Paint a Portrait: The Fundamentals of Using Light & Shade

1. Introduction: Portraiture can be a big topic, and maybe you're not sure where to start. Well, come here. I'm going to show you how to paint a face. Hi, I'm Shelly. I'm an artist and illustrator living in Enburgh, Scotland, and I mainly paint people. I like painting faces. I paint a lot of faces. But one of the things that I struggled with was understanding how to paint faces that drew people in, how to make them seem alive and pop. So I'm going to show you how. In this class, I'm going to show you the fundamentals of painting a face. You're going to learn how to see faces like an artist, simplifying them and breaking them down, creating depth and form. What makes anything look like it has a three D shape and how you can apply that in painting a face? How to use light and dark to draw attention, why our eyes are drawn to certain things and how to use that in your painting. And how to paint a face, any face, taking it step by step to create a finished portrait. By the end of this class, you will have created a dynamic monochrome portrait with just a splash of color. You don't need any special materials for this class. Whatever you currently use will be fine. This class is for everyone. If you're new to painting faces, this will guide you through the process. If you've been painting for a little while now, but feel like something is missing, these exercises will help you level up your portraits. If you're an experienced artist, this can give you a no pressure space to play and experiment with contrast and form. Are you ready? I'll see you in class. 2. The Project: Hey, what exactly are we going to do in this class? We are going to create a dynamic monochrome portrait working only with light and dark. The lessons are arranged to build on one another from a deep understanding of tonal values to deconstructing faces through to painting a real face, any face, with depth and form. Painting faces is something that becomes easier with repetition and practice. I recommend you follow along with each lesson and do each of the practical lessons in order. Remember you can pause and go back to review and retry anything that might need extra practice. I've also created a workbook to complement this class, so make sure to download that and use it to support your learning. I remember doodling faces in the margins of my daughters in school. I would always draw the same angle because I had somehow convinced myself that was the only face I could draw. It's funny the way in which we limit ourselves. Time and practice has taught me that I can do much more than that now, and it's something I get so much pleasure and satisfaction from. I wanted to share what I've learned about getting started with painting faces, make the class that would have really helped me when I was younger. I did the only sensible thing you can in such situations and experimented on my family. It's fine. They both painted faces they were happy with and no one cried. I called that a success. Okay. Then I talked the forerunner to this class in a live session online and from what I could see, no one cried there either. There are lots of lovely faces painted during and afterwards too. There are as many ways of painting faces as there are faces, if not more. In this class, I'll be showing you one of my ways of doing that. If any of this leaves you with unanswered questions, please go ahead and pop them into the class discussion area where I'll do my best to answer them. I'll be sharing the tips that I've picked up over the years to help you get the most from this process. You don't need to be an experienced artist and you don't need any fancy supplies to get started. You can use any traditional or digital medium you like from acrylics to procreate. I'll be demonstrating with watercolors because they make me happy. Choose art supplies that make you happy too. If you're working with traditional media, you'll need paper to sketch on, as well as a pencil and an eraser. You'll also need something to color in with. Paints, pencils, pens, they're all fine. You'll need one dark color and a lighter shade of that color, as well as a pink or red and a white. The colors I'll be using are pines gray and rose madder. I really like these at the moment. That's why. You pick the shades that you're really into just now too. Along the way, I encourage you to experiment and find a style of painting faces that you enjoy and create portraits are uniquely yours. I would love it if you felt willing to share your creations by adding a project to the projects gallery. If you would like to share what you've made on Instagram, please feel free to tag me so that I can see what you've made there too. I'm at Shelly Scale. My aim for this class is to give you the practical skills to paint any kind of face you like confidently to learn to see the world like an artist and take as much joy in portraiture as I do. Ready for our first lesson. Come join me there to lay the foundations of painting faces successfully. Okay. 3. Fundamental Concepts: All right. In this lesson, we're going to cover the fundamental concepts we'll need to paint faces. Get your art supplies ready, and let's do this. The first thing we need to understand is how to get a good range of values from a single color using whatever medium you've chosen. The color I'm choosing to work with in this class is called pains gray, which is a dark, bluey gray color. You can use any color you like as long as you can get a really dark and a really light version of it. Now I'd like you to experiment with creating different values of the color that you've chosen darker and lighter versions until you have a really dark value, we'll use for the shadows, a really light value that we'll use for the highlights. One somewhere in the middle that we'll use for the mid tones. Looking at what I've made, I can see this middle one is too pale and needs more darkening to be more in the middle. So now I think I've got an idea of what values I want to use and how to create them. I'm going to paint them out again and this time, I'll only paint the shadow, the mid tone, and the highlight values I'm planning on using. Now, I can see that this isn't dark enough, so I'm going to darken it down. Now I've done that. I've got a nice amount of contrast between