Watercolor Portrait Challenge: Paint 5 Faces in 5 Weeks & Build a Strong Palette

1. Introduction - 5 Week Portrait Challenge: Hardest skills become simple when you repeat them with a clear process. When you stick to a predictable routine, confidence builds quickly and things start to click, and that is true whether you are learning watercolor portraits or anything else in life. Hi, I'm Jean Veta. I'm a watercolor artist with great passion for portraits and color. I've been painting with watercolor for over 15 years, creating book covers, illustrations, and exhibiting my work both nationally and internationally. This year at a prestigious Watercolor festival in Cordoba Spain. Though I never went to art sch I've learned directly from incredible artists through master classes, and I continue growing through events, festivals, and countless hours of painting on my own. I also run my own studio, where I regularly teach in person portrait workshops. To me, portraits are more than likeness. They're a form of emotional storytelling. Over time, I've developed a simplified intuitive process that I love sharing both here on Skillshare. Also on my YouTube channel where I post videos about watercolor and also on Instagram where I share my daily art practice and studio life. In this class, we'll do what most people skip. Repeat a simple portrait process until it becomes second nature. We'll paint five faces in five weeks while building a reliable portrait palette that you can mix with. Week includes reference planning, a loose sketch lesson, a focused color mixing exercise to help you understand your pigment and avoid muddy mixes. We'll start with a simple four color palette, then add one new versatile color each week until you've built a reliable eight color palette that you can use long term. After the warm up and mixing practice, you will follow a complete paint along portrait demo from first washes to final details. At the end, you'll not only have five finished portraits, but also a repeatable method for sketching mixing and painting faces with more confidence. The entire class is filmed in real time, so it feels like we are painting side by side at a relaxed, encouraging pace. I recommend this challenge for intermediate students as it's designed as a continuation of my previous portrait classes here on Skillshare. You are a beginner, I suggest you start with taking introduction to Watercolor portraits, followed by Watercolor portraits for everyone, where I explain my full framework for colorful portraits at a slower, more in depth pace. Once that you've completed those two classes, you'll be perfectly prepared to join the five week challenge and get the most out of weekly repetition and practice. I would love to see your project. When you're done, you can upload it right here for personal feedback from one of the best parts of Skillshare creative community. So go ahead and enroll. Let's level up in portrait painting together. 2. Class Orientation: Hi, and thank you so much for joining the class. Over the next five weeks, we will paint five Watercolor portraits together step by step in real time. Whether you are here to build consistency, improve your technique, or finally feel confident mixing colors, I'm so happy that you're joining me for the challenge. Before we start, make sure to check the projects and resources tab down below the video. You will find everything that you need there, a downloadable reference photo for every week's demo, a sketch that you can download, which gives you the option to trace and use it if you need to work faster or don't feel confident sketching it. A materials list PDF and a step by step overview to help guide you through the process smoothly. All painting demos in this class are filmed in real time so that you can paint the your own pace, I will guide you step by step and not just through what I'm doing, but also why so that you understand the logic behind each step and feel confident to apply it on your own. Just a note, I make mistakes too and all the time. However, in the lessons, I always reflect and explain why I thought something worked or didn't pursue deeper understanding of the creative process. I'm not a big fan of blindly copying tutorials, but rather big believer in sharing the artist mindset and teaching how to think as an artist to encourage you to make creative choices on your own. Before we jump into the first week's demo, we'll take time to practice key watercolor techniques you will need throughout the challenge. Each week we'll follow the same four stage process to create a watercolor portrait. We will start by studying the reference and making a quick watercolor sketch. This helps us preview the painting and troubleshoot composition or color issues before we commit. Next, we'll draw the final sketch on watercolor paper and do a short color mixing drill to warm up and get comfortable with the palette. We will paint the final piece slowly and step by step from the first watery layers all the way to the last details. Throughout the challenge, you will learn how to choose materials that support your results, use your tools for specific techniques, spot and correct drawing mistakes, and even left and correct areas in watercolor when something goes wrong. You will have a full week for each portrait so you can practice without rushing and really reflect on the process. I encourage you to stick to a regular drawing and painting routine. Of course, that you can complete the challenge, at your own pace. If it's in five days or five weeks, it's completely up to you. But in my experience, leaving too much time between portraits can break momentum and slow your progress. When you're ready, take a photo of your finished painting and upload it to the project gallery down below the class. Not only does it help you track the progress and reflect on what you've learned, but it also helps other students feel inspired and supported, you can upload your project, even during the first week of the challenge and then edit the project every week and add new photos for each new demo you completed. As for me, your projects are the best way to stay connected with you. I personally read and reply to every project and your feedback helps me make better classes in the future. If you include few sentences about your experience going through the challenge, that's a big plus. Upload the project, even if you don't feel like it's good enough. We all have this feeling at times and it can be very discouraging. Often just documenting your progress by adding new photos into it as you paint new portraits, as an overview that helps you see your own work with a bit of a distance. Skillshare members, they're very encouraging to one another. I see so many of them commenting on projects from their classmates and this makes learning so much more effective. In the next lesson, we will take a look at all of the materials that you'll need for this class. See you there. 3. Materials: Lesson, we will go over the materials that we'll need for this class. Let's start with watercolor paper. Min paper that I will be using throughout the class for painting, all of the five portraits will be Windsor newton professional watercolor paper. This is a cold press 300 GSM paper. The size that I like the most is 12 by 16 " or 30 by 40 centimeters, but you can use a smaller one that might take less time. Usually the smaller versus slightly larger size doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to take you less time. But in this size, you can work on details and you are not too restricted when it comes to watercolor washes. This is 100% cotton paper. I will also use a small sketchbook for the tiny sketches that we'll do before every portrait to warm up and to basically try to see whether the portrait and the color combination looks great. So if you don't have a watercolor sketchbook, like I do, you see this is very small, messy sketches, then you can use just tiny pieces of watercolor paper that can also be scrap of works that did not work out your exercises. But we'll definitely do sketches in this class, a separate paper for that would come in handy. Since I mentioned the tiny bits of watercolor paper, if you took my previous classes, you already know that I like to keep these at hand because I like to test the watercolor before I go with my brush loaded with paint to a main portrait. These always come in handy when you need to find out whether your color looks good. If you can keep some of these scraps somewhere close. We'll also a few of the drawing tools. The main drawing supply I will use is the mechanical pencil. I keep two bits in my mechanical pencil. I find that those are not too hard and they are visible enough, but also not too smudgy. I like the pentel brand because they have very high quality graphite that lets me work without having to fight the materials. However, for the sketches, I like to use black wing pencil. That one has even softer graphite, which makes me really want to draw more. It feels very inviting to me for the drawing session. And I like to use it in my sketchbook. But I did find out that on a watercolor paper, it keeps smudging a bit more and sometimes it's harder to erase. So this pencil I have just for sketching in my sketch maybe for exercises, I do not sketch watercolor portraits with this one. You do not need two pencils. I'm just explaining my own process. Usually, I use two. Then there are erasers. I always use these three erasers. I've been using that for years. So the first one is needed eraser or kable eraser by fiber castle. Those are the highest quality that I found, and I find them very affordable. They last a long time, also, you can find them in different colors. The color doesn't really matter. This is a very gentle eraser that helps you smoothen out your sketch and lift some of the excess graphite so that your sketch on a watercolor paper doesn't smudge. In sketchbooks, I use it less, but in final watercolor painting, they come in very handy. This is hard eraser. Dust free is how they market this eraser, and it is for erasing lines completely. So this one it softens the lines, but this one can get rid of the line while still being gentle enough to your watercolor paper. I use that rarely, but sometimes I make a mistake in a watercolor portrait on the final paper, and then I just try to correct with this one. And this one is precision eraser or eraser for details, and that one's from KhirHartmd. I just buy them here in a local art supply store. This is a very soft eraser in a pencil. You can find many alternatives online to something like this. Now let's go over the brush. So having all of these three types at my disposal during the painting process helps me to create all the kinds of brush strokes that I need without constricting myself too much. So the main type that you need is round brushes, and I do recommend sable brushes. Synthetic brushes can help you too. Many of the high quality synthetic brushes can hold in a water, but they oftentimes fail to release it when you touch the paper. So the process is not really all that smooth. My experience with both kinds is that I tend to use sable brushes because the process is just so easier with for now. And my go to brushes are these two round brushes which are Winsor Newton Series seven. Those are finest sable brushes, and they're quite pricey. I will include them in the materials PDF, but you also can find many alternatives that are much cheaper to these brushes. You just have to find brushes that are round, maybe squirrel brushes, any kind of sable brushes that are round with one larger and one smaller. And then I have this pure squirrel brush that has contains squirrel bristles, and this one can hold a lot of water and I use it for large washes. This one can also be replaced by any that can hold a lot of water and it is a big brush. You can use hake brush even a flat brush with many bristles that can hold enough water can be used instead of this one. I definitely do not want to tell you that you can't paint well without having highest quality brushes. There are so many alternatives that I've tested over the years that work very, very similarly. So while this is something that I have in my studio and I use regular please find something that works for you that's similar to what I use and you can find in your local art supply store. So if I only had these three brushes, I could do the portrait. But I also like to use these calligraphy brushes. These are unbranded calligraphy brushes. I bought in $1 store or something like that, and they're very cheap. Can hold in a water, but the bristles are slightly more textured and sturdy. So I use them for textures for the hair textures. We will paint beard, I'm sus. That's going to be helpful for that. All of these textures could be achieved with these round brushes. Calligraphy brushes make them just a bit easier. And then there are two brushes that I have that are synthetic. These are Princeton aqua id, which I quite like. One is round, one is a flat brush. These synthetic brushes have sturdio bristles and I use them mostly for correction. If I need to lift some of the pigment with sable brushes, that's harder to do, but with these synthetic brushes, that's pretty easy. These I have pretty much for corrections. The round brush from aqua id I use sometimes for small details. Paints. These are the watercolors that we will use. In this class, we will build a palette together. So I do have a clean palette here. You do not have to do it in a way that I do. I just want to illustrate a building of a palette throughout the course of this entire challenge. And therefore, I've chosen to develop this palette from empty to having eight colors on it. As we proceed throughout the challenge, we will add more colors to the palette. So we'll start with four and we will keep adding as we go. But just to prepare you for all of the colors that I plan to use throughout this challenge, this is cadmium yellow medium. It is yellow, orange, permanent red, permanent carmine, cobble turquoise, cobbled blue light, French ultramarine, and blood stone genuine. So apart from Bloodstone genuine, which is a natural mineral pigment from Daniel Smith, all of these other pigments are from SchminkiHa dam Line, and I'm using SchminkiHa dam paints because the brand was kind enough to send me so many paints for testing. So I'm trying to build my palette out of these colors. I prefer art great brand that you choose that you have available in your location. Previously, I used a lot of winter renewing paints. Sanaia also is high quality brand, Daniel Smith, as well. So there are so many brands with very high quality pigments, but it is very important to choose pigments that are mixed with gum Arabic and don't have fillers, because if you paint with watercolors with too many fillers that will influence how the paint on the paper. That will also influence if you want to glaze, paint over your previous layers. And that is why I like to work with limited palettes, because if you have four colors or five colors or six colors compared to 36 colors, then your budget might not allow you to purchase so many paints from the brand that is high quality. But if you only use four to eight colors, I think they get pretty affordable. Brand has beautiful vibrant pigments. I did my research. Apart from cadmium yellow. These are cadmium pigments, they're supposed to be non toxic and also they're beautifully vibrant. During the first week of the challenge, we will start with four essentials, which is yellow, orange, permanent red. Then cobbled blue and blood stone genuine, and we will add the rest of the colors as we go throughout the entire challenge. So you can prepare those. If you don't have an empty palette, you can just use porcelain plates. I do recommend that you mix on a white surface though. Sometimes for the darkest pigment, which is blood stone genuine, in this case, I use a separate bowl for mixing because this is what I mostly use for backgrounds and I need more paint. The flat mixing surface is great for most cases, but for background sometimes I like to keep the stuff in a bowl like. Some extra tools that I tend to use throughout the class. This one is scalpel, just to scratch off some highlights, maybe some floating hairs. I like to add white detail with scalpel pretty much all the time. Then you will also need a tissue or a sponge or both. If I don't want to waste too many tissues, I just dry them on the radiator and reuse them. But I also have this sponge that I put in water before painting, then squeeze out the extra water and that helps me get rid of the excess water from my brush that is super heavy. Year, I've been using it more than last year, I kind of already incorporated the sponge into my process and it's helpful and I use less tissues. But if you don't have a sponge, you don't necessarily have to. I saw some people even use a regular cloth towel for getting rid of the excess paint that you can maybe wash after. Sometimes in my process, but mainly in sketchbook, I also use the white colored pencil. From car and dash, this is luminan pencil. Number 001, this is blank white. It is opaque pencil, if it happens that in a sketchbook, I lose some light, it is very easy to get it back and to see what the sketch would look like. If it had enough light. So this tool comes in handy. I try not to use it very often. Sometimes I use it for experimentation in the final piece, but very, very little. There's also white gouache that you can sometimes use in order to add some more highlights and light into the painting in case that you cover too much with your paint. Also, there's a spatula that I have here in the studio for removing some of the paint in case that I want to scratch off some highlights while the paint is still wet that I use very little, but sometimes it comes in handy. And that is it for the material. Next lesson, we will go over the essential watercolor techniques that we'll use throughout this portrait challenge. I will see you there. 4. Your Watercolor Toolkit: Essential Techniques to Practice: In this lesson, we will practice a few core watercolor techniques. Your watercolor tool kit, essentially, that will help you paint every portrait in this class. Let's begin. And I will go over essential watercolor techniques that we'll need throughout this entire class to deal with all kinds of portraits. They're simple. They can be practiced beforehand to warm yourself up, and they will tremendously help you. You won't need more techniques to learn than these six that I'm going to show you. So first, basic wash. So, in case that you missed this in my previous class, first, I want to show you how to do a basic I want to lay down the color on the dry paper, but in a way that doesn't form any blooms, doesn't have imperfections, is just one smooth wash. For that, you have to til your board. You have to use something small, even something like this. Essentially, when you put some small item here and till your board, after you paint the wash, the water starts to run towards the bottom, and that creates a smooth wash. That helps you smoothen out all of the paint. So I will mix my paint with water here, and I will try to lay down here. Stroke by stroke slowly, and we are working on a dry paper, and you have to have enough water on your brush in order for the paint to become a homogeneous wash. And here at the bottom, you can get rid of the excess with your brush. You can just lightly touch the bottom with the tip of the brush, and it will suck in the remaining water, and it will stay flat like this. So when you paint on a dry paper, the edges of your wash usually stay sharp like this. But if you do not have a tilt, the oftentimes the excess water can form blooms imperfections and cause your washes to not look quite like you want. So you can practice this on a spare piece of paper, just to make sure that when you want a color that looks even, that you know how to go about this technique. Second will be expressions and splashes. Is the fun one and not hard to execute at all. When I do splashes and some expressions on my paper, I do not use tilts the paper pad lays flat on my table. So for that, we'll need a large brush, big brush, maybe even this one that I showed you during the materials lesson, and you can just grab enormous amount of water on your brush with some pigment, and then you can splash it around. If your brush holds enough water, then it can splash enough water. This is the problem with synthetic brushes they sometimes hold the water, you can't splash with them. Let's out different brushes that you have at home so that you can find the one that creates splashes, easy. Then I will splash another color, and I connect the other color with the first one. But while I let the color touch the previous one, I do not mix them together. They mix by themselves, and I can even add third color, like an orange splider here, but I do not mix them on a page. That's very, very important. And grab a smaller brush with this dark granulating blood stone paint and add it into the wash and maybe more of this carmine paint for the paint to shine. So this is how we do splatters. Touch lightly. You can touch the pulls that formed here lightly with your brush and get rid of all of these excess, but that does not mean that I'm touching the paper. With the tip of my brush, I'm just sucking in all of the water like excess water, I can form blooms, so I tend to just get rid of it and do not mix. Leave it as it is. It will form a beautiful background. This technique, yes, you guessed it. We mostly use it for the backgrounds, and it can create beautiful vivid portraits. This expression helps to be more loose with our portraits and makes the entire painting look more alive. You can't mix the paints. You have to leave them. It always looks very different when it dries from when it's wet like here. And also, if you don't touch it too much, then granulating paints can open like this. It really shows the granulating texture. This is a smooth paint. This is a granulating one, and you can see the difference. Very easy technique. I love to practice it and I love to incorporate it in almost all of the portraits that I do. I might do a portrait with a simple background during this challenge, but most of them will contain something like this with different colors, of course. So practice this technique. I know it's not always easy. And remember, for this one, no tilt, leave the paper flat on your table. I'm going to go dry this, and I will show you technique number three. So for third technique, we will learn how to do diffused edges. This is the hardest of all of the techniques that we'll do, and it applies mostly for shading of the face. I think if I ask 99 out of 100 people about which part is hardest when it comes to portraits, then most will say shading. Shading is very hard with watercolor. But if you learn the diffused edges technique, then you can apply your shadows with ease without making a mess, and sometimes you make a mess, but we have to practice it a little bit for it to work. So let's do that. Oftentimes, the mix of colors for shading gets a little thicker. I'm not going to use the exact shading mixture. I just mix some blue with some red in order to show you what I mean. When we do the diffused edge on dry paper, it means that we apply the shadow, we apply the paint where the shadow is supposed to be and then just cleaned up in water. Need to get rid of the excess wetness from the brush. So it is damp, it's not soaking wet. No water drips from your brush, and you just go with the damp brush against the edge and touch it lightly, like this. See? And this is what causes diffused edge here. You have to do it quickly. Otherwise, that edge, once it's dry here, you probably won't be able to make it smooth like this. But if you do it quickly enough, then the edge looks beautiful like this. So learning this technique allows you to place shadows and then connect the new layer with the previous me show this one more time, a little bit differently. So I have a shadow here. I'm applying