around them. This part can be covered with clean water. And this side of the face, we paint Dmiton but very lightly. Here we can add a bit more pigment. But besides that area, this has to be very light. Just clean water mostly. This part will be bit darker. Actually, I can do these platters to give it a bit more freestyle effect and continue to this part of the face. Here there are shadows that are a bit more dark here as well on the mouth, definitely. The rest, we will cover with clean water. Clean watcher has to be. Here I could add a bit more pigment because that will get difficult to darken later with just one layer. And it helps me see if the sketch is at least a bit good or more precise. And this part, I wanted to do a bit of freestyle. So I use my large brush, larger brush. We could do this with our watercolor pad just laying on the table and try to do a bit more effects. Different splatters, kind of incorporate these into the painting. And as I do this, here I can suggest some of the hair strengths. A bit more pigment here. Here I don't go anymore because that's completely dry now. I just want to develop this part that is still wet. And this is what I'm doing now is just very intuitive. It's all about experimentation. I don't know if that will look good. I just want to create something that does not exactly look like the hair on the photo. Here, I feel like there's too much too many lines and brush strokes. But now, it's okay. And once you get into this stage that you can check this abstraction and you're okay with it, then we get rid of all the excess watchers. So with the tip of your brush, gently lift everything, then you can let it dry. Okay. I'm thinking of incorporating one more effect because this is not dry yet. I'm going to try to add a little bit of these extra drips, but only in some areas. Like that. Now I'm going to let this dry as it is. And once this is dry, we can continue adding second layer, just a little bit of detail. This will be fun portrait. This is what the portrait looks like when it dried. But we have one more difficult task in front of us, and that is to add some details and add the contrast around the face, define it a bit more. I don't think it's going to have to be a long process, but it will have to be a precise one. Will probably start with adding this hair strength with the dry brush technique. I have this testing paper. Oh, small watercolor paper just for testing the paint. I will want to use the dry brush like this, but maybe with a little bit darker paint. This is what we did already with other portraits, but I want to be a bit more careful here. Here a few more strokes. This way. And at the darkest darks here as well. Here we have to be very careful. Somewhere, you only have to leave the paper almost white, do dry brush. Somewhere, you need to cover a bit with more pigment in the darker area. I have to pay attention to where should I add more pigment and where I need to let my dry brush just create some texture. But most of this portrait is just hair. I just have to map out the tunnel values just like we did for this sketch. This is again, very dark part. Here. Maybe with a tinier brush so that I don't have these brush strokes on repeated look the same. And here I'm covering this with a bit of clean water to just to add the unity into these textures. A little bit of not here. Not there. I could not resist these pleasures. We'll dry everything to see how the values look because this paint it changes a lot when it's wet, looks different, when it's dry, it's much lighter, a bit more gray. I want to see the proper contrast as it is. Now we have to do the most challenging part and that is the ice. Careful here because since we're going to paint cast shadows and shadows on the face, no longer we'll be using dry brush all that much, but we'll be using dark paint with a bit more water like this so that we can spread it and cover the area with it. So first tricky area is this part, so I want to cover it all with me tone. Paint a little bit of these cast shadows on the face from the hair strengths even here. I'm going to be focusing probably a bit and then as this area is wet, we can go back in with pure pigment and add these darker parts it's as simple as this. You can't overwork this. Don't worry about this too much. Just pay attention to the reference photo should be fine. I should just lay down the paint as I see that the shadow is on the reference here, here I see a little bit of a dry brush. Kind of. Since this is the eyebrows, the edge will be like this kind of distorted. Here, it will be below these hair strength a bit lighter here. And here, it will wrap around the face. And here we have to just paint these shadows like we see them. On the reference like that. Here I smudge a little bit of this edge. It appears a bit softer. Here, this shadow kind of dissolves a little bit. This shadow is I'm painting it into a dampened surface so that it spreads a little bit. And the same is something that goes in here, and you have to dampen the surface a little bit to spread. Just with clean water. Now with thicker pigment, we can go in. I was hoping it will not be so wet anymore. And we kind of paint this and add a little bit of this eyebrow. 