the three values of color I'm using. I may not use this highlight color. I may just use the white of the page instead for the brightest possible highlight, which will give the greatest contrast between the shadows and the light. This is my shadow color. This is my mid tone color. And these are my highlight colors. Make sure you know how to create your own value range before moving on to the next section as you're going to need it there. We're now going to use the value range we just created to make things that look three D, starting with a cube. Let's draw a cube. Start by drawing a square. It doesn't need to be perfect, so don't feel like you need to get a ruler unless you want one. Once you have your square, draw lines from three of the corners all about the same length and the same angle as best you can, like I said, it doesn't need to be perfect. Now, connect these lines and this gives us a cube. I'm free hand drawing this because precision doesn't really matter for this exercise. We're going to have a light source that's coming from this direction, which means the top of the cube is going to be the lightest. This side here will be the darkest, and here will be our mid tones. Go ahead and apply your shadow color to this side, which is pointing away from the light source, which is why it is in shadow. I'm darkening this right down because this is watercolor, which means it's going to lighten as it dries. Another watercolor quirk is that I need to dry this before painting the next side because if I don't, the paint will bleed into this area since both will be wet. So now, go ahead and use your mid tone value to color in this face of the cube. And with those two values, we've managed to create a three dimensional cube. I'm going to leave the top unpainted and use the white of the page for the high light color just now. If you do this too, but want to add a bit more definition to this highlight face, you can paint around the edge and give it an outline. This helps it stand out a bit from the background, particularly when both are white. And there we have a cube. The next thing we're going to do is use our value range to make a surface look both three D and curved. So go ahead and sketch a circle. We'll have the light coming from the same direction as in the cube drawing. And because this is going to become a sphere, we'll have a jelly bean like highlight and a crescent moon shaped shadow. So go ahead and sketch these in. Now, let's start adding color. I tend to start with the shadows because getting that contrast in straightaway is quite satisfying, and it helps me see the piece come together right from the beginning. You don't have to paint it in the same order as me, but I suggest you give it a try first and then experiment with different approaches if you want. Now that my shadow color is dry, let's go on and paint the mid tones. As before, I'm going to leave the highlight white for just now. Now we've got 23d shapes. Something to note is that by having these highlights white, it makes them look shiny. If you don't want that, you can tone it down a bit by using a highlight color that isn't white like this. You can see these shapes are still three D, but they look less shiny because there's a smaller difference or contrast between the mid tone and the highlight. For this last fundamental, we're going to talk about getting attention. Now we've had a little practice at using tonal values to create depth and form. It's worth talking about what other effects having different tonal values next to each other can do. I want you to pay attention to the way that areas with a great difference between the lightest values and the darkest values, how they draw the eye. We can use this to tell viewers where to look. On faces, eyes, noses and mouths tend to have the greatest contrast. The white of our eyes contrast with the dark of our peoples, eyebrows and the shadows of our socket, our teeth, contrast with the shadows inside our mouth, and the highlights on the top of our noses, contrast with the shadows and our nostrils. These are all points of high contrast that we instinctively know should be there. We should make sure our paintings reflect this so that they look right to us. If you've ever painted faces before and felt like something was missing, check the contrast and make sure there's enough of a difference there. It's often the thing that's missing. Now we've covered our fundamental concepts of value ranges, creating depth with straight and curved lines, as well as using contrast to get attention. Come join me in the next lesson where we're going to have a little pep talk about the foundations we need to paint faces comfortably. I'll see you there. 4. Pep Talk: Okay. So yes. This can be scary, but how about deciding that you've already done a great job and give yourself a gold star for this class. Take the pressure off. I'm going to give myself one for being your teacher as well. Goldstar for you, gold star for me, Goldstar for everybody. Something that's really important to understand is that there are lots of ways to paint faces. Personal style is a magnificent thing and can range from the almost abstract to photo realistic with everything in between. There is no one right way of doing this, which is marvelous. Your way is wonderful. It's already wonderful. In this class, we're trying to understand how to make a face appear on paper, not recreate photographs exact in every detail. Likeness, if you want it is something that comes with practice. In this class, the goal is simply to create a recognizable face. With that said, let's get cracking. In the next lesson, we're going to look at faces the way an artist does. I'll see you there. 5. How to Simplify a Face: Before we learn to paint, we need to learn how to sing. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to observe a face and simplify it into areas of shadow and light. We could also call this abstracting the face as we do make it a bit more abstract and less detailed. This is quite different from how we look at faces every day and can take a bit of getting used to. In this class, all we're concerned with is light and shadow. But with a lifetime of studying the faces around us for meaning, for intention, for connection, trying to switch off that part of our brain isn't a straightforward thing. So we're going to practice. Pick an image of a face. The first thing to do is ignore the background. Remove it if you can. You can use digital tools for this, but an old school black marker on a print out works just as well. Ignore the color and focus on the darkness and light. Squinting really helps. Try and ramp up the contrast to really focus on the darkness and light and ignore the small areas and focus on the big areas of light and dark. This is the simplified version to work from because you can add complexity back in later. Okay. For all of the faces we're going to paint in this class, you'll find versions of the face at different levels of abstraction in the workbook. This way, you can practice working at different levels of abstraction until you're comfortable with abstracting or simplifying faces yourself. Ready to paint the face with me now? No. Well, join me in the next lesson and we'll do it together anyway. 6. Start Small: Paint a Profile View: Let's start small. We're only going to paint half a face, the profile view. And I recommend you make it literally small as well. Get your art supplies ready, prepare your colors, and let's get started. If you don't feel like drawing today, that's okay. You can just print this off and trace it or maybe trace it off your screen. Faces can feel hard, particularly if you haven't drawn them a lot. So it's really important to try and simplify as much as you can, to take the pressure off, to take the complexity away and to feel your way into the drawing. So I'm giving myself some anchor points here to just get the shape of the picture. See that here is in line here and it comes down a little bit of an angle. The ears here, and then face profile comes down and then it comes out again about the bottom of the nose. We've got the lips and the chin is broadly in line with the forehead here. And I use these sort of anchors to figure out if things are in the right place. What lines up with what? Don't be afraid to erase things to get them how you like. I think I want this bit to come out a bit further. So it gets down. It goes in, goes down some more comes around, goes in and around. And then we have a neck. Now I've got a shape that I like. What I'm going to do is look for the shadows. We've got an area here. It comes down and around the chin. This whole area is darkened. This area. This area here is one of the darkest we've got a dark area here in the ear as well. We've got a dark area here in the eye socket. And here underneath. We've got another shadow area that describes the nose here. Dark around the lips and a shadow here. So we've got several areas of mid tones, several areas of shadows. And then this highlighted area here. We have an extra shadow around the jaw. This area here going into the hair line. It's also extra dark. So I'm going to check my sketch. Am I happy with it. I think this is good enough to start for me. So now I'm going to crack on. I think I'm going to block in the hair to start with. I know I'm making this bun bigger, but I really like that detail, so I'm choosing to exaggerate it because it's fun. We're not trying to create photos so we can make these kinds of choices, and that's what really makes these pictures hours as opposed to just replicating reality. We're adding to it and adding our own little flare. And these choices can be intentional, like what I've done here with the bunimes they're accidental too, and both are totally fine. I think the upper lip is the darkest tiny bit of dark here on the nose. And then the shadows around the jaw line. Some shadows in the ear as well. And we've already got a face here. I'm dropping some more dark color into the hair because it's just looking a bit too light for me. Depending on what you use to add your color, you might have this issue as well, or it might go down as dark as you like straightaway. Alright, I'm happy with these shadows. I'm going to dry this off and then go on to my mid tones. I'm not sure that my colors right, so I'm just going to get a piece of scrap paper and check. Yeah, I'm happy with that shed. So all of this area is mid tone. And at this stage, I'm just coloring in the area that I've already decided as the mid tones. I don't need to make a lot of choices here so I can just enjoy the process of laying the color down. And I invite you to do the same. Get that nice little area on the neck. I'm going to give this a dry. There's a subtle bit of mid tone here in the eye socket that I'm going to add in with a fine brush. I'm also going to darken the eye and the eyebrow here and the upper lip. You might also want to add a little bit of an outline to the profile to help it stand out from the white of the page. I'm going over that shadow around the jaw line because I lost some of the integrity of that shadow, and I really want the contrast here to make people pay attention to the difference and to highlight the difference. And we're done. I've got a face. I hope you do too. Now we've covered painting a profile view. Come join me in the next lesson where we're going to look at things head on. 7. Keep it Simple: Paint a Front View: We're going to keep this simple and now work with a front view. I recommend you keep this one small like the last painting to make it more accessible and manageable. So get your supplies ready, and let's do this. Like before, we're going to start with a sketch. Again, you can trace this if you like. You can use the images from the workbook, or you can draw along with me. I can see the top portion here is cut off and that draws me in. So I'm going to start at this bit. I'm just trying to get the basic outline here. Get a sense of the size of the face, the kind of angles. I've got an area of darkness here where the eye is. I'm going to simplify that down along with the eyebrow, on the other side, it's very dark. Go up to the hair line and marking that in. And I'm reminding myself and you that it doesn't really matter if this is exactly right or not. I got a cheek here that's lighter, although not super light. And you can see what I'm doing is not actually focusing on eyes, nose, mouth. They'll come. As the picture finds its shape and form through these patches of light and dark. Basically, we're starting with the broad strokes and then working into the details. I'm working and refining my sketch until it looks