new layer here, and I want this edge to be diffused. You don't have to just do it with clean water. You can do it with another paint like with a lighter skin tone. You can go against this edge and touch it lightly and let the two colors mingle and create a diffused edge. Always, I like to paint with a tilt, which I don't right now to be able to control these blooms a little better. Then here I can just go with clean water and do another diffused edge one more time because this is our space for practicing. This is new wash, clean my brush, get rid of the excess, and touch the edge lightly, maybe lift some of the excess and do not touch anymore, let it be like this. You can practice this technique as much as you want. We will practice in every single portrait. You don't have to do it perfectly. I never do it perfectly, but this is something that we need to do over and over 100 times for our portrait, start looking fresh and really so fourth technique that I want to show you and practice with you is wetting wet technique. And wetting wet technique is a way to create a diffused edge that's slightly easier but also more time consuming. And we will practice that in at least one of the portraits as well. And the way to do it is to pre wet everything, to pre wet the page or pre wet the portrait or part of the portrait before you paint the shadow. So we make it wet. Now, the important part is that we can't make it dripping wet. The paper needs to be glossy, but it can't have dripping water and when you have this stage, then you can also grab paint. The rule of wetting wet is that since you have water on your paper, you can't have so much water on your brush. When I paint, I always get rid of some excess, and then you can paint, and the edge of your wash, it's automatically diffused because you placed it in a wet paint. But you also have to notice one thing. Compared to working wet on dry, this paint is much less visible, much less saturated and is weaker than here, which is why the wetting dry technique and created a diffused edge the way we did just a few minutes ago. Is a little quicker way. If you do this technique for diffusing your edges a little easier to control, but you have to do more layers. So I will try to use stronger paint. See the edge diffuses itself, and maybe we'll try to use even more strong paint here. Always get rid of the excess. By the time this dries, all of these three levels will be lighter than here. Is definitely a technique worth exploring. And these two techniques you can compare which one you like more. I like to use both actually, and it's good to know both because they serve a different purpose. The technique that we'll practice next is dry brush technique. This one is very important for the hair, beards, lashes, eyebrows, all of the things that have some texture. So dry brush. And I will try to do dry brush with different brushes so that you know what kind of result you can get. Is just my regular larger brush that I use for painting. And with this one, if I split the hairs a little bit on my palette, maybe even use my tissue to get rid of the excess, then I can get a decent dry brush effect. It looks like this. But with my textured brushes, with the calligraphy brushes that have less subtle strokes as a result, the dry brush technique might be a bit prominent. Look at this. Definitely easier to get, but you can achieve a similar effect. And then I have the same brush, but smaller when I need to paint smaller hairs, result is the same. This is not a tough technique. Also, for beard, sometimes you need to do this technique where you split the hairs on your brush, you get rid of the excess and you just stamp. Like this. You just stamp with your brush to create these kind of marks. That's useful for Elahi sometimes for beards, look at this. It allows you to create hair that is short. I can even stamp with the whole body of the brush to create a weird brush jokes, and you can create all kinds of hairstyles from so you go have fun, practice this, and our last technique will be basically a combination of a couple of these that we used previously, and it's going to be a negative painting technique. So negative painting does not mean that you are a negative person. You will see in a moment what it means. But I will need to layer watercolor. What that means is that all of this that we did here is just one layer. Means the color touch the paper for one time. Then it dried. For negative painting, we need two layers at least. So I will do a basic wash, for example, like this one, I can make it colorful so that we have more fun with the negative painting. I will need to dry now in order to show you what negative painting means. So this again, is first layer of watercolor. And then I can draw something here, like floral shape. And then I grab a slightly darker paint or it can even be paint that you painted with. The first layer, doesn't matter because watercolor is transparent, and so these layers, even if you use the same color, they will stack. They will look like colored glass on top of each other. The color will intensify because they're transparent. I will basically paint the background around the newly drawn flour here, and we diffuse the edge here. So you can now see that I left part of the first layer and covered part of the first layer with the second one that's slightly darker. I don't have to cover the entire first layer to do this. I can even use different colors in the second layer. But now you can see this double effect of different watercolor layers. This is a technique that's basically a stylization of a watercolor portrait or a way to intensify or showcase some parts of the painting. Usually, I use it for the background, but you can also use it for parts of the face. And maybe even in this challenge, we will try to use just a few elements in the final portrait that will lead to stylization. Is a beautiful, very important technique that we also want to learn and use in watercolor paintings. So I hope that you enjoyed all of these techniques and tried them, experimented with them. Maybe those that feel like they're very hard for you, maybe try them a couple of times before going to paint the first portrait. You can even do a spreadsheet like this every single day or every week when starting a new portrait just to warm up. I do that quite often. In the next lesson, we'll begin our week one portrait by creating a loose sketch. I will see you there. 5. (WEEK 1 ) Creating a Watercolor Thumbnail / Sketch: This lesson, we will create a quick, loose watercolor sketch from our first reference. Think of it as a warm up and a small thumbnail for the final painting. This step can be incredibly helpful for spotting composition or color issues before you commit to the large artwork. Try to keep this sketch to ten to 30 minutes max. Do not get caught up in the details and do not worry about making it pretty. It's job is simply to help you test ideas and build a little confidence before the main piece. Practicing this way became a total game changer for me, so let's jump in. So before we start, I still want to go over the sketchbook that I have here. This is a saner sketchbook. I like to create small sketches of nearly all of my portraits that are important or if I did not paint for a long time, but I noticed over time that creating sketches before I painted a large piece that helps me envision what the painting will look like, and it will help me to basically get familiar with the subject that I'm about to paint, and the final portrait gets so much easier. Since I started to do these tiny watercolor sketches, I don't throw away as many portraits as I did before. For example, this is a sketch that I created before I painted this portrait, and the sketch helped me realize that the color combination that I planned is not going to work. You can see that the face is not too successful. It's very ugly compared to this one, and the model was very pretty, but that's not the point of the sketch. You can make the face very quick, very loose. Point is this. Troubleshoot problems before they arise on a large paper and before you waste your resources and materials. So after realizing that this color combination is not great, I opted out for more vibrant combination, and I think it also turned out well because I have drawn the portrait before. Another portrait. And actually, this was the same principle. I did like this looseness, but it was very, very quick. It was maybe 15 minutes sketch, and the color combination made me realize that this is not what I want for this. Portrait, it does not support the facial expression. And then I painted the final piece with much more vivid colored combination, and I like this one more. But without doing the sketch, I cannot realize these problems. I only will realize once I have wasted a beautiful cotton paper. So nowadays, almost always I do these tiny little sketches, but I do not make them look nice. These are very quick, very loose, but I can already see the point and whether the painting that I'm trying to envision here is worth making or what kind changes do I need to make in order for the painting to work color wise. So we're going to do just that in this lesson. Here, we will sketch our first portrait in this challenge, and we will quickly try the color combination and see if that will work. We'll try to learn from this sketch. And please, I know you. You will try to work on your sketchbook for 2 hours, but that's not why we are here. Over the course of this challenge, I want you to learn to do this quickly. Just as a notes that you would take during the class. That's what the sketch is for. Is the first reference photo that I've chosen for this challenge. I knew that the first portrait that we're going to make is either going to frustrate us or is going to support our learning will make us want to try more portraits, and portraits are very hard. So I've chosen something that I do not think is going to be dead hard. It is a profile view, and it's a beautiful will try to sketch this. We'll give you a few tips on how to do this quickly and then we will try the colors. Since this is the week one of our challenge, we will only use four colors and we'll do everything with this limited palette and therefore, we also have to test out our mixes and if they work. For quickly sketching the profile view like this, I always want to first maybe use some straight lines to block in the main shapes. The angle of the jaw, maybe a little bit. Just use these straight lines to block in some of the shapes that you see. This is going to be part of the hair. And here I'm going to use oval. Then there is some straight lines for the neck. Now we can block in the line for the eyebrows. That's this one, another one, imagine that the eye with the eyebrow, they form this one shape. It's like sunglasses on or an eye socket shape like this one. So do that first and only there, you can do the actual eye, which can have a very triangular shape from the side view. Okay, let's move on to the nose. The nose also from the profile view can have a very triangular shape here, here and here. And since her head is slightly lifted, that's not going to be long. We do not make it too long. Then the mouth, this part is going to be the hardest. But if you had the previous class with me, which was about the introduction to portraits that include a whole half of the classes, just drawing portraits, you know that this bottom part of the face this part from the end of the nose to the chin, this part can be split into three parts one, two, and three. Here Summer is going to be that split between the lower and upper lip. This one is going to be the upper lip. And this one will be where the chin kind of turns. You can use these measurements to help you find the mouth. But again, we are doing this quickly, so we do not try to do it perfectly, or please do not try to even to focus on likeness too much. So I'll just blocking some of the shadows. This is not exactly hair, but it's fine. She has makeup here, and then the hair I also try to envision in straight lines first before maybe doing something else. Here is a cheek bone. Here we can see more light, here maybe a bit more shadow. Then again, here a bit more light and a lot more shadow in this area before we get to the ear and the earring. So all of these parts is covered with hair. And please try to sketch very, very loosely. I will not take the kneaded eraser and try to soften my first lines a little bit and clean up the sketch. And I'll try to soften my own lines a little bit, make it look a bit more like her, but again, you can even keep the face not looking so great at this stage. Okay. And here is just the rest of this is here. Okay. And with this, I can move on to the paint because it's just enough for finding out whether the painting is going to be okay. The sketchbook paper is a cotton paper, but it's not very high quality. It's very different from the one that I'm painting final portraits with. And so it won't even allow me to create such an elaborate watercolor piece, but that's not the point. So I think we can finally also start building the palette. The first week of our challenge, we will use bloodstone genuine. That's the dark place one here, use it in this palid as well, and I'm going to pour it here. I want to use cobbled blue. I want to use yellow orange that one's going to come here and permanent red. I tend to use cadmium red sometimes, but lately, I've been opting out for options without cadmium. So from SchminkiHodam, the permanent red uses a non toxic non cadmium pigment that is very similar in hue to cadmium red. So these four colors pressed it on my palette and we will try the mixes and we'll try to color this sketch. One more thing. We have to find out whether the portrait that we are about to paint has some highlights. I don't see many highlights, but like here on the notes, there's one. This part tends to be slightly lighter. You can mark it very gently. Here also here also might be a lighter part, just so that you don't cover it up. Here is lighter part. It's not completely white. So it's not a true highlight, but these parts are lighter. That will help us kind of preserve some of the lightness. And here, I'm going to get a little bit of yellow orange and a little bit of permanred. Mix them together, try to create a skin tone. Do not forget to add more water. We need a watery wash. Sketchbooks, I don't use tilts very often. I just block in everything with this one basic skin tone mixture. We'll work more precisely on the final piece, but we just go carefully around these highlights. This one I covered already. Maybe here on the neck, I will add a slight bit of the dilute it cobbled blue into the skin tone mixture because here, the skin tone starts to be a bit cooler and then more of the permanent red we want to use here, dilute it permanent red. You can add a bit more here on the nose, on the lips straight into the wet these highlights, I usually go over them with clean water. So the area remains lighter but not completely white and not cut off from the rest of the face. So the color that we used is yellow and red so far and just making notes about the skin tone. I also used a little bit of cobbled blue. If you add cobbled blue into this, you will get an undertone that's a bit more gray that looks like this. Now for the hair, we need some sort of blackish, brownish color. For browns, usually I mix yellow orange with a permanent red, a bit more balanced mixture and add a little bit of the latton genuine. You can get quite a nice dark color like this brownish color. Maybe her hair could benefit from adding more blue, so you can add cobbled blue as well, and that will make the mixture at more cool. Yes, I think this is very close to her hair color, and so we can start applying. Even if the previous wash is still wet, you can apply this. We can dilute a little bit more. I just want to see the color, what it looks like. So this is the base hair color. What else is there? What other colors are there? There's the jacket that she's wearing. I would maybe use the same color but use a bit more blue into the mixture, and that will give us something like color like this. I think that's very true to the reference photo. And here we can use more water. We can splash this around a little bit, maybe connect the wash with the hair and add in a lot more bloodstone genuine into her hair here where you can see the darkest part. Just notice little contrasts and put them there very quickly. This is not an elaborate painting. Now, we have to think about the color combination for the entire portrait. So I like this color very much. What other color might be suitable to use with it? It might be red. So maybe if we use red to create a contrast between the blue, that might be nice. And I think this portrait will benefit from having dark background here. I just testing all of the colors together. I know that might look scary, getting rid of all of the excess water, and I will need to add a bit more blood stone if this is going to work a bit more of the darkness. We can use that actually for the next layer and do some negative painting. So, if the face is still wet, then the color will bleed. You can wait, but I don't really make a big deal out of this in my schedchb. It's too much, then I try to maybe use my sturdier brushes to get rid of excess pigment later, but we will probably be able to cover this with the layer of shadows very soon. At this stage, might do some more splatters, actually, of red, but I now want to dry everything. So to make sure that we know which colors we use. Orange, permanent red, cobbled blue, and blood stone here. Four colors. I do like these effects, and I'm enjoying the color combination. It's not so poppy, but the red and the blue, they kind of mix together spontaneously and create these subtle purple transitions which I enjoy, and the blackstone is adding some texture and granulation. Might be a good portrait after all. Let's now move on to the shadows and try to add some to the face very, very quickly. So the main zones for the shadows will be here around the eyes, here around the neck, the jaw, some slight shadows, but very light, medium tone will be here around this highlight that's on her cheek, bottom of the nose and below the lip, those are the areas that we want to do. To create shadows, even though I will go into more details in the final painting, don't worry. You can first premix the basic skin tone here. We'll use the yellow orange and permanent red, mix them together, add water. Just have a bit of skin tone set aside to use for shading for connections with the previous layer, and main mixture for shading will be red. Mixed with blue. I add more water and less water, and this is what I try to do my shadings I need a bit more purple for this. So I apply the shadow here around the eye. This is not going to be a nice looking portrait. Don't worry. Then diffuse the edge, the technique that we learned in the previous lesson, and then connect everything with the skin tone, basically, wherever you have just a slight turning of the form in your portrait, then you don't have to use the shading mixture. You can just use another layer of skin tone to connect those. Top of the nose is quite light. We do not need the shading mixture that's very dark. But then underneath the nose, we do. We need the stronger shading mixture. And then the lips as well, here is the strong part, even stronger, actually. Below the lips, you can use the shading mixture. Like that. And a little bit of the skin tone. And now here, I want to use basic skin tone to make the skin quite wet here in this area, and then want to place this shadow here in wet and wet. That's what we can do to make it easier for us. This area is going to be darker clean water. Okay. That is very, very basic shading. I also need blood stone as my darker paint to just suggest the contrast around her eyes, maybe to here, basically just paint a little bit of darkness. And maybe use some for the brows as well for some contrast. And now I want to find out whether the portrait would look good if I placed dark background in this area. So I have blood stone genuine here of the blue, and I will try to do the negative painting, basically, which means that I go over the silhouette of the face, trying to make it stand out more emphasize the silhouette. And we will leave the face dry for now so that we have this sharp edge around. Here will be darker shadows of the clothes. On this side, we need to emphasize a little bit here the contrast of the hair, and some hairs string hairs. Careful with the strokes in this area because the hair here is lighter, so we want to do the strokes or more of the brass strokes where the hair is darker. And then I'd like to do more of that negative painting here in this area. Basically, this is my process for the sketch. This is just me throwing a bunch of paints on the page, seeing if the color works, the face is not well executed is just rough idea of what we are about to paint a large paper. Maybe the lips need to be more red, maybe actually in here, I want more red, just to balance this with the background. Maybe the nose needs more red. Do we want a portrait like this? Would orange help to make it more vivid? I don't know. Let's find out. I'm going to put a little bit of orange here. I don't like the combination. I think it's either orange or red. Nope, I think the red was all that we needed. I have these luminous, white pencils. These are color pencils. Sometimes, not always, they're absolutely not necessary, but sometimes during the sketching process, I use them just to see if adding more light or preserving more light would help the portrait out. Since barely can remove from the sketchbook enough pigment. I just use the color pencil, and that helps me also better plan what I can preserve when I paint the final portraits. So definitely the bottom lip needs more light that I covered too much there. There's some light on the teeth as well. It is quicker for me than any other tool. Okay, I will also use it to draw the earring. But in the final portrait, we'll do it different. And here is some light on her jacket, here is as well. Here, just the rim light. Maybe we could use just a hint of orange along with the red because now I kind of like it. I'm excited to do this portrait, and this is actually exactly what I wanted to show you with this lesson is that every time that I create a sketch like this, it was very quick process, but it's a peak to the final painting. Sometimes I find out when I create these sketches that I'm bumped and I do not want to continue. I find out that I'm not inspired by the reference as much as I thought or the color combination doesn't work. Usually it's not the reference. Usually it's the colors, and then I find a way to make them better, and the final portrait survives thanks to that. Sometimes it's the reference. I find the reference a good idea, but when I try to draw it, it just does not work for me. I do not connect with reference that also happens to me, and the sketch helps me realize that this is not a good reference for me to paint right now. This process of sketch booking, I think it's going to be an essential part of your practice as well to visualize the portrait, and maybe sometimes we will even do two and switch reference. We'll see. So please do a sketch like this one quickly. Either on a separate piece of paper or into your sketchbook, I would even love it if you included your sketch in the project that you will upload with the final piece. In the next lesson, we will draw a portrait to the watercolor paper and prepare for our painting process. I will meet you there. 