23. Day 5 - Watercolor painting (part two): This part of the eye here is a little bit lighter with clean brush, I want to lift some of the pig Do it like this. Lift it with your brush. This part also lightly try to lift some of it. Do not overwork. Here on this part, we need to do more of these shadows from tiny hair strings. You just have to basically draw them. They might be a bit more dark here in this area than a little bit more light here. Like that. And I continue I continue straight to this shadow. Because this is the hardest part of the portrait. Truly. So here I continue to paint this, this entire part that connects to the hair. And we here have to draw these tiny little shadows of the hair. Now here, I just tried to smudge this part a little bit to connect everything. And with the darker paint, again, go back and do these darker parts here and here, just a little bit. Here is going to be a hair strength that we will paint later. Here as well. I will try to probably will have to try to dry this. Here, I don't like the shadow yet. This shadow kind of wraps around the face. I try to soften this edge. I'll dry the ice and then we'll continue adding these dark hair strengths that I have to paint on top of the shadow. And that is this one and a little bit of here here and here. So I think this area is quite finished. Maybe remove some of the reflected light from here. Now we will paint around the nose. Here is the shadow around her nose. Here, it has a sharp edge, but it continues this way. And it continues to the lips, covers basically all of this entire part of the face. And even here. This is a tricky shadow because it consists of stiff edges. And some edges that like here will need softening. This one definitely needs to be softened. Here also on the nurse. This needs to be a bit more soft and this part softens as it turns around the chin. Then there is large shadow underneath the underneath the chin. So here it goes like this. And And here, probably with larger brush will be better idea, but we have to wet this and let this color bleed into the face a little bit. Also in this area, we have to create reflected light. So before the wash dries, you can try to remove some of the pigment just to lighten this area a little bit. That should be enough. O. While this is wet, I will try to add one quite soft shadow here, soft and light, but still. And we'll dry. Maybe I will do one more thing. I will wet this part here. And we'll add some really smaller shadings. But here, this part of the nose has some shading. This knot. We'll have to get rid of. Make this a little bit lighter later if possible. But on the nose, definitely, yes. This part should be more in shadow. And nostro, it needs to be very dark. So for nostro, I'm adding more pigment into this wash. Here, the mouth will do a bit later. This already dried, yes. So I have to spread with clean water again again. And dry. There's just a couple of fixes in this painting that we have to do with this stiffer brush, flat brush with just clean water. I want to rub off some of the pigment here at the top of the nose because I feel like accidentally a bit more pigment go in there that was supposed to. This part was supposed to be light. And well, it's not so light. But this happens. So sometimes you can rub the pigment off. And if that doesn't happen, then you can maybe here at a little bit of tone so that this one in comparison feels a bit lighter. Because this side part of the nose should have a little bit more value. And this part of the nose is very dark. I need to fix the lips because we did not paint them yet. So the upper lip, it gets a lot darker. So here should be more paint, more pigment. And here we just clean water. I create some value, but not so dark in this part. Here is a drop shadow. And that we got. This part is not so light. The lightest part is here. Now I think it's quite okay, but I just want to get some more of this reflected light here in this area. I'll try to lighten slightly. A little bit lighter. Could fix this forever or we can say, Okay, this is fine and we can move on because it's a study or a quick portrait work. But I'm not very happy with the nose because it's like we do not see this part of the nose. The third part here should be more in shadow, but there's it is slightly visible, even though it falls into this cast shadow. Okay. And here I want to we had a very dark hair strength there. I want to add some more because as I was adding the shadow here on the face, I smudged accidentally the texture. So I can add a bit of it. One more thing I will try to fix is the corner of the mouth here. I feel like on the reference photo, it's a little bit longer, and that makes her lips a bit more nice. And I think we're done. Did we manage to capture the values? I think we did. It's not perfect. Quite like this portrait. This was a real challenge. It was toughy for me. Let me know how yours went. If you handled this, then you're going to have so much fun for the next two days. Make sure you don't skip those. Tomorrow, we will paint a guy for change. I think you will be proud of what you've created so far, and I will see you tomorrow. In the next lesson, I will introduce another color for monochromatic portrait. Well again, do a quick thumbnail sketch and then paint a quick watercolor portrait. 