something like what I'm happy with. Okay. I've maybe got a little bit of a mid tone value here on the eye socket on the dark side of the face. I'm just marking that in. And if you are choosing to work with the simplified images, which I recommend, it's a really helpful route into a face. Got some darkness down here that helps describe the curve on this side. So all of this is darkness. Then we have this area of mid tones and highlights. And we've got another highlight area on the forehead here. I think this is a. I'm going to bring this all down a bit. Don't be scared to rub out your marks and do them again. There's nothing wrong with that. This is you just finding your way into the drawing. So feel free to make a mark, remove it, make a different mark until you get the mark that feels right for you. Got a bit shadow under this eye here. Yeah, I think this is enough to get me started. If we include this hair line here to give the face a bit of a boundary and a structure. Yeah. This seems to me like yeah, this is enough for me to get started. Oh, well, maybe just add this extra area of highlight on here. I got this big highlight here and here. And then the rest are all different levels of shadow mid tones and shadow. It's really useful to take your time at this stage because it's much easier to fix anything you don't like when it's still a sketch than it is to try and fix it once you've started putting color down. But now I'm happy with this. I'm going to go straight in with the shadows, start giving this face some structure. It kind of looks a bit like an abstract painting at this stage, but I promise you it'll come together and look like a face. You got to just trust the process. And really try to think about shadows and light rather than eye, nose, mouth. Of course, we can see all those things, but those aren't the things that we're focusing on right now. That comes later when we refine it, but right now we're just getting the shadows in. This gives our face structure. I'm going to switch to a smaller brush for these finer details. And now, just with these shadows, we've got the start of a phase. I'm going to dry it before I work on my mid tones because with watercolors, if you put wet paint next to wet paint, they bleed into one another. It's a good idea to make sure that your shadows are totally dry before moving on to your mid tones, if you're working with a water based paint like this. Next thing I'm going to do is move on to my mid tones, and I'm going to stick with the smaller brush. Our mid tones flesh out our face. No pun intended. They give it a bit more realism. I'm adding an outline. Again, you may want to do the same thing. There are mid tones around this area as well. Hopefully, you can see your face start to come even more together as you do this. Okay. Okay. Now I've got my mid tones down and I'm happy with them. I'm going to dry it again. I've got an outline of a face, and I'm quite happy with it, but I think I feel like I want more darkness on the other side to suggest the eye. So really adding an eyebrow in here, maybe a little bit more down on the nose and the line of the mouth. To make that shape more clear. Okay. And a little shadow on the chin as well. Go to darken the hair line here as well. And you can see with very few marks, we have a face. So it doesn't have to be that scary. Look, we've made a face with three colors. Now we've covered the profile and the front view. In the next lesson. We're going to turn a bit. I'll see you there. 8. Add a Twist: Paint a 3/4 View: We're going to add a bit more dynamism to the pose by having it turned slightly while following the same steps. Like the last two, I recommend you also keep this one small, get your materials ready, and let's get into this. Let's get started with this three quarter view. We'll be keeping the face the same size as the other ones, making it more manageable. I'm just going to find my way into this drawing. I'm starting at the top. Not because that's the right place to start, but just because for this drawing, that feels like the right place to start. You might find yourself called to a different point on this portrait, maybe the chin or the neck or the hair. That's fine. Go with what calls to you and find your way in. I'm working out the broad sort of outline here and that little dip in at the eye socket that you see when the face is turned at this sort of an angle. Then marking in the jaw line and the hair line that goes back maybe a bit further. I'm going in a bit of neck and shoulder here. So I'm going to tidy these lines up a bit. I've got some pair here. We've got this eye level that's fairly straight and a shadow that comes in and around. This little shadow describes the eye socket on the far away eye. In line with this, we've got? I've got the shadow line that comes up and joins the hair line up here. Okay. This describes the nose down into the shadow of the upper lip, lower lip and the curve of the chin here. This area is going to be high light. Here we've got an area of darker shadow around the bottom of the nose. We've also got a spot of highlight on the cheek here. I got a darker shadow as well. And it comes up around and into the hair. In this darker shadow comes down around the chin and follows the lines of the lip. Around the cheek bones. Then we have a highlight in here around the line helps us understand the chin is. Within this far. We've got deeper shadows. I'm going to refine this shape a little bit. Okay. We've got that area of darker shadow. Yeah, I'm just going to step back and look at this, see if there's anything I want to tweak. I do see some hair here. I might add that in just a little bit of detail to make it nice. I think I'm going to note that the shadow on the shoulder and the neck comes down like this as well. Just anchor the face a little bit more I got this hair line up here. I think it comes down a bit further. Just going to clean up that line. And, I'm happy with this. I'm ready to get started to put the color down. I'll activate my paints. And I'm going in with my shadows, starting with the darkest little point in the far away eye. And then moving over to the hair There's no particular order that I apply the shadows in. It's not always eyes first then here. It's really just I feel like at that point in time, and I encourage you to