6. (WEEK 1) Drawing a portrait: Lesson, we will draw our portrait to watercolor paper. Let's get started. In this lesson, we will sketch the portrait to a professional watercolor paper, cut and paper, and we'll start the process of creating a final piece. So sometimes I'll sketch free hand, don't measure anything, but other times I use my pencil to measure parts of the portrait to make sure that I'm a bit more accurate. If you have the option to print your reference to the same size of your final piece, then this gets easier because you can take the exact measurements and you can transfer them to the watercolor paper. I will start draw free hand, but I will measure some of the biggest, largest parts of the face to make sure that the drawing is at least a little bit accurate. Usually, I start by mapping where the top of the head will be. So maybe I want the top of the head. Here that is essentially this point. So then the portrait length is about as much as my pencil slightly a bit more. So here's going to be her chin. Now I have to make sure that this is where I want that face to be placed, but probably this is okay. So now I maybe just do one line to represent the face. There's a slight angle to this. So I'll just place a line. This is the top of the head. We'll have to find a hairline. This is hairline. Between the top of the head and the hairline, there's a little bit of distance. So the hairline could be here. Usually there's some volume to the hair on top of the head, so then we have to incorporate that. But then you can measure the distance from the hairstyle to the eyebrows at least roughly would probably say that here we can mark eyebrows. We can measure the distance from the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose, approximately here. That does not seem right. A little bit less. So I'll just do two lines to represent the nose very, very roughly. And then we can measure from the bottom of the to the bottom of the face. We already have that marked, so I'm just measuring to see if the previous measurement works and it does. If you want, you can find the midpoint, the middle part of the mouth, and you can measure from the bottom of the chin to there just to make sure that it is that you marked it properly. And then I'm going to try to draw a few straight lines like here, a line here, this angle just to represent the basic features. This bottom part might be slightly more complex. One and two, it can be just a few lines. For now, I'm not looking to be like 100% precise, just to make the portrait exist. And from here, one more measurement that could be helpful could be the width of the face, how wide the face is. I can measure that and mark here, where the ear will begin, and then we'll just see where it lines up. So the bottom of the ear, somehow it lines up with mouth here. Everything else, more or less, I can free hand from here from this point. I could measure this distance. The eye, it actually looks like a triangle one line, the other line, and then this line. So if you draw a triangle like this, and a few more lines that you will get the eye. This is all very rough, but it really helps. One tip for you when drawing on a watercolor paper. Just make sure that you don't press too much because then the line will be so difficult to erase. That's not great. Just make the lines very soft. Try to sketch with your entire hand, not just with your fingers or your wrist because then you get better movement of the lines. And just touch with the tip of the pencil, just touch the paper very lightly. Here around the jacket that she's wearing and the clothes, overall, I do not care all that much. I'll just try to sketch very roughly the silhouette. And I think this is just more or less what we need. There's the makeup the fold below the eye, And maybe the eyebrows. And here also this other part, we see just a little bit of the other eye. Okay. I also want to at least do this so that I can remember that here's a highlight and this is a check. So this is the first stage of my sketch. I did not use eraser by now very much. This is just rough outlines. I make sure that everything is where I want it to be. So the size of the face, the position of the face. If you decide later on after doing some refinements that you want the face to be a little higher then that's very difficult. But you have to decide all of these things in this first stage of the drawing process. But once we have this sketched, we can start refining the lines. I usually start this phase with the needed eraser. So now I will start the refining process. I will take the needed eraser and try to lift some of the pigment. Like I mentioned in the previous classes as well, the Ned eraser never takes away all of your lines. It just lightens them. The main point of your sketch is still visible, and now we have to refine. So we have to commit to certain lines, make them a bit more prominent, but still we don't press. We just sketch very lightly. So here was the forehead. So I sketched. I noticed that there was a little bit of a bump here. I will refine this as I go. I'll sketch the hair. I just look a bit more closely, and I try to also notice details, the curves, the angles, a bit more. Before it was very rough, and now it's just the shape of the nose. I try to be a bit more precise. This precision, you don't have to worry about it too much. If you can refine your lines at least a little bit that will help the final portrait. But do not worry if you can't observe all of the angles and get all the curves looking exactly like on the photo. That is, again, not the point of this exercise. I'm not entirely sure. If she has a difficult feature, it would be the chin, from what I noticed. It is also the angle in which she is captured by the photographer. I'm trying to get it at least slightly similar to the photograph. Here is where the detailed eraser comes in handy, but it's not a necessity, but it really helps. If I want to clean an area like this one, where I have everything, where I already have a clean line, but I want to make sure that around it, there's nothing else. And another difficult feature could be the mouth. So I might start with the lower lip and just observe how the lip goes. From what I see, it goes like this. There is part that shows a little bit of teeth here. And then here is the upper lip. Sometimes I do add this tiny hatching is just very soft just to make sure that I remember that there's shadow there. Shadow is also here underneath. As we draw, we kind of study the reference. So here also, underneath the nose, there's a shadow that we want to capture. I can do hatching. Mechanical pencil does a good job that the hatching does not look too strong. And when you place watercolor over it, usually it work just fine and covers the entire thing. And now the eye M. I try to just draw what I see the reference, what I notice. Here underneath the iris and underneath this part of the eye, you can see the thickness of the lower lid. But just for a minute here, just for a little little bit, so I try to preserve some of the white of the paper, and then you can see it again. There's makeup here and there's lashes. Here is makeup. I think this is also part of the makeup and then the upper lid here. I think the most difficult part we've got behind us, there's the part of the ear here just doesn't show very much. I just slightly measure this might bit higher. And I want to make sure that this part of the head is correct. The one here, we can't cut each. It's got quite a lot of hair, so we have to include, I don't have the chin, correct, but I'll fix that after everything is placed. Chin is not good. Let's try to fix. It's too prominent, so I think it's S. Now, I always smudge with my hand, and the Ned eraser helps me get rid of that so that my paper is cleaner. This line is not a sharp line here. Sharper is this silhouette, so I care about that much. More. And then the earring. This could be the final. There's a rule that I have and after every single drawing, I go for a break, at least half an hour, but it's best if it's overnight or an hour or lunch or something because then after I return to my drawing, I find mistakes that I was not able to see before and I can correct them before painting. If I don't find the problems with the drawing and I start painting, then it's almost you can't fix. Anymore because you cover them with paint. So I try to notice them. The drawing is usually the hardest part. And then after you have the drawing finished, that's where you can enjoy the painting process and relax a little bit. Or maybe accept shading. So I will delete a few smudges here, and I will take a break. I will be back in 30 minutes, and then I will show you how I try to find the mistakes. In the next lesson, I will show you how to do revisions and how to spot mistakes in your drawing. I will miss you there. 7. How to spot mistakes in your drawing: Lesson, I will show you my go to methods for spotting and correcting drawing mistakes, including the ones that are easy to miss at first. These small issues can become much harder to fix once paint is involved, so taking a few extra minutes to check your sketch is always worth it. Let's get started. So one of my favorite methods that I've been using lately to just help me find mistakes in my drawings is throw the drawing on the ground and look at it from above. Well, that helps me gain perspective and seeing the drawing next to the reference photo from a distance sometimes helps me see stuff that I did not on my table. So in this particular drawing, I did not uncover so far, huge mistakes, but a couple of minor tweaks, like, for example, here, the hair, should be closer to the forehead. So here, I'll just mark that the hair needs to be slightly closer. Some things probably will be fixed just by adding color, maybe just the angle of the forehead can be improved very slightly. Other than that, so far, I did not notice any, huge problems. Maybe she could have a little bit of like a smile here. So this corner of the mouth could be maybe improved just very, very slightly moved a little bit. Yeah, now I like it a bit better. We just minor tweaks, but looking at a distance definitely helps me and is one of the fastest methods. So that's why I do it more often than anything else lately. Another method that I use sometimes is to take a photo of the drawing with my phone and then take the photo of the reference with my phone. And then on my phone, just quickly, sort of, I will have to crop this one so they are similar in size, and then just flip in between them. Oh, so now I see. I see this angle is like chin on my drawing goes just so forward. I notice this now. So maybe that's the thing that we need to tweak a bit more is not to have the chin go forward so much and just to tuck it a little bit. I did not see that before, not even with my first correction method. I and also here, there's I need to go a bit higher, anything else? And the third method that you can try is to well, place the drawing upside down or on the side and then compare all of the distances. Maybe the distance, whether the eye is not too long too wide, the eyebrows here. This distance compares slightly better from this angle. Well, the shape of the jaw is different, and I can't get it right for some reason. But the shape of the jaw, I only see now from this angle a little better than before. And this length, that could work. And then upside down, I have to think about the chin because that gets I do erase a lot on a watercolor paper, and that's fine. The watercolor paper can handle it, but you can't use eraser that's dusty or that scratches the paper. It has to be very gentle. Even the hair shape is like better from this angle. Helps me better seat from this angle. And the other side It's the dark part of the hair. So these are my three go to methods. Not always I do it like sometimes I just don't care for the likeness as much. I just don't want to be embarrassed, here, not be able to get at least a little bit close to the reference. But oftentimes if I do sketchbook works or quick works, I don't really mind all that much. Besides measuring the main proportions, I don't go for likeness, all that much, I just want to practice. Here we did three evaluations of the final sketch, and I believe that we got as close to reference as necessary, close enough to create a decent looking portrait. And so that's great. We can prepare the drawing for the final painting. Prepare all of your painting tools for the actual painting process and make sure that you clean if you are like me and have the graphite on your hands, I usually go watch that. In the next lesson, we will do a quick color mixing demo and a recap. I will meet you there. 8. (WEEK 1) 4 color palette - Mixing Exercise: In this lesson, we will go over the four basic colors we'll be using this week and recap the combinations, practice mixing a little bit, and essentially prepare the palette for the painting process. Let's get started. I know that we've already used the four colors in the sketching stage, but we can quickly recap all of the color combinations that we can get from these four paints just so that the process of final painting is smooth, uninterrupted, that you are 100% efficient and prepare all of the colors beforehand so that you have easier time during the actual painting process and we can start mixing. I already put these four paints into my palette, but since they were sitting there for some time, I need to now grab a brush and make sure to wet them, so dampen them with a little bit of water. You can use water bottle or sprinkler, if you want. But I just use my brush and quickly do this. Let them sit in this tiny bit of water for two or 3 minutes so the pigment gets more workable. But I also do recommend to squeeze out a little bit, tiny bit of the fresh paint so that we have the best consistency for the work, especially the blood stone, which actually I will squeeze in also here. We will also add water here. So for the skin tone, we use a combination of the orange. This is yellow orange and permanent red. We combine them together. Here, I usually create this large pool in the mixing space of the palate. This is just red, but when we add a bit of orange, this orange has a huge influence of the yellow pigment, and therefore, the mixture gets peachy. It doesn't get all red, something like this. So this is our basic skin tone. Those are warm colors. We will use them everywhere where the skin tone is in the light. But then we use cobbled blue. So cobbled blue is cool color, and sometimes we do need the basic skin tone, which I will grab and have a bit of it here. Sometimes we need to cool it down. And in that case, I will grab this mixture and add a tiny bit of the cobbled blue in it. This may be too much, but you can see how lid gets. The cobbled blue pushes the skin tone into the shadow like here. Sometimes we need this in here, for example, or on the neck, some areas of the face that contain skin tone, but you can clearly see that the skin tone is in the shadow. So this is very important. Then in some areas like the lips, nose, maybe the cheek bone, they get more red, so you put a bit more red into the skin tone, make it a little bit more red like this. You can shift the colors from warm and even redder towards the cool ones. We will mainly mix these three colors together. I think it takes about 15 minutes to get used to mixing all of these and adjust the ratios according to what you need. It's not harder than that. And for shadows, we will be mixing the red and the blue. Sometimes we'll mix them and leave the mixture to be diluted. This gets us some purple, but it's not going to be all that vivid. Sometimes the red prevails, other times the blue prevails. Like when you add more blue, you get a mixture that looks like this. So these two colors together combined, they create some sort of purple, but desaturated, earthy purple that you can use for the shadow part. And also this mixture can be used diluted like this, even the one with more blue can be more diluted. And it's going to work for shadows, but it can also be used thick, and we will need in some areas to use thicker mixture. So then I use less water and more pigment. Which is why oftentimes it really helps me to push and squeeze fresh paint out of the tube, especially for the red and blue. So if I create a thicker mixture here, one part of my palette, it's going to look like this when it has more red. If you push and add a bit more blue, then the mixture can look like this. It's almost black. With thick mixtures, you can create details, darker areas. You can basically use it for anything around the makeup, lashes, brows, hair, the nostril even this part of the mouth, you can use it here and you can even use it for parts of the hair. For the hair, we can use this mixture and add a bit of blood stone genuine in it. I did use a little bit of orange in it as well. So this is going to be mixture for the hair. Maybe a bit more blood stone, a little bit more blue, and you just mix, you test, and you see what the final color looks like. Maybe a bit more orange. Yes. For the hair, we will mix all of the four colors and just balance it out. Besides the skin tones, I always think about the stylization. So which colors do I want to pop around the portrait? That is why we did the sketch and we tested it. I kind of like the blue when it shines a little bit more. I like the pops of red and maybe we'll also incorporate the pops of orange as well because this final color mixture, I was enjoying. And now with this warmup, we can finally start painting. In the next lesson, we'll start painting our watercolor demo together step by step. I will meet you there. He 9. (WEEK 1) - First layer & Background: This lesson, we will begin the painting process by laying in the first skin wash and we'll also add the expressive background right from the start. I love working this way because it helps us establish the main color values early on, which makes the shading stage much easier later. I will guide you through everything step by step, and let's get started. Before we start with the first layer, I always want to paint the skin first, and for that, we create a tilt. I have a basket here. Sometimes I use masking tape, something that's not too tall, but still helps me to hold the paper in a position that allows water to run down slightly. It is not going to be sufficient for the background or for the splashes that we will also do during the first layer. But for the skin painting, it helps to unify the wash, just like I mentioned in the lesson with the techniques. First layer for me is always dilute it skin tone placed and painted over the skin I do try to avoid the highlighted areas or the areas that should remain light. Just to make sure that you know where they are, you can grab a mechanical pencil and very lightly map them out like we did in the sketch. So here is one area that I can identify in the reference photo that is very light. Also on the cheek, just very, very lightly, do not make a map that's very visible. Here on the nose, I guess it's here and also in this area, just so that we remember not to go there with our brush during the first layer. Here as well. Actually, we will go there with the brush. We will not cover that area with paint just with clean water, and here as well on the chin. This is an area that's supposed to remain a bit more clean. So when you don't have paint yet placed on the paper, it can appear a bit harsh these maps, but do not worry. Usually, we just cover all of them. I just want to lighten this sketch that I probably forgot to lighten looks a bit too harsh to me. And now I no longer want to wait and I just want to get into the painting process. So the first part is always the skin tone like we premixed in this previous exercise that we did. And let's get painting. I will just gently place the skin tone over areas of the skin except the areas we just mapped out. And remember to use enough water. That's very important. The eye whites, they're not white, so you can go over them. Just go over this as well. And then clean water on your brush. You can lightly touch these areas so that they can blend. We'll also prepare the Chine brush that I have here slightly smaller, and we'll go over this part with clean water here, and we will connect this needs to be always with more water. Carefully painting around where I can't reach with larger brush. I'll try to do with the smaller one. You can go around the teeth as well. But here at the bottom, we have to kind of add the blue into the skin tone, and we can paint with that look how different it looks. The entire bottom part of the face will need a little cooler skin tone. Here, just clean water to dilute. Don't want sharp edges. And this part will need nectin and I have to admit that I need to be kind of swift with placing my first layer, especially if my room is a little bit warm because that dries very quickly. Sometimes, if it's not too dry yet, I can go ahead and use a little bit of red paint. I guess I could do that because I see a lot more red in these areas. Maybe a bit more red in the mouth area as well. And the nose. So for the hair, I'll mix red, yellow. So this is orange. I mix blue in them, and this is the base, maybe at a bit of blood stone genuine so that you get deeper color a little bit more of the blue to balance because the hair appears a lot cooler and we can start by placing at least just the base layer, I guess. And I want my first layer always to be watery where I can see the skin tone kind of peaking. Maybe here add a little bit more of the blood stone. So I need a bit more. And just because I want to do the background, I need to dry this part of the skin so that it doesn't get more blooms than this. It right now, I switched straight to the background by laying my painting flat, and I will now want to do splatters. Now, not the reference photo, but my sketch is more important. So just make sure to keep this on your side so that we can use it as inspiration, basically. And I always start with colors that are lightest. So maybe in this case, it would be a bit of the orange bit of red. I might start with the red and use my largest brush, do these free splatters and I kind of try to avoid the face. Weapon of the blue. I have to be careful around the face so that I don't go in it. So I always try to use the tinier brush to get the background close to the face. And maybe that's enough. And you can't forget about what we did during the techniques, is that the colors they're supposed to if you want them brilliant and just each color to stand out on its own, you can't mix them together. Here I will pour a little bit more of the black but very careful about the silhouette. This side of the portrait is black heavy as well. And the shirt now. I'll try to incorporate the orange, just like we did with the sketch, kind of like and now the important part, get rid of all the excess water, the large puls, suck it out of the painting. H. Especially here, these drips and drops this large brush. I can absorb a huge amount of water, so it really helps me get rid of these quickly. And now I can level up the portrait again, let it go down, let it drip a little. I do not like these shapes here, so I might do just a little bit of clean water and let it connect like that. Now I just let the excess run down. Here I collect it, and then I will see what it looks like from distance. No. So I'll try to do one more effect here somewhere is with just clean water, sprinkle some tiny bits of the water in the texture, and we'll see if that helps me achieve some sort of effect. And also, while that portrait is still wet in this area, I would like to paint in some of the folds of her clothes. In the clothes. Always, when you screen your eyes a little bit, you can see parts that are slightly darker like here is a part that's darker stroke. I just try to find this and do a stroke, one stroke each fold and leave it. But you have to do this in a wet background. Let's see what I mean. Here I have blood stone genuine with a little bit of blue cobalt, so that I have this dark blue mixture here and pretty thick because we are painting into the wet surface. And I will see if this will be possible. One stroke, one stroke. Stroke. Another one. There maybe just pure blue. And that's beginning to look like folds of her clothes. That's all that we need. We don't need more elaborate explanation of what she's wearing. That also works for the hair. So some parts of the hair, maybe I could do this with this brush. That's for textures. Oh, yes, that makes the beautiful texture already here and try to do some of these lines. Because in this area, I just want everything to be slightly blurred out. Maybe we could also do these strokes with red, why not. Here as well. I can also, sometimes I do this with my nails, but not today. I have a spatula here and I'll try to scratch out some of the highlighted hair while it's still wet. You can even do that for the earring to create a subtle highlight there. With this, I will let everything dry. This is the first layer. It's the messiest one. We will have to clean later. But this is just the process that I enjoy. Watercolor is spontaneous. All of these effects, I just want to utilize in my painting. Then in the next layers, we'll have more opportunity to develop detail and to work with a bit more precision to create shading and even correct some of these parts that did not quite work out. But for now, this just looks what I want it to look like. Here are some beautiful watercolor abstractions that I don't want to touch. This is the combination of vivid color, smooth color with granulation. Here, look at this. I don't even want to touch this. This is what your paint does, and it looks fantastic. So I'd prefer this to be a part of my painting. Maybe here I'll try to go for a little bit more of the splatters, a bit more expressive parts, if possible. And I will just leave it like this until it's dry, and then we can evaluate and start working on the face. In the next lesson, we will paint shadows around the face and add some details too. I will meet you there. 