24. Day 6 - Creating a value map (thumbnail): Today six of our watercolor painting challenge, we are almost at the finish line. Let's get started with today's portrait. You should be able to do this much quicker than before. Yesterday, the portrait was really challenging. But today, I think this will be a bit simple. I included different types of faces older and younger with longer hair, shorter hair, both men and women. So my reference for today will be this photo. I like it for strong contrast. Yeah, I wanted to include something different. It's three quarters portrait, so it might not be the easiest to draw. I want to experiment with adding a bit of texture. Again, for the facial hair, the entire hairstyle. I do not have a vision yet for how to stylize this. I just hope that this portrait will develop on its own. Let's start with the thumbl, first try to just block in the shape of this head of his face with simple straight lines, as many straight lines as possible. Like always, here is the hairstyle. And here again is the part for the eyebrows. This part is for the nose. This again will be facial hair, here, here, and here, his eyes will be easier to probably draw because they show a bit more structure. This is the structure of the circles below the eyes that helps us position them quite a lot. The eyes are closed, so it's not going to be difficult to paint detail here. There's an under fault here. Very quickly, something like this. What I like about this photo, partially why I've chosen it is that we can clearly see that the face has this sight part here. It's like you can see here and here, the side part of the face will help us give a bit more dimension to the face. That this very quick outline. It's probably the face will be a bit thinner. I always I have a tendency to do these faces are a little bit more white and then correct everything. So now I mark, now we're going to find the lightest lights for the sketch. There's a lot of highlights in the hair. The hair is light, but I don't think this will be the lightest light. We will give it some texture. Again, Abt there's a lot of light going on in this area, the forehead area. There's highlight here and again on the nose, maybe just a bit here. This part is quite light over here, this part, again, a bit more light. And this part is light. Here, lightest parts will be this entire part of the facial hair. Everything else, we can cover in some mid tone gently, entire part. And this as well. When it comes to these hairs, this will be darker part. Here, this part will be darker. Here we have some lights. There's some pops off a little bit of darker tonal value in the hair. Here behind the ear is also one part that's slightly darker. The background is dark, but I'm not sure if we will do that for the painting his shirt is very black. Okay. Here again, eyebrows, dark, not very dark, but definitely have mid tones. Darkest darks, one more ten, this is mid tone and darkest darks should be assigned here in these areas around the nose. Marking this falls around the eyes underneath the nose definitely. Here here as well. This is. Again, these areas around eyes, maybe you noticed in previous portraits, they often contain the shadow and if you simplify it to the minimum then you get this sunglass is almost as a shape like a sunglass that always helps you to define the face in that area. Here's very dark part that's underneath the facial hair. I marks the upper lip. Here below the lower lips a little bit of that tone. But then this again, is quite light. Here is dark, here is dark. That's just the standard shadow on the neck that you have that is a bit more dark. This part, the side part of the face gets a little bit darker just because marks the side, gives us a bit more volume in the face. Here we have one more shadow on the nose. So it might look something like this. Inside the ear, ear is a bit lighter, but here we have very dark shadow. Here we have some darkness and some darkness. I think that is it. That was 10 minutes of sketching helps me a great deal. Again, to plan a portrait like this is absolutely great. I always smudge, then it does not look so great. At least I know where the values are, but clean it a little bit, you have to do that. If you can tell what the values look like, you don't have to clean it up. When I have it mapped like this, I can move on to create the sketch on a watercolor paper. 25. Day 6 - Portrait sketch : Sketch our sixth portrait on a watercolor paper. Now that I drew this little sketch, it is time to draw the actual sketch for our watercolor painting. For that, as usual, I will use my mechanical pencil. First, I will start by blocking in simple shapes just like before. It's just always more complicated on a watercolor paper just because well, one. We cannot really use the values. I'm not really sure if the proportions are 100% okay. Unless I measure everything, but I will not do that for this challenge, I just want to be freehand and not overcomplicate the process because this is not a commissioned portrait. Maybe I'll do a class about that some other time, how to be 100% exact in these portraits. If you do a commission, that can be a helpful technique for someone. But not for these challenges as I said, Oh, quickly, my part, everything it this part. This is quick sketch. This was just a very quick very quick sketching. And now I have to basically check if I got proportions correct. I don't think they are correct and never are the first time. But before I correct, I always use this needed eraser and I'm going to clean the lines a little bit here. I might even leave this sketch a little bit more rough than what I usually do. I enjoyed this. It was very quick, very bold and it has more emotional impact, I think than if I'm too careful. I like that. We'll see how that turns out here. With this, I was a bit too far. Here, I'm not sure if the mouth is where it's supposed to be. Probably I'll find out by mapping these parts like this triangular shape, shape, and now the shape of the facial hair. I think, yes, I was right that it was a tiny bit too low. Should be like this. Here a bit more tone, here a bit more tone, and these are the more windows. The other eye would go like this, here. Careful about this part of the head. It needs to have a nice shape here it overlaps with the hair. Here, I think we get a bit more close to the face. Yes, definitely. I think we're done. I don't think we need too much more info. Don't really care about the shirt a lot. We'll soften my sketch a little bit and we'll figure out which color we will use for this portrait. I did not decide yet. I decided on a lot of stuff about this challenge, but the last two colors, not really. 