do the same. This should be fun. So do it in whatever way feels in whatever order feels right for you. I'm being a little bit careful when I do the shadow that comes down by the mouth and the lips because the pointy ends on that really helps you understand the shapes of the lips and the chin here. Madden some of this hair doesn't have to be exact. It's more just the suggestion of bits of hair sticking out here and there. Then moving into the shadows on the neck. Okay. All right. Now my shadows are done. I'm going to give it a dry before moving on to the Mntnes. Okay. Time for the midtones. I'm starting with that far away. I really draws me in for some reason. Then adding the suggestions of h. I think this far away edge of hair is really helpful because it gives a little bit of an outline. And that outline helps define the shape of the face. Adding some more hair on the other side before going into the mid tones on the face on the forehead, the nose, the chin. You'll see, I move around the painting when I'm doing this. I don't just sort of stick in one area and expand out from there. One of my teachers once talked about how the different parts of the painting holds hands and they all come up together. And I quite like that. There's something quite fun about dotting around the page and doing little bits here and there that I enjoy. I think it can also stop you getting fixated on one particular point, and maybe you can get to that place where you can't see it properly because you've looked at it too much if you just dot around. Just adding some extra definition here around the chin and the cheek. And I'll give that a dry. I want to emphasize the shadow on the far away eye. We really want these eyes to draw in and having good contrast will help with that. So I'm darkening that darkest shadow here to do that. And same with the eye area on the other side, it's not quite dark enough for my liking, so I'm going back in and refining it. Trying to get it to look how I want. With the nose and the lip area. And I'll give that another dry. And we're done. Yeah, I'm happy with this. Again, we've got another face the three quarter view with some shadows, some mid tones and some highlights. How did you find this? If it was tricky, don't be disheartened. This is something that definitely gets easier the more you do it. Have a go at doing this again using the other reference faces in the workbook. For a challenge, try setting a two minute time or pair face and work through the grid of reference images, either pick three favorites, go for a Bingo line, or if you're feeling really keen, work through the whole thing. Now we've covered the main three facial views, profile, front, and three quarter view. And the next lesson, we're going to take things to the next level and start working on a larger scale. Don't forget to snap a pick of your work so far, and then I'll see you in the next lesson. Okay. 9. Paint a Bigger Face: Part 1: We're going to kick things up a gear by working on a larger scale. We'll use the same principles as before, but the larger scale allows us to add a little more detail. Get yourself and your supplies ready, and let's do this. I'm starting with the top of the head on this one again. Trying to get a sense of where that face sits on the page so that I don't lose half of her face because I stuck it in the wrong place to start with. Now I've got a sense of the outline. I am working into the details. We've got a forehead here, and then that angles in and then back out again for the nose. Which then comes back in. I'm not quite happy with where those marks are, so I'm just going to do it again. That's fine. Just refining my marks, working my way into the drawing. I'm trying to work out how long her nose will be, because it's roughly the same length as her forehead. I'm trying to make sure that I've got those distances about the same so that it looks right to me. Okay. Then taking my time to get the angle of the nose, the way I want it. The upper lip is in line mostly with the forehead. So that's why I'm sort of going down from where that is to make a little mark, so I know where my nose has to connect to. And that gives me a little anchor points to join up this profile. Once I'm happy with that onto the chin and the neck line. Then those initial marks I made not quite right, so I'm going to readjust those. Add in that dark curve of hair that comes around the front of the face. And then down past the chin. Still not quite happy with that, no. So taking my time and refining the sketch. And I'm holding it back from myself to help get a different perspective on it so I can see I'm happy with this. Is there something I want to tweak? Okay. I suggesting the same thing if you're drawing this and not tracing it. Just changing where it is can help you see things that you couldn't see before. But now I'm happy enough with this. I'm going to work in the points of mid tones and shadow to start giving the face its structure. Just like me, you might want to take your time with this to get it right. Sometimes it comes easily for me, sometimes it's more slow. Wherever you find yourself in all of that, it's totally fine. You'll get there. Just give yourself some grace. I'm working my way into the shadows that describe the eyes and the nose here. Okay. Then I'm working my way down the cheeks and to the neck. I like to give faces a bit of a neck, sometimes just to anchor them and make them feel like they're not just floating on the page. Not that there's anything with them floating on the page. Times how I like them to look. Then I'm working into the shadows around the mouth and the chin, which help give that area its structure. I can see I've got this area of shadow that covers the nose and up to the eyes. Well, singular, since it's the profile view. We've got these areas of darker shadow around the bottom of the nose here. And also around the eye socket here. Okay. I think are these the main areas on the face. Yeah. I'm just taking a little break from looking at that and going up to the hair line, making sure I'm happy with those shapes. She's got quite a distinctive hair pattern here. That comes up off the page here. Now, I've had a little bit of a break. I can come back into that eye area, a little bit fresh, see what I think is missing and what needs adding. That can be a