10. (WEEK 1) - Painting shadows: In this lesson, we will start adding shading to the face and deepen a few darker details to define the features. This is often the trickiest part of the process, but do not worry, we will take it slowly and go step by step together. Let's go. Now the first layer has dried, and I'm loving how the portrait is looking at this stage. There's a little bit of messing here. I would want to clean some of it, but not right now. What's definitely coming after the first layer is the face. So I'd like to first focus on getting some shadows into the face, make it look a bit more in depth, and afterwards, we will do the entire stylization, see what's missing on the background. We will tie everything together. We'll grab my basket here again, and let's focus on shading the face. I will first premix some mixtures. Here, it's going to be the red and blue together mixture with blue prevailing, mixture with red prevailing, just like we mixed before. And before I even start placing new shadows, this always happens to me because the background is so watery. Sometimes the paint just leaks into the silhouette of the portrait, and I would like to clean it before we place anything else. Here is also a slight bloom that happened because I was adding extra water here. This part was obviously already dry, and that's why the bloom happened. But at this point, I'm not going to do much with it. Maybe I'll just also try to clean it very slightly inside this zone that was supposed to be light. Do the cleaning with my Princeton stroke, aqualy. Usually, it's the flat brush. I'll just dampen it in clean water, but I make sure that the water doesn't drip, so I always clean with the tissue and then gently, very gently rub the paint off my paper. This technique is just so helpful for me, but you have to have proper paper. For this, it does not work on every paper. Some papers just don't let the pigment out anymore after it dries, but most of them will let you do this. That can also be a pigment problem. Some pigments tend to stay the paper, and those are also harder to clean. This was not such a big mistake, just like it is in here. I'll just rub a little bit, clean up, and we're good to go. First, I'd like to place large shadows on the face, some shadows, and her face, overall, is not so pale, so we might have to go in a little bit more with some color. We want to place some more paint to create more depth and shadows over here, like around the eyes, bottom of the nose. Those are the main zones here, bottom of the mouth, and the most too difficult zones will be this chin area. In this area. We'll keep in mind that here we will only shade with the basic skin tone. So I will again, mix the orange with red, dilute the mixture. Here is the color that needs to be more intense but not too much cobbled in that mixture in this area. However, here we will have to work with even darker paint. And for this particular shadow, I would suggest that we could wet the entire face with clean water and for these large shadows to work wet in wet, just like we practice during the techniques part. So let's do that. Now that we went over this, I will place clean water. I will now go around the eye, so I am going over the highlights, but the eye sort of is dry. Here, I will dampen all of this. So now that you see that it shines, hopefully you can see this. The face shines. I did not touch the background. I didn't touch the hair, and I left out the eye. Sometimes I need to go over with clean water twice so that the paper soaks in the water, otherwise, gets the surface and it is drying so quickly. So sometimes you need to wait a little bit, then pour more water to make sure that this is really soaked. Let's start with smaller brush, placing some paint. I will also premix the basic skin tone, which I forgot. Okay. So with basic skin tone, I just want to slightly intensify the color here. I'm adding basic skin tone here. I'll add hints of orange here on the forehead. Here some shading mixture that already includes the cobbled blue. And mixture for shading that is slightly darker is going here. Here. Now, if you pre wet this thoroughly, then you can paint because it will stay wet for at least a little bit so that you can really work. In this area, I want to add a bit more red. And also the basic skin tone, like we said, here is shadow that we need to intensify color here basically. That's too much. Since my surface is wet, I can just push the paint back and forth. And whatever your color looks like when it's wet, it will be completely different when it's dry. Usually, it loses a lot of saturation. So do not worry. I already am kind of used to working with slightly more saturated color and just placing more color than what I think is necessary because I already notice this shift here I need to add a bit more blue in this area. Actually, I want to try adding a bit more of that orange here, just as a reflection of this orange. So the colors don't have to be necessarily always realistic, but we have to care for tonal values and therefore, make sure that it is dark where it needs to be dark, but it doesn't need to be the same color. I can already see that the face is getting some more depth. However, in this stage, you have to be careful about stopping when you feel that the paper is starting to dry. The moment that you feel that stop painting, you would do better if you grab the hair dryer and let everything dry re wet and continue because that semi dry stage is very easy to mess up and very easy to create blooms when you work in that one. I happened to me a couple of times. This bottom part for me is still quite wet, but here I would not dare to go anymore. Okay. Adding a bit more shadow here on the neck while this area is wet. Here, there's a bit too much of the blood don't genuine, so too much darkness, I'll try to paint over with maybe some blue or different colors. And now I go in with the thick paint. So very thick blue and thicker red mixed together into the mixture that I showed you earlier. And I will try to maybe add a little bit of darkness in these few areas. And a bit more red. Here is going to form bloom. This was dangerously semi wet area already. So yeah, I guess there's nothing I can do more because the paper is semi dry. So everything that I add now will create bloom. Here, I just want to lift some of the pigment from the teeth. We can do that later also. Now I will dry. We'll see the actual color that is staying here, and then we can continue wet on dry. 11. (WEEK 1) - Painting shadows PART II: So after this has dried, I quite like this phase. I do not need all that much more to do. Basic shadows helped a lot. But we also still need to do a little bit more shading here and correct this area over here. Some of these blooms like this one, it doesn't really bother me. When I look at the painting from the distance, it just looks like, Okay, I have the sufficient info there, so I don't like to scratch the paper too much. I just do the corrections that I think are absolutely necessary. Maybe one that could be done with the Princeton Aquilet brush is this one where the color from the mouth bled a little bit too much outside. So here I can imagine doing a little bit of the correction, but even that was not so bad. So here I won, but maybe here I will do just a tiny bit of lifting of some of the pigment. Like that. I just want to continue working wet on dry now. So with my tinier brush, I already have shading mixture here. I want to now go over the eye area here. So I'm adding color. It's not overly thick. And here I'm doing kind of a background for the eyebrows because they should not be painted on a completely white paper or light paper. They need some sort of shadow underneath. Here just add a bit thicker pigment. This one will need a bit more red. So with just the tip of my smaller round brush, I try to paint. I now will use a tiny bit of bloodstone genuine because I'm going inside the eye and her eyes are pretty dark. So here I try to use thicker pigment for that makeup that she has as well and for the dot. It's probably just drawn on the face. And the lower part of the iris, I try to do just with clean water, smudge the existing pigment so that the eye gets a bit more light in it. You can even try to. This something that I don't quite like the edge I try to make more crisp and very diluted blue for the inside of this for the eyeball, basically, because that's not white. I do not perceive this as white. It's more like grayish, a bit cool tone, but definitely not white. And I feel like when I added this color, then the eye looks much more alive. Don't forget to add the shadow below as well. Here we need to add shadow. And then with clean water, go against the edge and soften it like we practice during the techniques lesson. Here I'm going to lift some of the pigment to get this a bit more light, but the shadow here should be a bit more profound. All of these tiny little area, when I need to shade them, I work with smaller brush. Yes. And I smoothen the edges of these added shadows with clean water on my brush. Here there's also a shadow and clean water again and soften. I feel that here is still not dark enough. So adding the pigment while this is basically still damp. So there's wet and wet happening on a small area. And I will want to get the textured brush. Here, again, I need to do more shadow on this side. But now I can grab the smaller textured brush, the calligraphy brush and try to do the eyebrows because this part is already dry enough. We can do that by using the shading mixture but add some blood stone in it so that it is sufficiently dark. Even more blood stone. The shading mixture plus blood stone, it should be like This is why the testing papers, they come in super handy. This one can dilute a little bit. This one could stay a little bit more crisp. And the lashes, we can do that with the tiniest round brush with the tip that we have here. Just draw them in the makeup needs to be a bit more here like that. Now it's even obvious that it is a makeup. And here as well. Just do it softly. Okay. I think that's enough for the eyes, but we can go slightly below and do the nose, finish the nose. Not much work there, but still here, the shadow, I would like to make a bit more profound and here. It's a bit bluer shadow underneath the nose that I want to be seen slightly more intensely than before. And after I paint the shadow in or draw it in, I just use the damp brush to soften the edge where it needs to be. Then here tiny bit of the orange weed, orange with red here. That area, and a bit of orange and red here as well. This area so that the shape of the nose, the form can stand out slightly bit more here in this triangular. Then there's the check here. Where I work in this area where there's quite a lot of light on the face, I try to just dilute the shading mixtures so that I don't use too dark paint it will make it very difficult later to get rid of. Now I can see the cheek, and I will dry this quickly. Probably the most difficult will be the mouth. Again, I do not want to go in too much anymore. I just will mix the blue with red, make thicker mixture, but with red prevailing slightly so that we can draw in some details. Here, it can be slightly bit darker and here in this corner, too. And clean water in this area just because that's where the light gets more. Bottom lip is more light, but we can use diluted red here to create some of the textures. You can draw them in literally. And then as the bottom lip turns away from the light, here, it gets into shadow a bit more. Clean just have water now on my brush and I'm softening the edges of the paint that I just added. Here. Adding again, some soft shadow. I feel like maybe underneath the mouth could be slightly darker. And I like the mouth. I do not need more definition. When you look up close to this what I just created, you will see very blurry edges. You would maybe even feel like it needs to be corrected into something sharper. But no, actually, when you look from a distance, then you can see that this is exactly what we need a reality, the way our eye perceives, it is slightly distorted. It's not such hard edge everywhere. We've got enough hard edges to help the eye focus in this point, but here it doesn't have to be. You just need to place the values into the correct place. Leave it like this, it's going to be fine. Let's work slightly more around the here I'm using mostly just diluted blue mixed in some orange. Here in this area, I feel like the blue gets more visible and needed even. And then clean water, just touch it slightly. Just add the shadow like this. Here as well. Me blue, actually more purple and water. And maybe quickly dry so that it doesn't have time to form blooms. Here, the shadow is slightly broken up. Maybe I would try to fix it for just a little bit. Clean watcher. Clean watcher here. Still broken up. Maybe I will add some of that red with orange slightly so that we can define the jaw line. I'm not going to fiddle with this anymore because I'm going to mess it up. Maybe one more time, just here. Okay. Now that we have the large shadow and everything, I will try to grab the cleaning brush with water on it, and I will try to sort of rub out the earring edge. This edge of this earring, it gets very shiny, beautiful light. So maybe we could do that without invasive methods like adding white. Usually that works nicely just to rub it and it should look fine. Here. Yeah, that's good enough. I feel. One more thing that was bothering me was the area around the ear because here needs a bit more contrast. We do not have it so defined. That is where I want to work a little bit more. I'm working with mixture for shading. Here, just go to add a bit more contrast. Underneath the earring as well here. Here. Maybe as one more touch up, I will try to do the eye white again and add one more layer of kind of diluted cobbled blue here to the corner. Just so that I achieve a bit more depth. And I just want that to look like actual bowl. Good. So now I will grab the textured brush, both of these, the calligraphy brushes, and let's work some hair. We don't need to do too much, but some of it needs to be slightly more defined. In the next lesson, we will finish painting hair and do some adjustments to the background as well. I will see you there. 12. (WEEK 1) - Painting hair & Final adjustments: Son, we will add depth and texture to the hair, strengthen contrast where it's needed, and make a few creative tweaks to the overall color balance. While we never want to overwork a watercolor painting, a handful of carefully chosen details can make a huge difference in the final result. Let's get started. So we will be now working the hair. I need more blood stone, actually. Here's the s for the background, but I need more in my palette as well. Now, hair gets light and dark. Even dark hair has light and dark. When you screen your eyes a little bit at reference, then you can clearly see that this entire area, it does not even contain hair strengths. You can just see this shape that's very dark. We want to paint that in some way. You can see these areas over here as well. There's almost white like rim light here. There's a mid tone. Over here is dark. There can be identified dark areas. I want to get this into my painting. But the hair itself, usually they can't compete with the amount of detail with the face. So we'll just map out and leave it like that. They're already mapped out. Here is already lighter area, dark area. Need to make some of it more profound. Even if I leave the hair like this, it should be fine. The hair on the top of the head tends to be lighter. But here just to frame the face, I want to add some parts. This really helps me to frame it nicely. Then over here, Then here. That was too much. Let's try to do a stroke that's tinier, like, thinner. When painting this, always try to find the direction of the hair and go with it. I. Here is the main dark hair strength. And there's some that need to be lighter but still visible here so that they can nicely frame the face. Here, I want to include a little more of these abstractions so that the hair doesn't get line here and line there. And there's also hair here. Here we have to fill this in. There's continuous dark area. I will try to now dry. So I no longer go much after the reference photo, but I just want to do the stylization of the portrait, the final one so that I like the portrait myself, the way that the paint flows around it. I just want that to be how I envision it aesthetically. So the reference photo helps us to get the fact right. But now the stylization helps me to get my painting to where I want it to be aesthetically. I'm going to maybe do some light details with the scalpel, but then I will try to add some more of the darkness so that the hair and the silhouette pops a bit more. That's the plan for now. But I did forget to add here that harder detail, this detail of the earring here and maybe the earring could be orange slightly that maybe I could add a bit of rougher orange texture there so that it pops more. This is just very thick paint for final details. And now the scalpel. Here, just a tiny bit of the floating hairs. I want to scratch them off. Not a lot, but and maybe the highlight here. Always such a variable sound. I kind of got used to it already. But lovely effect. So now only the final stylization and I just need to figure out the way I want this portrait to look. I'd just like to add more of the dark textured background, add some areas and do the negative painting technique that we talked about. So here I don't want to do more. I like these compositions where there's some room and space and air above the head. But if I want some of the hair to pop a little bit more like here, and maybe this shoulder pop slightly bit more, I do need to add some dark background here. But I also don't want to edit everywhere because this color is beautiful here and here. This is also negative painting technique makes the chin pop a bit more. I don't want to paint over this effect. So adding this hopefully with care. Not too much. And maybe a bit more of the blue Just to emphasize the silhouette of the face. Does it make it pop more? Hopefully, it does here and also sort of here. But this part of the hair, I do want to do the same here. So black background, the granulating part here, adding contrast here and maybe here losing some of these colors in order to make the hair pop and incorporate this into the hair. I like even to use this ldstone genuine or the granulating color to get the effect of ink, like the aesthetics of ink brings contrast and that graphic excitement, I guess, into the traditional painting. Sometimes I use it straight from the tube so that it's dark, creamy and really rich. Okay. Okay. I will remove these splatters, like extra water from them. And we'll try to dry and we'll see what that looks like. Actually, here is a little bit. I don't know. This dark, it isn't 100% dark. It doesn't cover everything. This just an experiment. Let's try to see if that worked. So here after drying, this looked a little bit overworked. Therefore, I tried to lift some of the pigment and splatter more red because orange doesn't really cover anything. It's a transparent pigment, more opaque permanent red will do a better job. Hopefully, when this dries, it will look less stressed. I mean, this area, and this red adds it a bit more pop, and it also frames the painting from both sides. Here is the final piece. I will now sign it. That is this week's portrait is finally done. This week, it was a lot of setting up, a lot of exercises, a lot of practice. Hopefully the next week and the following weeks will be a bit easier for everybody and also quicker. That is the real advantage and real charm of all of the challenges is that the more you are into the challenge, the quicker your process gets, the less it takes you to set up your table. Everything is a bit more clear. This is what I want for all of us, myself and you to have as much fun as possible and to also progress in a way that doesn't feel like pressure, but it feels like we're working towards something. You can leave a painting like this. I am slightly tempted. Do just one stylization, which I like that the pencils, they can be erased. So maybe just do this with the silhouette and leave it like this. Emphasize this highlight slightly. Very little tiny little bit of pencil. And let's see what it looks like compared to our sketch. So here is the original vision that is very rough, and this is the final execution. I like the colors. The portrait, I think went quite well. Hopefully yours as well. For the next four weeks, I would love to see your projects. You can upload the project into the project and resources section of this class. You can add the first painting there and you can go back next week, edit the project. Below the first photo, you can add more photos. I would absolutely love to see your sketches as well as your final work right into your project. What was your experience? How long did it take you? I think the other students that take the class along with you would love to see what you also created. And that's just what I love about Skillshare. And I absolutely feel like that's a very helpful tool to have at your disposal, so please use it. Also allows me to give you feedback, and I will see you in the next lesson next week, and we will tackle different portrait. We will add one more color. It's going to be great. So I will see you in the next lesson very shortly. With that, our week one portrait is complete. I'm so excited for the next four weeks. Each one will be a new phase, new practice, and another step forward. Come back next Sunday and we will paint the next portrait together from sketch to finish. And little by little, this weekly habit adds up in a big way. I will see you next week. 13. (WEEK 2) - Creating a Watercolor Sketch / Thumbnail: To week two of our five week Watercolor Portrait Challenge. We will start this week with a warm up in the sketchbook and we'll create a quick thumbnail of our second painting. Let's get started. Welcome everyone in the Week two demo of the five week Portrait Challenge, reference photo that we are going to tackle this week, first in our sketchbook and then create a final drawing and painting. I think it's going to have one advantage and one disadvantage. The advantage is that we do