26. Day 6 - Watercolor painting (part one): This lesson, let's get painting our sixth watercolor portrait. We have the Tamil sketch here and we have a reference photo and the color that I decided to use today is Prussian green. I've never painted monochromatic portrait with this paint before. But it is one of my favorite greens, I don't know how that will look. It is very rich, quite dark green. When you dilute though, you will get this lovely gradient. It contains midgreen with a bit of turquoise undertones beautiful and it does not really granulate, so it will be smooth color. Might be interesting. Since watercolor challenges are about the experimentation, I decided to do one here. Before I start to apply the mid tone, I have to map out the highlights. Again, we've got a little bit of highlight here. We've got a bit here on the nose, but I will want them soft. This part will be in light. This part here will be in light and this part of the forehead as well. This is light, but this is facial hair, so I will not map that out. Also, there's a little bit of highlight here and here on the ear, which I did not really include here because I want more contrast here in this area. When I go over these areas, quickly realize where they are and we can basically start applying our paint. So starting from the face here, I will apply paint with a bit of water, but this pigment will be dissolved, will be very light, and this mid part will be covered with clean water because that's the light part. And here for the hair, we can do a little bit of texture again, just like before. Just a tiny bit of texture. The hair is gray, almost white, so not a lot of pigment. Here we can return a bit later to add more pigment. Let's continue adding the wash on the face. Here, this part will be a bit more dark. Here you have to account for the highlights. I would just cover that with clean water and continue towards the bottom of the page. Here again, there is a mid tone value here as well. It's really weird to paint portraits with green. I've never done this before. These areas should be at least a little bit of mid tone, but here we use clean water because these are the highlighted parts. And on this other side of the nose, again, you need a bit more pigment. And here, clean water. So pigment pigment. Clean water. Lots of clean water. More pigment. This is the side part of the face that needs a bit more pigment. This part is a little bit more dark. Me pigment and clean water. But this part in general, needs a little bit more pigment. Here we need clean water. I will try to just make this area as light as possible and here as well. Oh. Okay, B here again, pigment, pigment clean water in here. Pigment, but with texture since here we have some facial hair, so we can add some texture a bit more pigment for the mouth and midtone is here and here. This part just covered that with water, a bit more pigment to the corners, but careful because the lower lip tends to be a bit more light, rather clean water than too much pigment. And then here, we just have to do a little bit of the dry brush to create some texture. But from the bottom part, we need a little bit more pigment to kind of rounded here as well. And here we need a bit more pigment. Again, these processes, once you map everything out, they get pretty easy, pretty straightforward. Here we start adding more pigment, but you need more water also. And I want to maybe use my brush to be very expressive here. And thick pigment. Here, just connected with clean water. So I don't want too much like highlights in this area to grab attention. And if you have very thick pigment, then we could do these darker spots and folds in the clothes here a bit here and here and here. Just find a little bit darker parts. And add them if it feels like it belongs. Sometimes I do this with paint straight from the tube because it gets as dark as I need. Watercolor tends to be very pale. So sometimes we have to fight. If you want strong colour, you can use straight from the tube if you want. Okay. This dark part, we could have edited that later in the second step, but I already had this on my brush, so I did now. I need to now get rid of all the excess water and then dry. This is basically our first layer. It was very quick. Think below 10 minutes. If you can keep it quick, at least the first layer, then you might have a really expressive, nice, not too timid portrait in the end and everything that requires a bit more precision in the second layer, you can take your time. But I like when portrait or painting, it includes these abstractions and the splatters. Well, this display, and then a little bit of precision in your focal point. Right. I will now dry this so that we can continue with the second layer. The first layer is now dry. Let's move on to a little bit of detail. I would start probably with the hair, move on to the ice and the rest, and then I will figure out if I want to add some background because it is tempting. With a smaller brush, I'll try to do some dry brush. You know, these strokes, we use them a lot throughout this week. I'll try to edit here. Small brush is a little bit harder. Maybe we will try