helpful thing for you as well. If you're getting stuck on one particular area, move somewhere else, do some work on that, and then you can come back to it and see it with fresh eyes. Going down to the mouth area. Am I happy? I'll take a step back and look at this from a different perspective, see if there's anything that jumps out at me as changed or tweaked. Yeah needs a bit more work. I think this. I'm going to emphasize the neck. Not quite where I want it to be. There we go. Do another check to see is there anything else I want to tweak here? Shadow around the eye socket. It's a little refining, I think. And now I'm just firming up tentative sketch lines. I'm happy with this. These are the shadow areas. And adding my mid tones into the forehead. Okay. And that subtle little highlight along the edge of her nose. I think, am I happy with this? Yeah. Now I'm marking in the shadows down her, her cheek, s of her face. And yeah, I think I think I'm happy with that sketch. Time to move on to adding the color. 10. Paint a Bigger Face: Part 2: I'm going to start with a big area of color a little splash there. I'm going to block in this big area of shadow that really dominates the face here, the hair shadows and the shadows on the side of the face. Get a stray hair off my brush. Then get this right down to her neck and all the way up to the top of her head. Taking care with the hair line at the top. Okay. And then coming down. This is another area I'm going to be careful with because the hair here, the shadow defines the profile, and that gives us the shape of her face here. So I'm going to be careful with my brush to make sure I don't on her forehead or her nose. And even with just this big block of color down, the face is starting to come together. I'm going to switch to a smaller brush to work into the smaller details. You might want to do the same thing. My dark isn't quite dark enough, so I'm going back in for a stronger color before working into the shadows around the nose here. Then working around the eye area with these shadows that really describe the shape and the position of the eye. I'm working doting about from here to there, darkening any shadows that I think darkened. Depending on what media you use. You might need to do this or not. I also step back from time to time to look and see have I missed anything? Is there anything that needs more attention? Now I've got my shadows on. I'll take a moment to dry it so the colors don't bleed before I lay down my mid tones. This one here gives us the curve of the forehead. Then I moved down into the shadows of the nose, trying to leave little teeny bits of highlight for moving back up into the eye socket area. And then down around into the cheeks. Trying to leave that spot of highlight on the lips and then go down and around into the chin. And the neck. I feel like that eye needs darkening. It looks a bit too bright. And I'm just doing a quick outline here, like I have done on the other paintings to help separate the highlights on the skin from the background color of the page. Okay. And then finishing off with the mid tones that are around the hair. Want to dry this now. And once it's dry, I can look at it and see if anything needs refined or darkened. I'm going to get my smallest brush and my shadow color and add some details. And the first one I'm going to add in is a really dark nostril. And then I want to emphasize this eyebrow, give it a little bit of texture. I'm happy with that. I want to do a similar thing with the eyelashes, really emphasizing the eye with this darkness and giving the eyelashes some texture. I notice there's quite a dark line here on the pupil that helps to define the eye. So I'm going to emphasize that as well. And the dark front shape of the eye too. Go to darken this area around the lip. I think I want to add more contrast into the hair. As it's dried, it's really lightened. And I don't think I've got enough contrast for what I want in this painting. I'm going to pull this shadow in as well. And add a bit more color into the pupil. And the lips I think could be darker still. Same with the nostril. And that edge of the nose there. The hair doesn't look dark enough to me either. So I'm going to go back to my big brush and put another layer of color down there to deepen that. I'm going over the hair again. But I don't have to color in the whole thing. I definitely want to darken some of it. Yeah, that looks more like what I'm aiming for here. But I'll give it a dry and then see. Mm. But before I do that, I think this eye is a little bit lifeless. So I'm going to add some whites to give it a highlight and bring more life back into the eye. I'm using white guash for this because you can layer gash on top of watercolors. If I had white watercolor paint, it wouldn't show as well. Okay, now I'm ready to dry it. And, I think I am done with this. We've worked on a larger scale. So that gives us more scope to add in details like the eyelashes and the pupil and the and things like that. Good job on taking it larger. It's a major step in the process, so make sure to congratulate yourself on taking that step. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson to work on your class project. I'll see you there. 11. Class Project: Part 1: All right, let's get into the class project. This follows the exact same process as before. The only difference is that we allow ourselves to add even more details. You know the drill, get yourself and your supplies ready, and let's get into this. I'm starting with the top of the forehead here and just trying to get the outline of the face. Like the last lesson, working on a larger scale. And at the start, I'm just finding my way in how big is this face going to sit on my page? Where's the bottom of it? Where's the top? What are the shapes of the sides of the face? Just looking at the angles and trying to as best I can reflect them on my paper. Okay. I'm looking at sort of landmarks like ears. And where does the bottom of the ear relate to the curve of the face? And then looking at my shadows in light. I can see I've got pretty strong shadow down one side of the face. I'm just trying to get the basic positioning and curvature of that. I'm using the bottom of her ear as a bit of a guide or a landmark to help figure out where the curves of that shadow are