not have so many details there, there are glasses. So we'll paint something a bit more fun, but not too many tiny little details that you need to get exactly right. The disadvantage is the angle of the face which might make the face a bit more challenging to draw. And there's going to be lots of light and shadow. This is strong lighting in the photographs. We don't have to paint as much to get the effect that's going to be beautiful and shiny. I'm excited to paint with this one with you. Lots of hair. And we also will introduce one more color into our palette this week. I would now start in this lesson with creating a sketch. This is where I left off last week. Maybe this tiny piece of my sketchbook will be enough to create a sketch, just a tiny one just to see if this one will work out and test some colors. For drawing this, again, I will be looking for lines that are straight. So the top of the head, then here, this part of the face, I I could draw a straight line here again, another straight line here for the draw line. And this line, since we are looking at the portrait below from this side, the face is going to be shorter. Normally, the face would be longer, but since the chin is lifted towards the camera, this distance is going to be shorter. And so this one will appear almost flat here. That will also kind of put nose in perspective. So the nose will be here and will be very short. Will appear shorter. Eyes will sit over here. You can also already put the glasses in Just sketch this lightly, and then here is going to be the mouth, top lip, bottom lip, corners of the mouth to create some sort of expression. The expression will be harder to get. There's the nose and then, this is really nice. Then there are shadows here. Shape of the shadow is also important. Then please notice here the ear earring. There's a bit of a silhouette of the eye suggested here, but mostly it's the frame of the glasses. And then there's going to be the hair. I just very, very lightly and just to get the hang off that my friend's photo? Here's the shadow underneath the mouth and then here's another shadow. Lots of shadows here on the cheek. And then here the hair will fall like this. The eraser, they'll try to maybe make it slightly more precise so at least get some level of being true to the actual reference. This is incorrect. It's going to be harder to draw. Here it is going to be shadow earing. This might be even slightly shorter. But for me, this sketches just what I need is quite enough. Now we can try to test our colors in order to see if they will work on a page. There's the glass is still a little bit weird here. That's fine. Remember the four colors that we used last week. So we are adding one more to the original four. We had orange, red, we had blue, and we had the blood stone genuine, and to these four, we will add a fifth color, and it's going to be permanent carmine. I'm going to add it here. All of the combinations from last week, they still apply, but we'll have some new ones. We'll probably go over the mixing again. So we'll have the original skin tone from red and orange. That's going to be here. This portrait will have more orange shining through, and we will use orange as a yellow base for the glasses. That's what we are going to use a lot. We can also use subtle greens from orange and blue. So orange and blue here. We'll create subtle greens that we can use for the background parts of the face. In some areas, the green will come in handy. And we will have carmine, which is the new color. I'm going to add it here, and it will be very suitable in a diluted form for the shirt, as well as mixed. So this is the diluted form. It will give us beautiful magenta or purple color. And when we add blue cobalt in it, it will create gorgeous purples. Look at this. So that will come in handy here. When the purple shard is in the shadow, it gets a bit more purple has the influence of the cobbled blue. For the background, we will use cobalt blue. For darkening, again, we will use the blood stone genuine, and that's the entire palette that we will use throughout this second demo. Let me very, very quickly try to see if this works. So I'm adding very, very light diluted skin tone first to almost the entire skin, but some parts of the skin, they need to stay in light. Here as the light shines on the face. Let's just add a little bit of the pigment. I'm almost tempted to leave out hard edges around these light areas. There's going to be a lot of them. But then we can use diluted carmine, which I would like to use for her lips lot here. Some will also go here to paint her cheek. Here, definitely we need more clear red. In different areas what's gonna be cute. Now, the purple, we can even shade with the purple. We can use the red and cobbled bloom. To create purple, we can add a bit more of the magenta. We'll see. Here. I just want to see if this is going to work. For shading just blue and red like before, a thicker paint for the shadows that get a bit darker. Here also this part of the face. This part of the glasses. I'm just quickly assigning the color. So the inner part of the glasses, it looks to me like blue with the blood stone, but also you can add magenta in it, and that's going to be this color. It's like, dark, reddish purple. And then let's do with the orange, let's do the glass frames. Also with a little bit of green. Now, the hair. So for the hair is going to be something similar to skin tone, actually. But you can add a bit more carmine in them and see if this works. They have a pinkish undertone. And I see more orange in that color as well. And here on this side of the face, they have a little bit more purple is what I see. Here, I guess it's supposed to be white or lighter. This is very light but here Since I have the darker color on the brush, I just try to go in and create these darker spots in the hair wherever I see. And we can also go in and do the pink shirt. Lighter, lighter, that's going to be a lot of water. The shirt is going to be light. But on the other side is going to be more purple here. We get the shadows a bit more red. There's the line and here's another fold. And now we can go in with the blue and do the background. So I just wanted strong, beautiful blue for the background that lets her hair shine, rich, nice, lovely. A lot of blue will be present on this side of the portrait. Still, I did not quite get the cheeks there to be bon. No. Now I will dry. And we'll see. So I do not quite like the blue because I would like for it to be a bit greener. So maybe if we mix the blue with shiny bit of the orange just to make it and, of course, dilute it, then that would make the background color a little bit more like this, which I think would go better with the carmine color. I would like that more as this combination of the pure cobalt. Of course, the orange makes the blue slightly duller, but it would still work. That would be better. So in the final piece, I will use this. But maybe just let's add a few more details to this. You're just a bit more prominent Shadow. Okay. I will for sure, put a bit more of the darkness into the background because I like to do the darker backgrounds, of course, you can do whatever you like. This is your sketchbook. When you're creating the sketch, experiment, see what it looks like, see what would you like to add. The sketchbook gives you room to see what options would work. I don't have to get the shadows exactly right here. Maybe it's time to use a little bit of this pencil to see what it would look like if we addit some highlights, some hair strengths. There's going to be a lot of these because the hair is floating against the light. A few of these will reveal a different deeper look on how this final outcome, what would it look like? There's a tiny bit of light inside the glasses as well. And here. I find the pencil very helpful for sketchbook, sometimes even for final work. And it's softer, it's not so harsh, like when you add too much white paint. Good. That's gonna be nightmare to sketch. I think this sketch is going to be a really fun one when we go through the initial sketching process and make it right through the techniques that I've been showing you in the previous them as well, then this one can be one of the most fun portraits in this series. In the next lesson, we will draw this portrait together on a watercolor paper. I will meet you there. Ph. 14. (WEEK 2) - Drawing a Portrait: Lesson, we will draw this portrait slowly and step by step, correcting mistakes as we go. Let's get started. The drawing of this, I do expect it to be slightly harder, but let's try to see if that could work. I'm trying to figure out if I'm okay with the face being the same size, like here, or do I need to make it slightly larger? I might make it larger a little bit. I'll sketch very lightly, but I'll try to identify where the top of the head is again, like before and the bottom. This is very important. So is going to be the chin, and this is of the head. Basically, this is the hairline, so I need to mark that there's going to be some hairstyle here. And then I try to do the center line here to mark where the center of the face is. Did I make it larger? I don't know. Not really all that much. Well, okay, then that helps me at least measure. So from hairline to where the glasses are here divided, there's going to be the mark. Now the length of the nose would be something like this. And the nose, you can also measure the length of the nose. Here and here, and then there's mouth. So from bottom of the nose to the bottom of the lips is here. There's going to be the center line. Maybe let's see what lines up with what? Again, like before. For now, it's just roughly. Let's map it out. Now the glasses. Let's try to figure out. This is the nose. So here and here, there's going to be this edge of the frame of the glass frame. And we can maybe measure the entire length of the glass. S. And I will try to make the circle. These glasses, they can be tricky. I will try to make it nice and round. Maybe like that. Here on the other side, there is not much of a distortion between one side of the face and the other, but there's slight. So when you look at a person from the front and you draw the central line, usually, one side is just as wide as the other side. Here it is not completely 50 50. Here is maybe 55 to 45, and that is because we are looking slightly from this side at the person. Have to keep this in mind because when I draw the center line to her lips, for example, then I can notice that this part of the mouth is slightly longer than this part of the mouth. Like I said, 55 to 45. It's not a huge difference, but to be correct in drawing this angle of the face, we have to just notice this. I notice the same when it comes to the nose. There's slightly more of this side of the nose like here, and same goes for glasses. There's a little bit more here than here, even though that part is covered. Okay, I will also map the eye that's in here. But only the shape so I can see this line and this line maybe tiny bit of the reflection. That's all that I can see. Okay, the tricky part will be the silhouette of the face. So I will try to see what straight lines can I find to make this look at least a bit right. And here. Now, this is too wide. So how wide is the face? And I've picked a difficult angle straight on Week two, but we will have no more weird angles, I promise. But this one will be fun to paint at least once we manage to draw this. I do think the nose is correct, but for now, the lips might not be. I want to try and correct. So here will be this cheek. Here. On. She still is not smiling. Why isn't she smiling? I think it has something to do with these corners that they need to have a specific shape in order for her to smile. You know, that's very difficult to get. I want to sketch the rest of the figure, basically. But before we can do corrections and try to figure out what's wrong, we have to have everything placed and positioned. Now, this is too wide. I need to do a bit surging. And I still feel like the mouth is a little bit too low. Yes, it is low. Is the nose low as well? Yep, it's to go higher. At least I found something finally. This is too low as well. So again, corrections. Here's one nostril like that. Then here is the shadow. The top lip needs to be finished here. The length of the entire lips is the tops. So maybe that's why it wasn't working out before. This is lining up with what? With this. Now that at least looks like the correct angle. Yeah, it looks slightly better. We do the checks here. Just these tiny little dots in the cheeks. Yeah, she's at least correct angle now and smiling tiny bit. And here's also something that lifts. This is the shadow the shadow actual elites here. It's not correct yet, but we're getting somewhere. Gosh, this is hard. So when you have a difficult demo to draw like this one, maybe take more breaks just to give your eyes a little bit of rest and then see if you can identify a little better where the problem is. That's what I will have to do soon. And also, this frame needs to be thinner. Here, maybe not, but the rest is here at the bottom, it gets thinner. And this one as well. I don't know. I feel like I've jumped from the phase where I try to just block in everything to straight to the phase where I refine, to find out whether the sketch is at least close, what I'm trying to achieve. Yeah, I'm getting closer, hopefully. This is going to be in shadow, so that kind of makes me see the face a bit differently when it's all white and then here also. I think my sketch that we did previously in the sketch was a little bit had the forehead, it was slightly too large. From this angle, we just see a lot more of the chin area and less of the forehead in general. Almost thought I'm going to give up on this demo. It's not all that bad. It's gonna be really great looking when we play around with colors. So I think it's worth it if we take our time during the drawing process. So I need to take a break at this point. I can't see. I just can't no longer can identify what's wrong with the drawing. I can still maybe just not. Yep, that was too far. So I'm going to take a break and then I will throw it on the ground just to be able to see if that's correct. Where the remaining mistakes are. I'm just going to take my time to make the sketch as much right as I can, because I know that this extra time that you put in your schedule always reflects on the quality of the fine painting. So you don't even have to do the sketch and the final painting at the same day. I would even recommend to spend a day with your sketch just sketching the morning correct in the evening and take another look at it the next day and then paint. Sometimes it's definitely the rest throughout the night, it helps me to realize the proportional problems that did not occur to me previously. And here is there's how the This is the part of the frame. This goes behind the ear. This is the ear. Break for me. I'm going to now try to fix this problem that I found and see if that helps. These are lines construction lines that were supposed to be helpful. So I guess that the glasses will end here. And the frame of the glass should end here. Now, the precision eraser comes in super handy. Generally, I don't mind the pencil underneath the painting, but in areas that were supposed to be clean and almost white, I do not want too many unnecessary pencil lines. That should be better. Gosh, I'm terrible at this like technical drawing where you need to draw something that's 100% set in stone also comes for architecture. Just my lines get so wobbly. All right. Good. So I think that gets a little better. I'll try to clean up. I smudge the drawing way too much, and these hairs will have to just do with the brush because they get messy. There's no need and no point to draw this exactly like one hair string at a time. This could be a bit more precise. This is where the hair will end and hair is going to be that line. I don't know. You probably see all my mistakes much better than I do, but never mind. I think I'm ready to do a painting and we'll see. Doesn't have to be perfect. When it has to be perfect, it's going to be a different class. It's going to be a create a portrait for your mother in law class. But this is not that class. I am ready to go paint, but before that, let's do a very, very quick color mixing exercise. In the next lesson, we will do a quick color mixing exercise and invite a new color into our palette. I will see you there. 15. (WEEK 2) - 5 color palette - Mixing Exercise: Lesson, we will incorporate the new color and test mixes for our new five color palette. Let's get started. Okay. Just to recap, it's better to do this warm up twice than not remembering what the mixes look like or being confused with mixes during the painting process. So in order to really get the best out of this palette, let's try to mix some colors. So my palette gets a little bit dirty. So basic colors orange, red, I will herald this for you every single week. It's good to do this before painting because you also prepare full of paint for painting that's going to have minute and then try the skin tone. This is a good skin tone. I can dilute even a bit more to get the color that is slightly lighter. Now we have the new color. We have the permanent Alizarin crimson. We can actually also incorporate that one into the skin tone, dilute, look that's going to beautifully match the skin that she has here. To make the skin tone a little bit more pinkish, make it pop. In this case, it's going to be lovely. We will also use a lot of diluted carmine. I will use it for the lips, even for the shirt, diluted form like this. I think even for the hair, which has this pinkish kind of shade, a gorgeous mixture that is not really all that present on the reference photo, but we can use for stylization is when you mix it with blood stone genuine. I have this here. When I mix the two, then I will get really lovely. This granulating purple mixture, you're gonna love it. I think this is great to have a granulating paint in your palette, not just smooth pigments because they add so much texture and you can just create your own granular or du achromatic combinations by combining pigments that show some granulation like this one, the bloodstone genuine or if you have Mars black as an alternative, that's going to give you a similar effect and a smooth color like carmine here. When they combine, as the color dries, the pigment falls apart. The smooth pigment stay smooth, but the granular pigment falls into the wells of the paper and it creates this beautiful duochromatic effect. That's something that we could maybe use. They do have the coupled blue here as well, and you know that the coupled blue in this form, I did not want to use for the background because I want to mix it slightly with a little bit of orange and make it look tiny bit more turquoise. I need to squeeze new paints to my palette. Shiny bit of this one. With the cobalt. Then it makes it a bit more turquoise. Dilute it. That's going to be nice. I would also love to see what it looks like with the blood stone. I'm thinking about the stylization of the portrait, but main color to stylize will still be the carmine in contrast with the cobbled blue greenified. This mess is how you test colors helps me to figure it out. Anyway, for shadows, we always use the red combined with the blue mixed together. This is going to be for the shadows. The mixture will be diluted or it can be thick like this. You can also do that, and that same mixture can go inside these glasses, maybe with some addition of the blood stone to make it even darker in some areas. As you can see, this is very close to the color of the reference photo. Great. Now that we have tested our colors, make sure that you place them in your palette. When you have your setup ready, we can start painting. In the next lesson, we will begin the painting process. I'm excited and I will see you there. 16. (WEEK 2) - First Layer & Background: This lesson, we will begin the painting process by applying watercolor to first layer. We will paint both skin and the background while everything is wet, Let's get started. So in this lesson, I would like to paint the portrait slowly layer by layer, starting with skin tones. The first thing that we can do together is to map out all of these areas that will stay white. There are parts that will be in shadow. Most of the light parts we just leave white, but maybe here is one of the highlights that is pretty prominent on the nose as well here. And then on this side, basically just this entire thing. I'm not even going to map out because that's a large portion. And on the chin here, there are small highlights here on the lips. And with this, we can start painting. During the previous lesson, I already prepared the skin tone, mixing slight bit of permanent carmine into the skin tone to make it more rougi for this particular portrait. Not every portrait is the same, and so I try to alternate the skin base for every single portrait that I paint unless I want to make it super comprehensive and don't want to change colors for some reason. Here is the basket, and we'll create a tilt. And having everything like this, we can start. We'll start with laying down the skin tone here around the glasses, and then with clean water, adding clean water here. But it would be great if the skin tone did not get stuck here. But he way of descending. I'm creating a passage here. It won't measure all that much here as well, and maybe here as well. Here we can go through the glasses. Here, the glass frame is not too dark. We basically can go like this. Here I try to add more carmine for the lip area, clean water, also. A lot of clean water in this area. But then this side of the face needs a bit more paint color. Um. Normally I would even try to add cobalt in the skin tone. But here, everything is so warm sunshine is on her face, so I don't even see hints of cool color much. Maybe just very, very slightly. We can mix it in here. And also, I prefer purple and not clean blue. Let's now dilute the permanent carmine enough so that we can paint the shirt. I'm also here using purple mixing cobalt blue with permanent carmine. I'm here using more carmine and maybe even a hint of red. This is all just clean water, and maybe let's do some splders Okay. A little bit of hair. Mixing warm colors together. Orange, carmen, whatever's on my palette, not too much pigment on the brush, and place the color where you can see that there's a little bit of color. There's a lot of hair here that are almost white. So I'm placing mainly color to the areas here that contain a bit more color that you can see with your eyes and really being careful with the pigment because we can lose the lightness very, very quickly. The brush for some hair strings. I'm trying to observe as my color here and the paint and the water as it dries. When it's not too wet, maybe I could go in with the spatula and remove some of this pigment, but when it's too wet, then it would just be darker. You can use spatula or even your finger to get some of that highlight. But you can't have completely white surface. Let's try this. See it's not working yet. Here, maybe it will. Not quite, makes it darker. It's okay if you try. This works better with paint that's thicker than with the first layer. Maybe now it's also time to grab the smaller brush, and since this is still wet, do some folds of the clothes. Here, maybe I want to do that shadow. And here, I want to kind of get a little bit of blood stone with carmine together, the darker one and do this detail. I don't know why. We don't have to rush it. Want it maybe smudge parts of it while it's still wet. It is no longer wet, though. Never mind. You still have to do the background. I told you it's gonna be fun to paint. Now, further background, cobbled and bloom with the hinge of that orange, just to dull it slightly. And I don't know, experiment. And as part of the background, always is, for me, is blood stone genuine, so I don't want to use it too much. I want to combine maybe with a bit of blood stone. No. I just play with colors. No system to my work whatsoever when it comes to backgrounds. I guess you can't be afraid to mess your painting because that happens. It's just it might not work. That's why I took the photo of the sketch in case I need to do it again. And sometimes I have to. But if it works, then it's beautiful and it's just like watercolor is supposed to be spontaneous effects. Okay. Now, I will let this dry, but before it dries completely, I will try to see if I can wait for a stage where it's semi wet and then sprinkle some clean water into the wet wash. But I can't do it too soon. Right now. Then I dry everything, and, you know, that we can basically adjust the background even slightly later. It's gonna be fine. The only thing that I kind of lost is this light over here. So maybe I could try to get some of the paint out here. But I did want to connect the background with this wave across her body, so I do not regret that. Okay. So letting this dry and sprinkling just tiny bits of water. I don't know, 3 minutes. And this you need to do when it lays flat. Now I will let this dry. In the next lesson, we will start applying shadows to the face. I will meet you there. 