to do that with a larger brush. Might be a bit more flexible. And here I will try to add these parts. H And here a bit more. This he is more challenging than I thought. And here. And all of the darker area that are around the face, we have to paint there. Okay. Still not happy with the hair and not even with how the texture turned out. We'll probably have to add the background so that the white hair does not scream so much. Though, Okay, now, I have to add here a little bit more shadow to round this face. And then with clean watcher on my brush, I have to smudge the edge. Kinda have to add ocher here as well. And here with more. Okay. I'm thinking of adding a little bit more pigment here to create this round shape of the head. Now, we move on to the eye area. I'm going to return here because it's not quite okay, but we will now do the area here. I cover this all with pigment, and here there's a little bit of if possible, a little bit of dry brush because this should get a little bit darker here and here. Here as well. And on the other side too here is sort of like the darkness. And then the texture of the eyebrows, here is the spart. And we have to cover this up with meton and dark cast shadow underneath the nose. Maybe it is too light. This paint is tricky. It seems dark, but you really have to add thicker pigment to stay dark. A very tricky. Almost pure pigment I'm adding now for the kind of darkness that I need in these areas. And here I kind of want to smudge a little bit towards both sides. Smite baby too dark. No. Smudge the wrong thing. Wrong thing. All right. Something like this. Can I grab a smaller brush because around ie, we still need some extra work, especially with here where we have the dark lashes part. I want to do some texture here to indicate the lashes, and this part is very dark. 27. Day 6 - Watercolor painting (part two): This is just drawing with small brush, trying to get a little bit closer to the reference. But it is way easier to paint and even more fun, I think, portraits that have a bit of expression like this one and maybe show a little bit more structure with more natural light I like very much. And with very, very light paint, we need to add some of these wrinkles on the forehead. Never do them as one line. Do them as a line that is broken. This was one line and it looks weird. So weird. And here a bit more volume. And here a bit more volume. And just a few more spots and like this, imperfections of the skin that I love to add so much. They show so much character. Here as well. And I think that I made him a little bit too high. The forehead is a bit too high. I think we have to do just a couple of these tiny hairs need to go a bit lower. Hair is a bit too, that was the lines are too thick. But for this part, I think it should be okay. And and even, like, here shadow around this part there. And this this part of the ear that's a bit too dark or bit darker. Here there are parts that are darker. This is enough. I don't want anything more about this ear. This just enough. Bit more darkness around the ear, behind the ear definitely. If possible to add because this is one of the tightest, darker spots of the painting. We've got stuff to finish around the eyes, and I think the rest is fine. Around the mouth, I mean, So here is the darker area. And here below the lower lip, we have to shade a bit more. First layer was not all that sufficient. And here still a little bit of the dry brush. This is too much. I will smatch some of them because they felt a bit too sharp. And maybe a little bit of darkness and volume here in this area. Oh, well, I've hidden some part of the neck that might have stayed a little bit more light here. So I can bring the light back with rubbing and lifting of the pigment. But no more than this. And we're almost done. It's just here. I need a bit more volume. It's like working with one pigment is way easier than working with color. Here as well. Here as well, because this is also part of the face that turns away from the light, so should have a little bit more volume, little bit more darkness in this area. I will now dry. We'll see. Well, if you want, we can grab this suple and bring back some of these highlights to make this mustache bit more lively and real even here. Here, maybe a bit more. Structure. As well as for the hair. I want to decide whether I'm going to add background or leave it like this because the painting is finished. It did not even take 1 hour to paint. And I want to paint a little bit of a background with this brush. So I'm going to make a wash of paint diluted here. We'll see. So I'll start lightly here, and I will add this around the portrait first. And with a tiny brush, I will move the water here. So that I have a clean line. Well, you have to do this while the portrait is still wet. No, the portrait, while the background. The first washo background is wet. Here we have to get rid of the excess so that it does not drip too much. Just to incorporate it into the hair. And here we will I'm making a bit more payment just to see what it would look like. And now now I'll take away all of this mess, the excess watcher. As the wash dries, I can do this with clean wacher on my fingers just to give it a little bit of some extra background effect, and I'll dry. Well, I think it looks much better with the background than without it, but have one more correction to make. And that is when placed in the background on a separate layer, sometimes you get these hard edges, sometimes they fit, and sometimes not so much. And for that, I use this stiffer brush. It doesn't really matter if it's