placed. Then working on the shadows that describe the bottom of the lip and the curve of the chin. I'm using a landmark off of the shadow line to position her neck. And by using landmarks like this, we make sure that things. They're going to be in alignment with one another, so they're more likely to be in the right place. Now I'm looking at where's the shadow of the eyebrow going to be in relation to that dark curve on the other side. Once I've got that placed, I can look at the shadow that marks the lash line of this closed eye. I can see that the two eyes are on a plane with one another. That helps me figure out where those shadows on the other side should sit. I can then add the shadows and the highlight marks in. I can see there's a less dark spot on the other side, an area. It's not highlight highlight. It's mid tone, but it looks like a highlight because it's in the middle of a shadow, like a little island popping up. As with the other drawings, feel free to make marks, to erase them, to make new marks, until you get the marks that you're happy with that look good to you. That's what I'm doing here as I refine these edges. Mark on where I think the shadow of the nostril is going to be curve of the nose here is that shadow line dips down into the lips. And even though we're working on a bigger scale, it doesn't mean that we stop paying attention to the shadows and start doing things like drawing lips in fly. I'm using the shadows to tell me where the lips are and how much of the detail of that we can see. Then I put a few lines in to suggest the outline of the hair. Which gives me a better sense of the full scale of the picture. Then I can start refining the shape of the face. I'm marking in some little spots of highlight now. Along the bridge of the nose and the corner of the eye. The nose. I'm still refining that side of the face. It's hard to see Okay. Particularly because the side of the face bleeds into the shadow of the hair. But quite like having some anchors on that side, just to give me an idea of the shape of the face. I feel like there's a bit of mid tone on the forehead on the shadow side work to place that in. Yes. And then I want to refine the curve of that mid to island of light on the dark side of the face because the curve of those lines tells you something about the curve of the face like we did in our circle exercise. I want to try and make sure that the curve of her cheeks are well described by the curve of those lines. And like before, I'm taking a step back or moving the picture back and forward to see it from different perspectives to see if anything needs tweaked on it. But I think actually, I'm happy with this one. So, I'm ready to paint. 12. Class Project: Part 2: So now I'm ready to paint, but I'm running a bit low on my shadow, so I'm going to put some more paint out. And get covered in it. Artists life. Okay. Let's add some water into that so that I can use it. And this time, I think I'm starting with the eyebrow. That's what's calling to me to paint first. You go in with whatever's calling to you. Then like I was saying before I move around the painting, so I'm going to do a sploge for the hair before working into that shadow side of her face a little bit, and then adding some more of the hair in. Okay. I'm not trying to be super accurate with what her hair looks like. I'm more trying to give a sense of the energy because her hair is full of fun curls. I'll add a few squiggles in to indicate curls and the quick brush strokes leave a mark that is suggestive of energy. And that can give the impression of that kind of hair without having to paint every strand of it. Then I'll swap to my smaller brush to get into the detail of the shadows. Like before I start with the broad strokes before going into any sort of a detail. You want the broad strokes done first before laying in any sort of a detail because if you start adding details and then realize actually, you want to move that line a little bit, you've kind of spent time on something that's going to get lost. So I always like to go in with the details once I've got the main blocks of color down. I think it's quite a helpful approach to take. Certainly a lot less frustrating than the alternative. The other thing about getting all the broad blocks of color down first is that you can really start to see your face emerge from the page. And I think that's really fun, really motivating, as well. So that's my main goal here. Get the blocks of color down. And yeah, I can I can see a face here. Going to outline the chin, give it some structure. Yeah, I've got the start of my face. Okay, I'm going to give this a dry. These shadows are fading, so I'll probably want to darken a lot of them. But for now, I'm just going to get my next big block of color down, which is my mid tones. Trying to be really careful and not color over my highlights. If I do, though, it's not a big deal because I can paint them back in with white gas. And depending on what you're using to put your colors down, there should be a way to add the white back in if you make a mistake and forget pins are delightful for things like that. But I'm trying to avoid needing to do that as much as I can just by paying attention to where the highlights ought to be. As I put my mid tones into the page to really add depth to this face. At this stage, when you're not making decisions and you're just adding color, it can be quite pleasing coloring in Very soothing sort of activity. So I do recommend letting yourself sink into that and enjoy the feeling of laying down color with your brush strokes or your pen strokes or your pencils, whatever way you're doing it, or if you're doing it on your iPads or tablet. Just enjoy the feeling that comes with that sort of tactile sensation. And now I've got my mid tones in. I'm going to dry them. And you'll see that with watercolors, they lighten as they dry. So I don't know if you notice, but when I was painting the mid tones, they look quite similar to the shadows when they were wet, but they do lighten up when they dry. So you can see the distinction between the shadows and the mid tones. Now it's dry. I'm going to go in and add some details with my fine brush. I want the eye to draw focus. So I'm going to darken that down significantly. I want to add some texture into the eyebrows. I'm going to