17. (WEEK 2) - Painting Shadows: Last time, we will do shading around the face, color the glasses, and do a lot of necessary work on this portrait. Let's begin. Now, my first layer has dried, and since I left it flat on a table with some excess water lying around here in pools, you can see these beautiful splatters formed. So when you understand how the splatters for and you can use them to your advantage. Make sure that you don't have them in your flat washes. For example, when you paint your face, you need to do tilts to avoid them. But for backgrounds, they're pretty beautiful. Sometimes I like to do them on purpose like this. Some of them we might cover up with a second layer of the background that I might apply in some areas. But yeah, these expressive elements are beautiful for the background. I also noticed this morning, there was a problem that this part of the face was slightly wider, and so I make an adjustment moved line slightly closer so that it's not so wide. The thing with watercolor and with water in general, when you go over your sketch with water, even clean water, it will fixate the sketch. You will no longer be able to erase it or not erase it completely. Some of it, I can erase, but not as much. The line will stay there. However, this is not so difficult to correct. If I was to make the face wider, that would be a problem. The line would be there. But to make it shorter, the excess line, we can just cover it up with some darker paint. So I just wanted to let you know that this was an adjustment that I found was a problem, and these kind of corrections are possible. I'm always trying to think about what would make this portrait be more successful. But it's the tiny little things. I think we have to learn to be observant, but not to torture ourselves for mistakes and take our time, but not too much time. The perfectionism isn't really getting most of us anywhere because done is better than having it perfect. The way I think about this is I try my best to observe and correct the mistakes that are obvious to me, but I do not torture myself for the mistakes that I do not notice and try to focus on finishing the portrait rather than having it all perfect. That would be the balance that we are trying to find with all of these demos that we do. And now I want to start working on the face just like before, and I don't think the previous portrait that we did, we worked the largest facial shadows wet and wet, and that was very helpful for us because there was a lot of diffused, large shadows. That would be difficult to do or wet on dry. However, this portrait is a different situation. There is some shadows that I want to apply that will be diffused or maybe just the skin tone. But most of the shadows in this face, this one and this one, and also this one, they're not large, they're small. Most of them have sharp edges because they are cast shadows or drop shadows. We'll do better if we do them wet on dry. I will not pre wet anything, and I will just work wet on dry. So let's start shading the face, and let's actually prepare the mixture for shading. I will wet my paints This is kind of dirty. I have to clean up my orange. The orange is problematic to keep completely fresh and not dirtied by other paints, but I do not stress about it all that much. You never can actually get watercolor being clean because they mingle. That's the first thing. And the second thing in life, the areas that you are painting are not clean. Like, the light reflects from every surface. So she's wearing this pink shirt. So the pink will be present here in her skin tone, in her hair, the pink is everywhere. And also the blue from the background will project it to the shirt, to the face in some areas, even though you don't really see it, but it's going to be there. I do not really get how people try to preserve and keep all of the parts of their palette 100% clean when in real life, the colors mingle. And if you separate the areas too much from each other and you only keep one color in the background, one color in the skin, and the other color on the shirt, then your painting is not connected. It feels very artificial. That's what I want to say, and I will now mix the paint. Just me cleaning the palette at this point. We want to have premixed skin tone. I will use it in some parts of the face, and here I want blue with red to use for shading blue and red. Let's test if the shading mixture can work, include a little bit of red in it for these areas, but more or less that will work color wise. And here in this area, I already can see that there's more blue, so the shadow will be this color. And I think it matches observe your reference before touching the painting with the brush. Observe it, take your time. Just look at the shadow. Some shadows are much warmer. This shadow looks like almost completely red to me. This shadow, the drop shadows, they get more cool. You can see more of that cool color impact in there. But on the edge, look at this. This edge is red. The other edge is red as well. And here, this shadow is not a drop shadow. The shadow on the nose form like the nose turning away from the light, and therefore it will be more red. And for painting shadows, we will again use tilt very, very first thing. I want to make sure that this cheek looks round like a ball. Here it has highlights and here I will try to insert or paint in a bit more of that skin tone so that it looks like it's round, basically. I will do that with the larger brush, and this is light skin tone, just very diluted. I will apply it here all the way here. And with clean them brush, we practice this diffusion of the edges technique before. Will lightly touch from the bottom part. That is it. That is how you do it. Don't touch it anymore, maybe a little bit. And here as well. Adding that color, paint. It will be even here, more prominent. And then clean them brush diffusion diffusion. This needs to be clean water. And here as well. I want to do it on the forehead as well, here and here. This part of the nose containing more skin tone, essentially. These are not the harsh drop shadows yet. I forgot to diffuse the edge on the top of the nose here, clean brush. And I will dry this. I will work with the smaller round brush is my number five, Windsor Newton. And I will mix the shading mixture, one that's more red for these shadows. This one here is more red, but then we will add more blue. Best if you have on your palette pre mixed the bluer version and the redder versions. Here is the redder one, and here is the one with more blues. I have a bluer one and we'll start with the redder one and always have tissue in your other hand so that you can quickly save areas if needed. Here's the bluer end, slightly bluer end, and I am going to hear touch with skin tone or clear water. 18. (WEEK 2) - Painting Shadows PART II: So now I feel that I need a mixture that's slightly thicker. And because after drying it does not have quite the intensity that I was going for, and I will apply one more layer very carefully. And only a part of the area that we did in the previous layer. Hopefully, now when it dries, that it stays the way I need it. Now, let's do this very, very tiny small shadows. And I will also have to diffuse this I see a lot of red in that part. And here. Now, the more difficult shadow will be here on this side, but you just need to draw it with your brush. Quite I will use a thicker mixture also. Like that. Here it needs to be darker and more blue. Here we'll connect with more red. I try to connect it to this area. And clean water or you can use a basic skin tone to connect this as well. So not every time you have to have the shading color, go to clean water. Sometimes you can go through skin tone to water. There's going to be twigs around the nose, but later. I just want to map out the largest shadows first. Don't worry. The portrait will look good once we have everything placed. Like, let's address the glass area. You can do the shading mixture, and blue, but I will try to add a little bit of the blood stone as well for the darker parts for those that are basically dark cast. Okay. Let's fill this with the color. But here, the rest of this shape is just mostly red, maybe red with a bit of orange. So should go like this. And here also. Now, while this is wet, quickly mix color that's more creamy and thick blue with a bit of red together, but also add a bit of blood stone so that is really dark and thick like this. We have to draw them wet in wet so that they kind of diffuse Thick pigment is just as important to be used in watercolor at times like the diluted one like this. I slight bits of red. And now the other glass. That one we have to be careful because we have floating her there, but I will show you how to make this, how to solve this dilemma. I want basically to draw part of this glass maybe thickly. While the paint is still wet, you can use Spetula and do this to even have some of the floating hairs going through this part of the glass. I will just draw the hair suggestion goes like this. I'm missing parts of this red and orange in the other glass as well, just a little bit just to balance it out. Now I can dry this and we can keep on working and do the mouse. We will be using diluted permanent carmine. Here. I'm trying to find areas that contain more color and do not fill areas that look white to me. Like these areas fill and look like they have most of the color here. This corner, you will have to mix in some of the blue or purple here as well. Here in this corner slightly bit. So the rest, you can just use clean water to diffuse these marks slightly. Leave it like this. Okay. Now the bottom leap here is almost completely white. But then in this area, again, we have more car mines. Here I see a bit more red in this area, a bit more clear red. Now I discovered a bit more clear red here as well, which means I'm using the permanent red. And towards the bottom lip, again, you can diffuse the edge with clean water or with carmine with a bit of blue again here. But this is an area that should remain more or less unpainted or just painting with very clear colors so that the lips are not too strong. They're basically light. And here again, we have purple. Stronger purple color here. And very dark in this corner. Now, the shadows around the mouth. Shading mixture more diluted, but there's a shadow here this one with diffused edges, and there is a shadow here. That runs like this towards basically the bottom here of the face. But here we need to diffuse the edge, and you need to work quickly because it dries very fast. And clear water here. And a little bit stronger color here. And here, stronger bluer, but return to the original mixture with more red here in the middle. See so that we can see the form a little better. This color is not so strong, while it's wet, I'm trying to add a bit more pigment here, but also see the diffused around the neck here. If we can, not sure if we will be able to, but we can also try to No, it's too wet. We'll have to do the removing of the pigment later probably with scalpel. And the face is starting to look a bit more three D. I do miss a shadow here on this cheek that will be a bit more red, a little bit more diffused. Here. This dramatic light, it helps a lot to the watercolor portrait. If you can, when you're starting out, paint more reference photos that contain dramatic light and strong cast shadows. They're easier, but also you learn so much and you will give your portraits that form. People avoid it, but they really are easier. The shadows are always red and blue, red and blue, look for W's more red and where's more blue. This is more like just the touch ups. Where I feel that the face is too flat, I try to imply the form a bit more like here again. This is just because watercolor is transparent and it's very hard to tell how much it fades when it dries. So I only can tell once it dries, the pigment that I placed before was sufficient or if I need to add some more, but it's not a problem to add even 20 or ten or three even of these transparent layers. If you do it with brush that's gentle enough to ward the color paper. That's another reason why I like sable brushes because synthetic brushes, they scratch the paper always a little bit, so you need to do more layers, but they also while laying the wash, they can lift some of the previously laid out pigment. That's one reason why you can't really use these brushes for cleaning your sketch. Most of the time, they don't lift anything, but that's the point to layer more color on top of the previous one. Now want to do a little bit work around the nostrils. And these details we could do them later even while I'm on it and have these mixes on my palette, I try to do everything I can with them. Okay. A little bit of red here. And just diffuse. I will dry soon, but I forgot. Here is another corner that needs slightly more definition, and there's this drop shadow from this part of the glasses, and it usually is more red here in the middle and more blue in the corners. That helps to emphasize how the form is turning. I might do a shading master class. Maybe not this year. We'll see. In the next lesson, we will finish the painting process. I will meet you there. 19. (WEEK 2 ) - Painting Hair & Final Adjustments: Lesson, we will conclude the painting process for week two with adding more details, painting hair, and applying all the remaining adjustments to this piece. Let's go. Let's continue. I would like to maybe do the hair. Oh, I forgot about the ear though. We'll have to do some shading here. That also, I think is very suitable for this hair layer. Hair is quite chaotic, but still you can look at the reference photo I kind of squint your eyes a little bit, and then you can see that here we have very dark shadow, almost black, reddish black, that is the same color as we can see here, going towards red and orange. So we'll have to preserve this gradient in a photo. Then we have it here. We have the dark area here. We have it here, definitely some of these areas, and then we have mid tone areas. When you see this particular hair strand going all around the face, in some areas, it will be nearly white like in other areas where it falls slightly into shadow, but it's not in shadow is just a mid tone. This is what it looks like. Probably we'll mix orange with a bit of the carmine. And then in other areas like here, the mid tone can be almost blue or purple. Here on the top on the hair, you can also see that here is mid tone, but these areas will be near light. On the other side, there's a lot of light, but there's mid tone here in this area. So mid tone here. We'll use light, mid tone and dark to create the illusion of form a combination of this brush and the two brushes for the hair, the calligraphy brushes. So let's get started. We'll start probably with the ear. There's a mixing skin tone, and I can give you the light color first, and then the shading mixture with red prevailing. That's what I see on the reference that the shadow appears redder to me here. And now here the dark shadow on this side, this will be the moment where we will make the face look a little bit less wide and cover up the second line that I've had here. And I'm starting with quite dark pigment and adding more diluted redder pigment, kind of leaving painting negatively this earring and adding a bit more cinge. This entire area will be redder with some orange, maybe with a bit of carmine even here. And maybe starting to work with the calligraphy brush would be best. I'll start with larger one, and what I'm mixing here is just a mixture of orange with the carmine very diluted so that we get color like this, but less water on the brush so that we get the texture. And here we have to sort of incorporate that wash we painted into brush stroke. Oh, yes, and here. Best to do it while this previous one is still wet. I like to paint the hair very loosely, like, to make it not such a big deal, but rather only focus on the most essential brush strokes here a bit more red on my brush and adding more blue, and the mixture gets thicker and darker as I approach this area. Three and some tone is missing around this part of the glass frame here. Not too many brush strokes. And there are a few areas here. With more blue in the mixture, I just paint. These don't even make sense to you because they're such abstract shapes. I'm just looking for them when I look at reference and try to just roughly paint what I see there. Here. You know, I just went over that shadow lightly to incorporate this darker part into what I had painted there. Down here, the hair is almost purple. It appears very light. We don't have to paint everything. I think that if somebody looks at the portrait right now, I do not have nearly as many areas as appear here on the reference, I just have a few. The most important ones, the darkest ones, the ones that create contrast, and yet there's full information for the viewer. And sometimes with watercolor, it's best when you stop there. I still don't tend to add more than is necessary, but I'm learning to discipline myself. I still feel the need to work a little bit here and let some of these textures will be great if I mess it up so that I can teach you how not to do it. But essentially, here I felt the need to add a bit more of this so that this area is not such in one tone. But other than that, I don't think we need more than this in the portrait. I also like to incorporate the background into the hair slightly. And for that, I will need to add slight bit of the blood stone, and I want to mix it into the carmine and the color that I used for the hair. And here, for example, the background has one line here that creates the silhouette of the hair. I want to break that one line and just connect it with the hair strings. So I do have to work a little bit with the background color. And then I want to use the method of diffusing the edge to incorporate that ddt paint into the background so that I don't mess up this. I will have to use softer brush because my texture brushes, it has quite sturdy bristles and could mess it up. But for diffused edges, the sable brushes are the best. And I would like to do that on the aracse as well. I didn't card mine here with a little bit of blue because previously I had purple there grabbing smaller textured brush. Okay. Now I'll try to dry everything so that I can see where we're at with this portrait. Alright. So this portrait needs just a few touch ups and we have to leave it. The exact shade of the shadows is not exactly the same, like on the photograph, but that's not what we're going for. Do not add layers. Only add more layers if you feel like it's less than 70% accurate. But I think this is 70 plus more percent accurate, and I'm not going to touch it because I will destroy the fresh watercolor like these brush strokes in the hair. Some areas are a little bit messy. Never mind. We're not learning how to be a world class watercolor painter right now. We'll get to that later, though. When I figure it out, I will let you know. We are going to add some finishing touches to make this portrait presentable. I was thinking about the shirt, but actually, to me, looks so good that I don't need to make it more realistic. If I did not have such beautiful bloom, here probably would add a bit more of these strokes to define the shirt a bit more, but I will just leave it like this because the focus of the entire painting is in the face. I kind of like this. To me, the viewer does not mean to explain that that's a shirt, that there's a fold. I think that's pretty clear. It is the overall emotion, what's more important. And what we don't have yet painted is the frame of the glass. Some small tweaks will to remove some of the pigment and clean it in some areas. This color what I noticed and it's bugging me. I'm going to add a little bit more of the paint here either with a diffused carmine or diffused red, make this edge so that it looks around it in this part. And then also maybe here, there's these tiny bits that you can add to define the fabric. It's absolutely unnecessary to do more. And I noticed a small shadow here, also something that is the drop shadow that goes from the glasses or from the hair. Here and the glasses. We need to use the orange. You can dilute it and color the glasses, there's just a few areas that I see still as white. I'll make them Rugi In some areas like here, I will add more the carmine. I mean, dilute Rugi color. And here as well. So leave out some of these highlights. Here, for example, is a very prominent highlight. And then also with thicker paint, I just feel like there are areas that are slightly darker, here and here. Here, there is a shadow. Just look at the frame on the reference photo, try to map out all of these tonal values that you see there. Good. Maybe here a little bit more. Oh, I forgot, and I did not see that before. She's got eyebrows. They're very light ones, but they're visible here. Another missing shadow that I just realized is this one underneath the mouth and diffusing the edge. And I felt like the nostrils need a little bit more definition. Here, between the nostrils, there should not be black paint or dark paint, but here we should make it a bit more dark. Noses are hard, quite difficult and challenging to shade. Adding a glaze of diluted carmine here to the cheek. Just in order to harmonize all of these colors so she's not so pale in the face. Maybe even here, Tiny And I do miss a little bit of that redness here on the chin. So just glazing on top of everything that we painted, you can glaze these thin layers of watercolor until it looks just about right in here also. So that the neck appears rounded. Food. We'll now take the scalpel. We'll try to scratch off some of these highlights, for example, here. I'm basically drawing with the scalpel. It's very destructive for the paper, so I only do it as a last details and only you have to have a completely dry paper. Otherwise, it will scratch out huge chunks of paper, so you need to be careful with scalpel. Do think that for this particular portrait, these floating tiny very light hairs are accurate because the reference photo has a lot of them, so Okay, good. I will now sign my painting with my aqua round brush. This is the synthetic one, and it is helpful for signing because drawing your name with the sable brush or with brushes overall can be hard to make it right. I feel the need to add some of these just a tiny bit of splatter. We'll see what that looks like. I will dry, we'll check. And this is the final portrait for this week. I'm certainly hoping to see you next week again. For another one, we will incorporate new color into our palette. Now you're familiar with five. Next, we will be six. Again, I encourage you to take photos of your sketches of all of the explorations with color and of your final portrait from this week and either upload a new project into the projects and resources tab underneath this class or update your existing project. If you've uploaded one project, you have to update and add more photos into it, and I will see you next week. Bye. I hope you had fun and learned something new during this week's demo. I will meet you here next week, and we will paint a different portrait together. Do not forget to return, and I will see you. Bye. 20. (WEEK 3) - Creating a Watercolor Sketch / Thumbnail: To Week three of our five week Watercolor portrait challenge. We will start this week with a warm up in the sketchbook and we'll create a quick thumbnail of our third portrait. Let's get started. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Week three of our five week watercolor portrait challenge. So we already have these two wonderful paintings done along with two sketches, and now it's time for the and we are also adding a new color to our palette. For now, we have five colors in the palette. So we have yellow orange, permanent red. Last week we added the permanent carmine, and then we have the cobbled blue light and blood stone genuine. That's a quick overview. I hope that you remember all of these. We are going to have a mixing drill later. Also, this is the new color that we will add today. I'm excited for this one, because this one particular pigment can make your painting so much brighter, beautiful, just absolutely fantastic looking. And this is cobbled turquoise. This is a pigment PG 50. I use this SminkyHdam color, but from the same pigment, many other brands create the exact same color. So you can find Sanier, Ivan Rembrandt, and Windsor Newton and guess even Daniel Smith, they have a color that looks exactly like this. I am just recapping all of these colors because while doing the sketch exercises, we are already going to be using it. So let's get started. Maybe it's time to even get you acquainted with today's reference. We already painted two women during this challenge, so I thought it's nice to switch the subject a little this is not going to be so hard, not as hard as it looks like first glance. This is a portrait of this fantastic looking character guy. We're going to be using colors, mainly the turquois. Even though the photo is stylized with blue and yellow, I'm going to be using yellow and turquoise. This is our opportunity to practice beard, especially the white beard. I love painting character portraits like this one, not just beautiful women, and I hope that we can try more faces like this in the following weeks. I also have to start a new page in my sketchbook. Hopefully, the rest of this challenge will still fit in here. So let's start with the sketching process. A reminder because some of you haven't been drawing or painting for another week. We do not want to get caught up in the details. We just want to do a quick overview. The face in your sketchbook does not have to look nice. We are testing colors and somehow getting used to the subject. Let's get started. I'll start with some straight lines just blocking in the shape here. He's got some really great cheek bones. There's a line here. I think the whole forehead looks somehow like this. And then there is the nose part, then we have the mouth. Cheeks. And this line is very interesting. And then we have the beard. So one of the easier portraits, I would say is because half the face is actually covered by the beard. The beard might be a bit more volume here, and then the ear. Now, the entire eye, I would sketch as a trang like this. This is the shape that I'm seeing here. Here is eyebrows. Very thin ice, but lots of lines here underneath. Don't have to do all these lines right now, suggest that there's something there and there's going to be some structure in the face, bit of wrinkles, and here is shoulder. There's a little bit of texture here in the clothes or maybe a pattern, which is something that I like and would like to include also, if that fits, there goes my portrait. I think that's about right. It's good enough for the sketch. It's super quick today. And I will check the eyes because it feels like they're supposed to be a little bit closer to the nose. I will also check here might be lips slightly higher. Here. Good enough for me. I'm going to take a photo now and we'll test out all of the colors. I will quickly swatch them here so that we know what kind of palette we're using heroes for. So here is going to be six colors. So before painting, I need to add a bit of water into these wells with paint. Don't have to squeeze fresh paint for skate book. I never do. I only do that for the final piece, and definitely we'll have to add the new blood stone because I run out, might not be using too much of it today. We'll since we have this new color, it goes in here, we have to add it onto the palette. This one is best if it's fresh from the tube. That way, it remains the more vivid and vibrant. I've used in paintings before. I can live without it, but I'm convinced that this color could bring to life even the most messed up piece. Probably it could make it more vivid. Anyway, I'm going to count all the colors. So here is orange one, permanent red. Carmine. We are not going to be using too much of it in this painting. I think just for lips because that's the color here is slightly bit more rouge. In some areas here, maybe just to add the pop, but not too much. And then we have the regular cobbled blue. We have the new cobbled turquoise. And the blackstone, which is dark granulates if we let it. Let's mix the skin tone first. Skin tone looks in this photo, a bit more on the yellow side. I'm going to add more of the yellow. You can map the highlights if you want. We can make sure that here in this area, there's not too much color, just clean water. A in this area over here needs to be lighter. This one over here, slightly lighter. Here there's also light. It's not highlight per se, but it's more like a rim light. It is lighter part, but also gets a little the purple side or maybe you can even add the turquoise there to this side here and here. Something reflects from this side that is blue, but it is light value. So I'm paying attention to it, essentially. Here is lighter part, here is lighter part. Definitely here, lighter part, and here is also the rim light. The beard, it gets also sharply white here in this area. Can't really see or distinguish, but always in these parts here of the beard and here, it gets more yellow or maybe even greener. So that's just going to be a little bit more pigment here than in the middle. And when it comes to hair, this upper part of the hair also gets lighter. Here it gets light, but here catches a bit more of the tunnel value. This is a map. It looks weird now. Probably it helps you cover everything with paint. The way I do it is usually just add the skin tone everywhere, except the areas that I mapped out, and this is just test. Even slightly stronger skin toon, we don't have to be too worried because he's got really intense skin color. This is not a pale person. You can be more intense. But then get clean water onto your brush and go over these highlights. Otherwise, it will be just too sharp. And then I grab a little bit of carmine, go over these parts like the lips, little bit of pure. Red definitely needs to emphasize that here. I actually see a bit of carmine on the nose here around this area that's supposed to be more highlighted. I just see a bit more carmine. Oh, I forgot the ears. The ears, they tend to be a bit more red, especially when there is so much light going through them. They're translucent. And so that is better described by adding more of that permanent red. I want to also use tiny bit of the turquoise here in these areas like I mentioned. This is going to be side part of the face, and let's use the yellow, the permanent Yellow for the head. I want it to shine like this. And let's use the turquoise here, maybe with a bit of blue. And we'll see what that looks like here. I want to use it here as well, and a little bit of that reflected light. Larger brush, a little bit of the blood stone. Maybe we could let this sort of bleed around. Let the yellow bleed slightly. And maybe add a bit of yellow into the background. Just to harmonize the colors. This is the free part of the composition, the unplanned effects. And we will see. For the hair, you can mix everything that you have on your palette, balance the colors. If the mixture is too warm, just add one of these blues. And we can create this type of cool gray that can happen when you mix basically everything, warms and cools together, and you need to add water so that it stays more on the transparent side and you can use this for the hair. So we will only paint the parts of the hair that are slightly darker. Here, we have darker parts. Again, I should be using the textured brush. Here I go he used the hair to just create some sort of texture in the beard. You can't cover it up completely, but we still want to paint this bottom part here. Maybe a bit more worms in this area because actually, here is a bit of skin underneath. Here, I need to add a bit more of the ness. Here is a bit of the shadow. And with the orange, I can create this pattern on the shirt. This orange mixed with everything else, so it's not clean color. Here is the eyebrows. Here is the dark parts of the hair. Just trying to create contrast. Look for darker parts of the entire composition. I used to just squint the ice to be able to see this and everything else we can do once it dries. Hopefully, there's not going to be too many things left to do, and then we will need the blue with red mixed so that we can start applying some of the shadows. And the head, while it's still sort of damp, the yellow needs to go slightly more dark so you can mix in a bit of the red, and then we can add some depth. Like it's going to be darker here around the edges, and then we can blend it with a bit more of the clean yellow here. So that we suggest a bit more first sketch, we're getting summer. I'm going to know quickly dry this, and we'll see what needs to be edited in order to see how the colors should be working. This is now dry. I'm going to try to add a bit more details into the ice because there are white windows, and there should not be pretty dark in this area. So that's why I want to cover that up. There's going to be a few more structure lines, wrinkles, maybe. I don't like to spend too much time on these sketches to go into details waste of time for me. The only thing that I need is to know if the motif has potential to create larger painting from if I need to switch my color combination. For now, Turquoise did not turn out so vivid because I covered it up with other colors. But look, we add a bit more of it, and I think it might work better. But also, I need to add the blood stone too here. But to do more contrast. You don't have to add the background like I am. This is not according to the reference, you don't have to use it up. I just have this way of styling portraits that tends to work for me, so I hold on to what I normally do. But I think it's going to be nice and expressive motive for us to explore. Can really make my textures look how they will look on the larger paper because there's just no space for it on this paper. There's not enough room. The wash will never look the same on the small size and on the large size, which is why I prefer the A three larger pads for painting. That's my minimum. I don't really like to add more contrast colors. I like turquoise more with the carmine, to be honest. When you have carmine and then you have a turquoise going against, this is such gorgeous combination. So the yellow with turquoise is not ideal, but it works. But if you add both, it's not going to be great. Maybe we could add carmine just as undertone, but there's going to be too much color if we overdo. I don't think we need the car necessarily. Need a few more details in order to see this properly, here, just a few more brush strokes. Here maybe a few more. We have the pencil. We can do more lines with the pencil if you need. There's definitely going to be a little bit more shadow here, a bit more here. And there's going to be more here, a little bit more on the lips and the nooses a catastrophe. Nahair on the cheeks. I want more volume, so I'm adding a wash of paint. Think for sketch. It's enough for now. Pencil time. And this is again just to show us what we missed. We can this be made better if this can pop. So I'm just going after all of the highlights, trying to figure out. Here there's going to be a bunch of these white lines basically telling a story about the hair. I maybe we should use masking fluid, but I don't like to do that is unnecessary, in my opinion. What I don't like about masking fluid is that it prolongs the process. So you can get the highlights in 100 different ways that is not destructive to paper like masking fluid can has unpredictable results because you never know how thick the line is going to be. It's never how you drew it. It looks very different every time. None of the masters that I learned from and went to master class with, none of them use masking fluid. They need to paint on the spot, preserve the spontaneity of the medium and masking fluid slows them down for illustration and studio work. I liked it, though, when I was starting out that helped me to preserve the highlights a bit more efficiently. So I'm not saying that it's bad, but just telling you my reasons why I don't think it's a great idea for me personally. And here we have the those I need to preserve because that ear somehow are so important to the entire shape of his head. It did not even notice before, but they are. And I could leave some of the white spaces here in between the texture. It's just so crowded, like when I do the final work. This was so helpful. It's so messy, but helped me to envision what I want, what I clearly don't want in this piece. Still puzzled by the colors, whey you just stick to the turquoise and orange, but I will maybe drop a bit of carmine to the final one and we'll see if I like I keep, if I don't like I have tissues to get rid of it. Anyway, this is the final palette, one, two, three, four we have six colors, guys. This is a pretty intense palette that we're getting into. And besides one, we have all of the primaries here, the worm and the cool red. We have the worm and the cool blue. The magenta and the turquoise are actually primary colors in the printers CMYK model. We have the blood stone, which granulates helps us with the darkness. And we have the yellow that's also a bit orange. We are missing lemon yellow for complete palette. Of all the primaries, lemon yellow is like the very light, very cool kind of yellow, but I rarely use it in my paintings. I rarely need oversaturated greens. I never use them. So for me, personally, this is the only primary color that I tend to skip. Most of the time, I just like the warm yellow, and that's all I need, usually. What do you think? Because this might just be my personal favorite painting of the entire challenge. Once it's done, if I don't mess it up, and it's gonna turn out at least this cool, like the quick sketch did, I'm going to be very happy. I'm looking forward to this one. In the next lesson, we will draw this amazing portrait together on a watercolor paper. I will meet you there. 21. (WEEK 3) - Drawing a Portrait: Lesson, we will draw this portrait step by step. Let's get started. So this portrait is going to have a little bigger the facial and the head part basically than the previous ones, is because it's a close up. So I guess I assume this size should be right. I'm going to mark the top of the head. Here's going to be the chin, here's going to be the nose. Super quickly mark all of these proportions and here's the beard. That's the beauty of having the reference printed at the exact same size. Of course, when sketching freehand, it's going to look slightly distorted, but I don't mind like the sketching the sketchbook, not 100% proportions, but still had the energy and expressive portraits are about more than just looking exactly like the reference for you. But with the rest, we have to figure out. So I'll just from here, I have to kind of use freehand sketching as well. This is the eyebrows line. Slightly above it, there's the ear here. The distance or the size of the ear might be a bit like this. Here's the noseline and here's going to be the beard. I tend to draw wide faces way too wide. So I guess I should measure how wide exactly the face should be. Approximately this wide. So here I'm just looking for straight lines here. Here is a straight line. This is the point where the head or the face ends. This is the eyebrows and I guess somewhere in the middle. I can measure. There's going to be a triangular nose. The width of the nose should be something like this here at the bottom. I think not getting the nose shape here can cause some problems because it's such a dominant feature for him. And here, there's going to be the I. I'm going to measure again, but the triangle could go like this. And here, even to here. And now this part This distance here. This ear aligns with this part. So here should be the end of this ear. But does not align with the other part. When you draw a straight line from here to here, you can see that the ears do not align. This one is lower. This one is higher. That's just because of the angle from which we are looking at the face. It is okay to find out they do not always have to align. Make sure that you check this, see if it does not align even here, like this part of the nose. Of this weird straight line coming from this point to here should come here. But now when I measure the here, yeah, now it's good. So there was a problem. But on the other side, it aligns more like here. So straight lines to check everything with everything here, the nose with the corner of the eye. Here this part with the corner of the eye again, Here, we do not see much of this eye. Here there's the beard. Okay. Weirdly looking portrait, but the main proportions are there. Now I have to refine. This is just the first part of the drawing process, a lot of measuring. Now we give him lines that are a bit more tidied up that are cleaned and maybe try to go for more likeness, at a bit more details. We'll see how that goes. I'll be a bit more silent during this process because I have all of the main shapes here already present, so I do not need to correct all of that. I just want to figure out the most accurate line and how it's supposed to look like and make it a bit more pretty. If I have two or three lines here, which is unnecessary, then I use the eraser in a pencil in order to clean this area. This process looks like literally cleaning up It's like when you're making your bed, take the mess, straighten it out, and then you can go about your day. I like to start from left and top and move towards the bottom because I'm a huge smudger of my pencils. So I tend to have the sketch less messy when I go this way. It doesn't mean I won't have to use the kb razor again because I will. But it's just what works best. That's how I like to paint, too, just because I'm right handed, so it makes sense to me to go from top to bottom and always from left to right. I do not think that we need too many details. Being a drone on a watercolor paper before we go and paint the portrait. Some painters do a very detailed sketch. I've seen them blocking in these darker hair parts here and completely making that obvious in the sketch as well. To me, it's just a waste of time, and my process just includes only mapping the rougher parts, rough areas of where I need to paint, but I just do all of these darkenings straight with my brush and then makes the process a bit more quick. Et's do the hardest part, and that's going to be this area. I already mapped out some of these, but the dominant part will be the browse. So I will start with sketching the browse. Here is going to be darkness. Even in the sketch, do not have to invent lines. And what I mean by that, you do not have to find the lines of the eye. If you don't see them, you can just mark this area as dark. That's all that you need to do. You're going to cover it up with paint anyway. M. Here, just lightly mapping some of these wrinkles. And then here there's one this complicated structure. And here, there's some pores that are showing. So you can include that, but do not press on the pencil too much. Again, starting here with the eyebrows and making sure that we have the eye here. Lots of structure even here. Underneath the ice. Lots of life lived. I just like drawing these faces that show a bit of structure, life character. Here maybe also a bit more going from the eyes towards the forehead, and there's one on the forehead as well. Just be light with this. Do not just draw a line. I try to rather fill an area with hatching than draw a line because it does not quite look like the wrinkles. It's just a suggestion of the line. Wrinkles can be easy or complex, but they're essentially not a straight line. Compare one wrinkle to one hair. It's a completely different type of value. And I think we're getting somewhere, now. Oh, the nose. Here, there's areas of shadow and here as well. We're going to have to use the spatula here. My gosh, I'm smudging everything. But it's always good to clean up like this because otherwise, that graphite will stay there and will influence the color. And turquoise is pretty transparent, especially when you dilute it with water for larger washes. So I do not want that smudgy, dark graphite everywhere. Did I get it right? Or is that a cary catcher? Tell me. Going to have to probably use our method for checking the proportions and see what's wrong with it before I commit to a certain line. Let's use the one with the phone first, and the other. So I want to try to figure out what is wrong with the sketch. This is just too wide. So here I need to go and fix this part of the sketch. Did I measure incorrectly? Well, a little bit. Here and here, it seems a little bit out of place. So this and also so therefore, I have to even make the eye look a bit thinner. I mean, ear, sorry. Okay, thinking for me is very hard. It. Maybe this might represent the ace a little better. Like we said we do not have to fix it because I'm not doing a commission for this guy. So it's going to be a guy. If I did commission, he would tell me or his wife would tell me that it is not exactly him. If I'm doing portrait commissions and I'm not 100% precise, I have a big problem. I probably don't get paid a lot. But if I just create portraits to learn and have a hobby like this, which is how I like to think about what I do, then this is fine. I'm gonna maybe throw it now on the ground and we'll see if that thing needs a bit more I took some small break and I threw this thing on the ground just to make sure that I have everything, not 100%, but at least as close to the original as possible, but I'm discovering even here some problems. For example, here, the corner of the mouth should go a little bit further here than maybe a little bit here as well. This bottom part of the nose needs some adjusting and also this corner of the eye, it goes higher, but it's supposed to go lower. Those are the few things that I'm noticing. I'm going to go fix them now, and then we finally can start painting. Now, I just want to adjust what I found. This one goes just way too high. Here we have to go lower Oh, and the weird shape of the nose, as well. I just think that his nose is a little bit more regular here. And what else did we say? I think I mentioned the corner of the mouth. Okay, I'm going to take photo of the sketch. We're done drawing, and finally, we can start playing around with colors, which is the part that I'm always looking forward to. With portraits like this, after you created a sketch and you draw the portrait in the final size, you have won the bottle at least 60% of it anyway. The color has different problems, but this is the biggest deal at least for me personally to get the proportions, draw every. Many people will agree with me when they state that drawing is a discipline on its own that we need to regularly practice. In the next lesson, we will do a quick color mixing exercise and introduce a special new color into our palette. I'll see you there. 