flat or normal round brush, but with flat one, I can get these highlights if I want to. I could add, I could wrap the pigment off a little bit here and add these tiny little hairs. You can do that with very tiny rambrs as well. He works very nice if you don't overpaint this layer, if it's just one coat of paint, then the lifting of the pigment, it works very nicely. And here, sometimes I want to also rub the edge so that I soften this edge of the portrait a little bit. Here it created like double edges which I don't like. So this part of the portrait can be more seamless. It looks a bit more natural. And here, just a tiny bit of floating hair. Sometimes I can even rub off some little wrinkles even on the face. But I do not think that we need all that much detail. I was just fixing weird brushstroke here. Okay, we don't need to be so it. Pick about it. And we can call this done. I will sign the portrait and we'll leave it alone finally. And guys, we just finished sixth day of our watercolor portrait challenge. Has it been fun for you? Because for me, the more I paint, every single day, this portrait, the more as I feel and I feel like starting a new one immediately after I'm done, I'm kind of getting curious about different reference photos and how would I tackle them. So hopefully, it's at least a bit similar for you. But you'd be I'd be really happy if you share your experience. You can upload your class project down below. Even if you only have one painting, you can upload, tell me how you're feeling. How's it going for you and you can always edit your project and add the remaining paintings later on. Do not forget about that option. And I'll see you tomorrow. I have yet to figure out what paint I'm going to use, but tomorrow for our last painting, we will tackle a weird angle. So we'll take a little bit distorted portrait, and it's going to be fun. It's going to be difficult, but not so difficult. And it's the last one of this challenge. And I will see you tomorrow. Bye. 28. Day 7 - Creating a value map (Thumbnail): Welcome to the seven of seven day Watercolor challenge. And yes, this is our final portrait for this challenge. So let's get started on our thumbnail. We have one more portrait ahead of us. It's going to be a challenging one because this portrait is phase in a weird angle, as I call it, it's tilted upwards. The way we perceive the face, it has a very different proportion than what phase normally has. I like this kind of challenge. There's a lot of floating hair. Let's try to sketch this and we will see On the plus side, there is a lot of contrast in this phase. You can clearly see the value structure. Here is some lighter parts of the face. Here is mid tone and here is dark. So three parts of the face are quite visible and the floating hair invites us to experiment and stylize a little bit. I'm looking forward. Not sure if it's going to be too hard to draw. Let's just try. Like always, I want to try to sketch this in straight lines as much as possible. And the face from this angle, it appears much shorter than usual because that's what the perspective does here. So this bottom third of the face is very large, larger than how we usually perceive it, and little lips appear much larger than how they would normally be, especially the lower lip. Here is a lot of shadow. And even the top lip is quite, it takes a lot of room. This space between nose and mouth, not a lot of space is there. It's quite small, and here is nostrils. You will see you will see the nostrils quite open because that's, again, the angle that we perceive the nose from. And eyes, they are almost aligned with the tip of the nose. So here is one. The eyes will be challenging to draw and paint. And here you get corner and it'll be like this. So here is the chin. Here is the shoulder. This the area for the cheek. We don't see ears very much. Forehead is very short. There is some dark hair here, like mid tones and floating hair, of course. This is the base. I think this is the base. Without toning and placing tone values here, we don't really see if we are correct. Let's try to first find out where the lightest parts are. They will sort of the silhouette of the nose. So I think like this here will be light part. This part is definitely in light. Forehead, a lot of the forehead is in light. Then this part is in light here as well. Lot of light in the bottom in the lower lip, and that's it. I would put the chin in mid tone because it's still hidden underneath the lip, so we don't really see all that much. Everything else will be mid tone. So let's cover this up. H. And now, in all this Mton, we have to find the darkest values. So start here on the face. Here will be quite dark this part. Here we'll have quite dark this part and then browse. Eyes here. And even like the eye whites, you would think they would be white, but look how dark they are. So what I see is a lot of darker tones in that area. Here is a bit more dark. And yeah, the forehead should have some me tone here on the edge so that it kind of turns. Now, the nose here, this part, this part, And here, this part, the side of the nose gets a little bit more mid tone. This part of the eye gets a bit more darkness. Here. Top lip. Bottom lip. And here we get a lot more dark areas. So we've got light, mid tone, and darks. This case is very orientation, there's not much precision in it, but I think when I look at it from above, it more or less maps out what we want to achieve with this painting. We'll have to be careful because I'm a little bit afraid that if we don't shade this properly and there's a lot of changes in