do that on both sides. I want the corner of the lip to come back and darken down, same with the nostril. These are all points of high contrast on a face that we all know and recognize even if it's subconsciously. So it's good to darken them down and help define the face that way. I want to add a bit of texture into the lip because we're working at a larger scale, so I can do that. I can add some of the lines that we have in our lips that she has in her lips. Okay. And that dark side of the face, particularly around the eye isn't quite dark enough for my liking, so I'm going to darken that down. Yeah, I really want to increase the contrast there. There's some fine lines that describe the eye lid that I'm adding in here. And same on the other side. And I'm darkening around the nose, the nostril, to help really describe that shape. Give it form and three dimensionality. I'm going to swap to my bigger brush to lay in some more of these shadows and darken them back down a bit since they dried a bit lighter than I wanted them to. That's not a bad thing with watercolors. It means you can I guess get more confident as you work into your painting. If it's lighter to start with, that's fine. You can always darken it. It's slightly more tricky to go the other way. You may want to look at your painting and see if you feel like your darks are dark enough, and if they're not, then take the opportunity to darken them. Just adding a little bit of detail here into the hair the ear. I think I'm getting close to being done here. Adding a bit of an outline around the hair line. Darkening those areas of high contrast that I want to pop I'm just having a look at the painting to see if there's anything else I want to refine, to improve to tweak. I think for now, I'm happy with this one. I'm going to give it a dry, and I'll check it again once it's dry. All right. I've got a face. I hope you do, too. Well done on working through your class project. Take a moment to look back and see how far you've come in this class already. Snap a quick picture and then join me in the next lesson to look at taking it just a little bit further. Okay. 13. Taking It Further: Again, in this lesson, we're going to look at ways to progress from this class. The first thing we're going to do is look at adding a little bit of color back into our portraits. Dip a toe in the water by adding a touch of warmth in certain areas of the face, lips, cheeks, maybe nose, chin, and forehead. Go ahead and pick one of your earlier paintings and try adding this in. I'm starting with a subtle pinkish mixture so the end result doesn't look too clownish and I'm going to apply this to the lips, nose, forehead, and cheeks, and then blend it in a little bit on the forehead and cheeks. Now, it's dry and I look at it again. I think I want some color on the chin, too, so I add a little more there. At this stage, I also want to add some finishing touches to my painting. I tweak little things here and there until I'm happy with it. Okay. You might want to practice this on more than one of your earlier paintings depending on how comfortable you feel at this point because we're working up to trying this on our class project. You can also refine anything else that you feel like at this stage, do your little finishing touches. Okay. After adding this color to your paintings, look over the whole thing and see if you feel like there's anything missing or that you want to draw attention to. At this point, I tend to look for areas that need more contrast or if there's a highlight or a shadow that I feel is missing somewhere, and then I'll add it in. The next thing we're going to look at is taking this further and making your own reference images. There are websites such as Pexels and Unsplash where they have loads of royalty free photos you can use. I'll put those links in the class resources below. You can also use your own photos. My daughter is my muse and I'm forever painting her from reference photos I've taken myself. Go ahead and source some photos of your own practice simplifying and then painting them. I'd love to see where you go with these next steps. When you do go this a little bit further, please come back and update your projects. I'd love to see where you take this. Okay. And now we're just about finished. Come join me in the last lesson for some final thoughts. Okay. 14. Final Thoughts: Hello, my fellow portrait painter. Well done on making it here. Thank you for joining me as we learned the fundamentals of painting faces. We started with the building blocks using shadows, highlights, and mid tones to create form and deliberately applying contrast to tell our viewers what to pay attention to. We then practice simplifying little faces before working up to larger, more detailed portraits. Along the way, we looked at faces from different angles. What I would really like for you to take away from this class is that you can paint a face. By taking the pressure off through simplification, this intimidating subject becomes way more accessible and fun. There's something magical in seeing a face appear from the blobs on your page, and I would love for you to experience that too. If you feel like sharing the faces you've painted, I'd love to see them. You can post them in the class projects gallery, and if you'd like to stop by there and leave a kind word for other people's paintings, that would be really nice. If you enjoy sharing things to Instagram, feel free to tag me there. I'd love to see what you create. If you want to find out when I release another class, you can follow me here. There should be a little green follow link down there somewhere. And if you click on my name, that'll take you to my profile, which has all my other classes on it, as well as links to my website where you can see more of my work. If you're interested in learning more about using watercolors like I did in this class, I suggest you give these classes of mine a try. I'll put links to them in the description below. If you could leave this class a review, that would be super helpful. It can flag to other potential students what kind of a class this is and if it's the thing that they might be interested in too. Thank you again for joining me to learn how to paint faces. I hope you've enjoyed this time and I'll see you in another one of my classes soon.