the shadow. It's not quite all that precise. Might turn out like she has weird green on her face or the face will not quite look natural. So we have to be careful. But I like this kind of challenge, especially when we are about to close on our seven day regular practice. I think something like this is totally required. I will clean this up a little bit just a bit. We have to go sketch on a watercolor paper. I think it must be a fun portrait in the end. 29. Day 7 - Portrait sketch: Let's sketch our last portrait on a watercolor paper. I have to admit that I truly struggled with this demo. It was very hard for me to draw. I don't know if it was the tiredness or my cold, but I have to admit that I decided to publish it anyway and not remake the demo for something a bit nicer, just because I wanted to give you a reality check because there will always be days that everything that you touch will turn out great and that motivates you. And will always be days when your own art will not live up to your own standards. And I want to acknowledge this fact. I just want to encourage you to be proud of yourself that you've come this far. Please bear with me as I painfully sketch this one. You can try to sketch your own, and probably you will produce a better sketch than I did. Nevertheless, this all is part of the process and it's part of my own reality. I regularly throw away at least every fifth painting that I paint, I think it will always be like that, and I don't even mind it. It is a very small price to pay for those portraits that will turn out great because the felt portrait and felt sketch always teaches me so much. And so with that, let's check how this one went. The process will be very similar to what I've done for the value sketch, but sadly, I cannot use value here. I kind of like the whole silhouette of the girl. Here is the nose. Okay. One nostril, the other and very difficult. I will try to clean the sketch up a bit. This goes actually even lower. Very difficult, more difficult than I thought. It just keeps looking weird. But I think the mouth is the most difficult part, and the rest can kind of be covered with the hair, but the mouth is really truly weirdly positioned. Probably this is best I can do, and I'm not even sure if that's correct or alright. But again, without the tone, value is very hard to judge. So I've probably got some mistakes. This eye is way too far, forehead still too high, and the chin was too low. Yeah, the ankle is weird. Definitely lies a lot. Okay. A little bit better, but now I have to. Now the paper is just filled with lines and I have to clean up. I'm not very happy. However, I don't know if Pepper could take any more changes, so I will do it like this, this and we'll see. So this is my final sketch, and I will start preparing for painting. We'll show you what color we will use for the last day very shortly. This might be our very most challenging one. 30. Day 7 - Watercolor painting (part one): In this lesson, we will paint our last portrait in watercolor. I'm so excited. Let's finish this. For this last painting, we will use this color. It's called deep scarlet. I was looking for something like coffee but did not have that color in my collection, but this is the deep scarlet. Paint, I think it might be an interesting monochromatic portrait. We'll see. Hopefully we'll not have trouble getting the strong dark tones with it. We'll see. So I'm first starting out with this light wash of paint. I will first apply here to the hair. Here, also, just add a bit of texture. And we'll have to do the white for the forehead and nose. And here is the part of the face that's a little bit more dark and here as well. And then here we cover it up or connect it with clean water. Just mapping out according to our seminal sketch. Nose that will get mid tone, the mouth will definitely get some darkness here on the cheek, just clean water, here as well, clean water. Bottom lip clean water, but below it, we have to apply more pigment and here, much more pigment. Between them, could be clean water to connect. Then a little bit of dry brush here for the hair. I want to add a little bit more darker tone in some areas so that I don't have to do too much darkening in another layer here as well, while it's still wet. This part and this part is kind of dark. These parts around the eyes. This part is very dark. Best to apply when everything is wet here. And we add some texture and darken as we move towards the bottom here. Okay. This part of the hair needs to be a bit more light, getting some texture. And this part of the shirt, we have to really go heavy with pigment. And between these hair strings. Yeah. I kind of want some dynamic strokes. This part of the painting is very empty. I'm thinking what to do with that. I would try to maybe do this. And here, I'm going to take the entire tube and we'll paint with it the darkest folds of the clothing just because this pigment is quite light. And if I don't get clean pigment, then I don't have much chance to get some of this darkness. Here. But mostly I use it for the clothes, for the skin, it does not really work all that well. I don't know what it will look like when it dries. We'll see. Hopefully it will look nice. This part of the work already belongs to the second layer, but I just want to do as much as I can, if that's possible. And here, maybe we could lift some of this pigment, lift it up here as well. Also, we have to get rid of the excess. Now, I just grab a bit of water with my fingers and I try to do this platter effect, just a tiny bit to make the painting look a bit more interesting here in this abstract part. And I will add the first layer dry. We'll see if we can make something of this pace in the second layer. So now, first layer is dry and we will continue with the second layer. This second layer, I'd like to add some of the Shadows on the face make some areas of this painting sharper a little bit more. Start with the eyes, move through the nose to the mouth, and probably finalize some parts of the hair and the entire composition. Probably would start with adding this shadow and making it a bit more profound here and here. Actually, on the other side as well. I'm hearing a little bit more of a dry brush technique. I'm going to darken the eyebrows. I have to do this with almost clear thick pigment because this color is not that dark. And on this side, the part of the eye is very dark, almost entire this thickness of the eyelid is very dark, as well as the insides of the eye here the iris. Yeah, the iris. And even eye whites, they are quite dark. I'm not even sure if I can do this with this pigment. So dark. And here is another shadow. In this part, there's another shadow. And here we have to blend with brush that's well, just dampened with clean water, and we blur this edge a little bit the entire top lip is quite dark, so I'm using very thick pigment here to cover it up. Then this lip is rather pale. So if I go there is just to create some texture of the lower lip, but not much shading. Okay. And then this part is quite dark. But when I'm painting shadows, I do not want this texture. I want to smudge the paint a little bit. And here I thought I might add more shadow. And this chin probably will need one more as well. Here and here should get a bit more dark. Okay. I will try to now use hair dryer because I don't quite see if the contrast is okay. It is a bit weird. Probably I drew it wrong, but we need to lift this part a little bit. Okay. 31. Day 7 - Watercolor painting (part two): We'll have to do something with the eyes. Don't like them for now. Maybe we should do something about it right now. But for this, I will need, like, a small brush. This is the one that I have here. Close by, I just synthetic brush that allows me to draw with thicker pigment here. I need to add some accents and probably these lashes also. Okay. And I'm not sure, but for this one, I might need to use white guash or at least a scalpel to increase the lightness and add some highlights in some areas. For now, I'm just trying to remove some of the pigment with thicker brush. Like here and a little bit here. Okay, I see one more problem, and that is with this shadow, it should go like this. Here is a bit too light. I will try to add that now with bigger brush. I think the face is more or less we can't do much better. Maybe a shadow here and a little bit of shadow here, and then we move onto the hair. So here I can actually see how this shadow could improve things. And I'll just soften with clean brush. The last thing that I want to add is adding some contrast into the hair. So here is a deepened area that we still don't have much darks in there, so we need to add those. And there's a couple of hair strings that I'd like to add just for stylization. I would start here at the top of the head. Here. These areas are larger and should be a bit more clean since they're very close to the focal point. Here. And here we must preserve some of the hair strings that are light, so I'm painting kind of in between them. Oh And sometimes I just add too much texture, and then I just try to dissolve it a little bit with clean brush so that it does not look like pastel. And here still need to add a little bit of the contrast. Okay. And this floating hair that I'm adding to the very end, I think they're very key to this composition because there's a lot of space in here in this area, and she looks kind of this way. So I wanted the hair to flow that direction. This one must be probably too much. I destroyed some of the nice texture. So now with this couple, I want to add some of the tiny little highlights in the eyes. Maybe even like here and on the lips and some of these floating hairs. I Okay Yes, and I think we're probably down. But This was a real tough one. I hope that you enjoyed the entire challenge. Let me know if you like this portrait. I might have to even remake it in my own spare time because I'm not 100% satisfied with this results, but I think it was fun challenge. Probably second time drawing and painting this one would turn out a little better. The color was very nice, was much nicer than how I thought it's going to go. Thank you so much for spending those seven days with me. I hope you had fun. Let me know what you learned. I'm eagerly awaiting your project. 32. Final Thoughts: And the Z you've made it to the end of this challenge. Congratulations. I hope that you enjoyed this challenge. I hope that it helped you loosen up and simplify your approach, and maybe even see portraits and watercolor a little bit differently. If you haven't already, I'd love if you uploaded your project down into the project gallery. It is always very inspiring to see your interpretation, and I do respond to every project. So if you want to stay in touch and see more of what I'm working on, you can follow me here on Skillshare to get updates when I release a new class. I also post a lot of painting process and tutorials on YouTube or share my daily art on Instagram. You can follow me on both platforms if you want to. And thank you so much for spending your time with me. I hope this challenge helped you build some of the creative momentum, and I will see you in the next class.