22. (WEEK 3) - 6 color palette - Mixing Exercise: Lesson, we incorporate new color and test mixes for our new six color palette. Let's get started. Now we will go over all of the colors that we'll use in this demo and we'll try to mix some of them. We have the five colors here that we used throughout the previous week, just a quick recap what they are. And we're going to do this every single week. I know that you might remember, but some of you had longer time between the demos and we'll need the recaps. We'll do it quickly, but we'll do it always. So this is yellow orange. We have permanent red. Now since last week, we have carmine. This is permanent carmine. Then we have cobalt blue. And we have our dark color that is also grainy color, granulating, and this is blood stone genuine. Just one. Now, this week we are adding new color. We are adding cobble turquoise here as our sixth color into the palate. So the orange with red always gives us skin tone. But if you just mix orange with red, what you get is this. That's not quite what the skin looks like. You need to add more water. And once that you dilute, there you go. That's much better. You have to care for consistency of your paint just as much as about the hue, so be mindful of the actual shade. It's going to be more saturated, more intense, and also a bit more opaque. When you paint with thick pigment, when you dilute, sometimes the game completely changes. That's the base for our skin tone. Now, if we take some of the blue and we mix it into the skin tone, we get grayer skin tone. So here is the skin tone with blue. Look at this. Sometimes we need it. To cool down the skin tone or something like this. There's a bit more blue. In this mixture, there's less blue but still blue. And if you compare these two, there's going to be a warm skin tone, and there's going to be a cool one. The side of the face that is away from the light source will be cooler skin tone, and this one will be closer to the light source. But you can also do the same with the turquoise. You can take the turquoise, mix it into the skin tone. And get the skin tone like this. This is with more turquoise in it, slightly less turquoise in it. But the thing is the turquoise. I often granulates slightly. It's not the same level of granulation that the bloodstone has, but it gives you a little bit of the grainy texture. When you combine a smooth pigment with a granulate yeah, would actually mark. So this is the granulating one and this also granulates. Then colors they will start to split on the paper like you see here. And so that creates different story of paint than here. It is a cooler skin tone, but it also shows a bit more texture. It contains more granulation. So in today's demo, I will cool the skin tone down a little bit more with the turquoise than with the blue, and the result will be more texture. We are painting a face that's not so young and we'll need the structure in any way that we can get it so that we don't have to paint everything manually. The structure, the granulation helps us with but I got to tell you that other than this, to mix the turquoise into the skin tones, I do not really mix the turquoise into any of the colors. And that primarily is because turquoise is an opaque color. If you purchase this original PG 50 pigment from any brand, then the pigment dies opaque is thicker, and so it muddies up the mixes. Even here, you can already see that the mixture is slightly muddier. These are transparent paint or semi transparent, and so most of them will not muddy up the mixes. But this when it gets mixed up into my stuff on my palette, then everything looks a bit more muddy. The way I use this paint is almost always keep it separate from other paints so that it's bright and beautiful like this. Almost always I try to use this color in a way that shows the saturation of these particular pigments that you add to paintings to make them shine as a color that wants to stay on kind of a narcissistic color. But I do mix it into skin tones to harmonize everything. I can't just have it on the background on the shirts, on the clothes. That would just not be harmonious. When I have a specific color and use it in the background or in my painting, then I need to incorporate it into other parts in a way that fits best, but I need to have it present in separate areas of the painting. So that's why if I work with turquoise, use it for the background, I try to incorporate into skinton as well, there's what you have around you kind of reflects on the thing that you're painting. So as a way to incorporate, you can mix it into skin toon. Today's mixing exercise is not much about mixing. It's about learning to use the color. This is a weird color, but it always livens your artworks. And with this short mixing drill, do I need to go through the mixing shadows, but maybe I will. So always, when we shade, we use red and blue. We don't mix with turquoise, the shadow color. It's red and blue, red and blue always. I will do these two here. So you get this mixture, sometimes we need to use more blue in the mixture, and other times we need much more red. Like here, so there's a gradient, but it's always red and blue, red and blue. This mixture is used in all of the ways that you can imagine. It's used thick and it's also used somewhat diluted. At times, you need to dilute, and even the bluer mixture needs to be diluted sometimes. So look how many shades it can give you. You really do not need to do anything else besides use these two colors for all of the shadows. And I like it because it's a simplified approach that makes you only think about whether the shadow is warm or cool and not think about particular colors and how to put them together. So just red and blue, balance them. Is it more in shadow? Is it more dark? In that case, it's going to be more blue or is it more in the light? Like, it's shadow that still has some light in it, and therefore it might contain a bit more red in areas might be more diluted. This is the only two colors that we use for most of the second layer. And maybe I could say that we will also need gray because the person that we're going to paint has some gray hair, some white hair. There's a lot of gray that I found in the reference. Grays are not hard to mix because generally, when you take everything that you have on your palette, look this and turquoise and everything. Creates gray, natural gray. This is warm. Then you just have to judge if it's warm or cool. This is not gray yet. This is like brown. And brown contains a lot of the warm colors. And so I add turquoise, for example, more blue. And then you get this gray. This is 1 gray. I can add more blue in it. That's a different type of gray. But look, we have gray. See? These are the grays. You can dilute a bit more. You can even add blackstone to create more intense, more like dark gray. And that's how we get gray for this painting. Look, beautiful. When you try all of this combination, prepare your palette, prepare your watercolor setup, we can start painting our piece. And in the next lesson, we will begin the painting process. I'm excited. I will see you there. 23. (WEEK 3) - First Layer & Background: This lesson, we will begin the painting process. We will again try to paint both skin and the background in the first layer. Let's get started. I first need to refill my palette with a bit of fresh paint just because fresh paint is always the most vivid, saturated, beautiful consistency that you can get. And definitely that's worth it. For these larger paintings, I'll start with the skin tones. I'm not going to map out with pencil. We already did that during the sketching process. I remember these large areas that need to stay more light so that I will start painting around them and then fill the area with clean water. For the basic skin tone, we're going to mix like always, the orange with the red. We might use a tiny bit more pigment than usual. Just because his facial tones are slightly bit more intense. This is a beautiful vivid color. The photograph did a good job. Something like that works. I think that's pretty similar. And because once I start painting, I won't have time to explain that much. In areas that are turning away from the light source like here on the sides of the portrait, the skinton is slightly greener. I'm going to take this skinton here and add a little bit of blue in it, or maybe in this case, a little bit of turquoise, and it will make it greener like this. A little bit of turquoise works. Look at this, and this is what we need. In this area, all of the areas that are away from the light, even here around these areas, and finally on the beard itself, one and two, and then we're going to add the carmine. We're going to add the carmine in some areas and pure red to some areas, especially ears. So let's get started. We'll premix more of the skin tone, and we can do this. And clean water and connect. Here as well, and here as well, it doesn't have to be precise. Greener undertone connect here on the sides and the eyes as well here on the side too. Now, quite vivid will be the ear. Here I run out of the silhouette. I'll just correct. Here again, I will add more turquoise. Clean water here, clean water here. Maybe I'll start with clean water here and we'll add more carmine to get the nose. Clean water on the sides here. The sketch that we created previously that gave me quite clarity. I could not paint fast like this and make decisions like I know where everything belongs because I did the sketch. So I think the sketch is such an important process. The portraits almost alive here. Here, there needs to be more of the turquoise undertone here in this area. Even on the sides of these snows clean water here. Careful in this area because we are already done with the skin part and here from this part, we need to transition towards the texture of the beard. So I'm going to take turquoise, blood stone, mix them together with some skin as well, and maybe a bit of carmine just to get this gray that we talked about. Something like this. Here I'll just start the transitioning of this texture so that I don't get the shape of this edge that is too harsh. I just want to transition. Paint sparingly. Don't paint too much. Just paint a bit. Here. It's just a gray, but this is greener gray. So I mixed a little bit of the turquoise into this paint. H. And I still am missing my smaller winds re newton brush. The sable one, I'm still missing this part where I need more skin tone. So here, there's still just so much with a bit of carmine because that's the mouth area. A little bit of bloodstoneF the corners, there's darkness there and just the skin tone that I just want to fill in slightly. And here transitioning towards the facial hair. Actually, I'm going to find the spatula. And while this best works if the paint is still wet, here we can scratch off some of the highlight it. It's like facial hair. I If it doesn't work, then it's fine and we will do it scalp later. But if it still works, do it. Now I want to do the hair in this part. Similar way, bit of turquoise. I just want the turquoise and the blue to pop. I try to always split the hair on the palette, just split them like this. And paint with that. I forgot about the extra red or carmine. I didn't make it while the washes were still wet. Never mind. We'll do it later. We'll do one more wash later. Sometimes you can't do this because it might just be drying very quickly. Sometimes I add a little bit of the orange for the greens with orange and a bit of turquoise that gives you greens. In those hair, in certain areas, I see the greener undertones. And with this, I think we're ready to start experimenting with all of the rest. Just the yellow here. Let's do the heat. And yellow here, yellow here and just water between with the yellow, a little bit of darkness mixed into the yellow. Mostly it's could be a tiny bit of turquoise. So it gets a little bit greener and we need to edit here and here. Just to tell about the form, now you can see that the head has some sort of form where I get to remove the excess pigment. And with the large brush, I'm going to be now adding some of the remaining paint. No more tilt. This is going to be the part where I experiment, throw around some colors. So no more tilt and we'll see how that works out. Start adding maybe the blood stone tiny bit here. So now I just have two colors and that little bit of yellow, and I have to decide what works design wise. I also like these darker spots for contrast. But now we have to add the yellow because otherwise, the yellow is not going to have context. First, I need to slightly get it off. Okay. Now, slightly getting rid of these pulls so that I can figure out if my composition extract part of this painting is good or not. If it needs fixing or if I throw the painting away, it happened to me a couple of times that I had to start over after this particular layer. I don't think it's bad, but here we need more color. I definitely forgot about. Here needs to be the skin tone. And then there's another shirt, which will be greenish undertones, gray green. So very diluted with water here and here as well. The whiteness of the beard would had to compete so that would not be ideal. I need more darkness, so thicker pigment in this area. And now I can gently lift this and let the rest run down so that I can get rid of the excess water. Now I can see the remaining water drops, which I could not see before when it was lying down. So Okay. Maybe I'll take just a few more bits of the turquoise color and try to create extra fun texture here so that I have these pops of color. And the same with little bit of the orange. That's it. Now I will leave this to dry. Then we can move from here. In the next lesson, we will start applying shadows to the face. I will meet you there. 24. (WEEK 3) - Painting Shadows PART I: Lesson, we will do shading around the face. This face shows a lot of structure, so we will try to paint all the skin folds and tiny wrinkles. Let's begin. First layer is completely dry now. And look at these beautiful effects here. I just love how on Winter Newton paper, we always get these sharp edges, and we get really beautiful visible transitions. Color I really shines on this paper. So I'm very happy with the result. I'm not missing the magenta, which we had in the sketch here. For now at least, we'll see. I would like to do the hardest part, and that's the shading of the face. So what I want to do is to first find the larger parts of the skin that need some shading. These are the mid tones, and you can find them here on this tire cheek part, and you have to imagine some parts of the human face as a sphere that you need to shade and sphere shading is a little more subtle, so we will need to soften and blend the edge the light part, and here's where we apply the kinton basically. It might be the skin tone that's slightly cooled with either turquoise or cobbled blue. Another part is here, also the mid tone part. There are mid tone parts here around the eyes, and we also have to apply mid tone here and here in order to make the forehead a little bit round. The forehead here shows some structure. So here is a white zone. So here is the light zone, here's again, some mid tone. Here's again, some light zone. This is the mid tone zone. And on the sides of the nose as well. And then there's some mid tone here around the mouth. We won't do the most dark yet, but we'll get to that. The colors that I need to prepare is the skin tone. So the orange with the red mixed in can prepare a little bit of this color here, diluted with water. And then here I prepare blue with red for shading blue with red. It's going to look purple, but with more red, it will be like this. So the two shades. So I'm preparing the red with blue, but here is more red, and in this mixture, there's more blue. And I also want to prepare thicker mixture of red and blue. So I grab red, really, really thick here and thick blue. Those will be for adding the darker parts of the shadows with thinner brush. But all the metons that I just discussed with you, this will be applied with larger brush. So I'll just keep this here. So let's go. So this part is something that definitely looks a little bit darker to me, all of this, actually. And then with just clean water on my brush, I need to kind of blend the edges. There's not that many harsh edges in this part yet. So I applied the skin to on a little bit of that mixture of red and blue here as here, it gets slightly darker. While this is still wet, we can actually grab the smaller brush with the thicker mixture of red and blue that I have here, and we can go in here. This is really thick mixture of paint on my brush. Here we pre vet this area where we can paint. Into the wet area, we can even paint the darks. Like this. I try to kind of observe the reference where I see parts that are more blue and parts that are more red. It's like darker. When you see darker shadow, it's going to be almost always more bluer. So here, for example, these parts will be more blue and here and here. And these parts more in the light, so you will use the same mixture but with more red ratio in it. And I have to be quick because this dry super fast got a little bit warmer here in where my studio is, and Watercolor became more difficult. It's far from summer, but it's like a lot of heating going on inside the building, so I can feel it just drying very fast. And we got in quite a lot of information, pretty fast, I think. No. Then it already is dry. I will not touch it anymore. I go work on the other side. I'll need to go back, but for now, it's fine. So I'll do the same on the other side. So here we have the the skin tone that I'm working with here and here. I get rid of that mixture of red and blue, but here we need to be more careful because this eye is in some areas in the light. And clean water will have to work fast and clean water from the other side. And same like here, I get this brush, sick mixture with thinner brush and I go in a little bit of blue in the mixture. I want it dark in this area over here. Maybe I could incorporate turquoise in his eye just a tiny bit. Kind of there's here there's a highlight that seems so blue to me that looks blue. To paint the wrinkles, be lose. I feel like they need to be slightly lighter. So I'm mixing the skin tone with this red and blue mixture. But this is not going to be overly dark color, but I still want to try what it does here and here. And I feel the wrinkles here in this part, get literally red. So I'm going to use the permanent carmine to get this. Here as well, just a little bit. The pops off. Red. This paper is incredibly sensitive when you go back in your wash and your wash is already like semi dry. It creates blooms like crazy. So I try not to work too much. And if I'm unsure, it's always best policy to dry this and then try again, do the next layer, maybe wet and then work on one small thing. So I only always work maybe a few minutes, and then I stop because the paper becomes reactive. Large areas here around checks. I'll start with skin tone. But the skin tone here, it sort of needs to be mixed with the turquoise have a skin tone, and I have a turquois so I need to make it a bit more greenish, a little bit more green. This is the color, actually. It was slightly tricky. We already have the hairs there scratched out. So I'll try to just leave some behind the negative painting technique, paint around some of them and here blend. Here, there could be a bit more of that red in this area. And again, with the smaller branch, Pure turquoise just to show the reflected light on his cheek. And here, everything is a bit more blurred out. I wet this ear. I use clear red here in this part. And red and blue, thicker red and blue. Slightly bit more red. And I leave it like that. Maybe a bit more turquoise here. Again, for the reflected light, the bottom, he's got the turquoise here, it reflects to the bottom part of here. Now we work on the other side, the other cheek. Maybe I'll start with the red here. Clean water. And this mixture of skin tone and turquoise continues here, over here. Again, we have to just avoid some parts, leave out some parts to suggest that there's the reflected light there. It gets a bit greenish, but that's how it's supposed to look, I guess, and here just clean water. Just to incorporate it. Now, maybe let's wet this ear. This ear is lighter than the other one. I have to be a bit more careful, but it still contains red on this side. Maybe we could even leave it like this. But perhaps I could do just a tiny accent here and here. Tiny bit of turquoise. Now, this area below the nose, now I try to use my small brush and just be a little more careful around the nose. So below the nose area, the color is a bit trickier. You can still see the skin tone, but the skin tone is a lot in shadow, so it's going to be a lot of these skin ton with turquoise. This one, the gray one or the greener one. And here we can probably apply the color like that, but we have to do it in a way to leave out some of these parts that are white because there's the mustache. But I could also do it like this. I could apply the color, and then while it's wet, I use the spetula like before, but just time it a little better. And with the shading mixture red and blue thick again, I need to work these shadows because you get accents here. These need to be darker. Okay. Now, let's connect to the nose. There's a subtle shadow on the nose, which is just a shading mixture, red and blue, but slightly more diluted and you have to apply it here. It's best if it kind of connects with this paint if it's still a little bit wet, then that's best. And here, like this way goes the shadow. Shadow goes this way. Clean water? Clean water. Soften this edge. And on the other side as well, it's not dark shadow. This is very subtle. So I'll try not to mess it up. And on the tip of the nose, there's redness here. And then here again. I feel like this part needs more of the shadow. So it is still where you can add paint here. And here I even removed some of it to create that reflection. Maybe, actually, I could incorporate some of the turquoise as well. Is already becoming so reactive, I'm going to have to maybe fix the nose later. So for now, that part is fine, and maybe let's do the mouth. Again, red and blue, very, very thick. That creates dark that just is enough dark for us to paint with it like if it was black. So here, that mid part of the mouth. Okay. Here, just slight parts of red, bit pops of red is what I see on the reference, and the upper lip, it looks a bit purplish to me, slightly purple. That's also just red and blue. Maybe a bit of carmine to the lips, you can always add a bit of carmine. Make sure that you dilute the paint a little bit more, not make it so thick like the line in the middle. I like the mouse like it is now. You don't have to do much more. Here there's light here in the top of that lips light. Maybe we could do it when it dries to get a bit more of that pigment out. Okay. I will dry everything, look at it a bit from distance, and then we've got a lot of structure in the face to work out still. But maybe as a next step, I would like to add some hair because I'm missing contrast here that would correspond with darkness in the eyes. And so I like to work the entire painting together, not just try to finish one area and then move to the other, but the areas they communicate. So it's always easier for you if you try to adjust something here than something here, something here, and then look at it as one thing, basically. And how all of the parts fit together. That's very important. I'm going to dry, and I'll see you 25. (WEEK 3) - Painting Shadows PART II: Now everything is set and I want to continue. Maybe first, I will clean up some parts of the sketch with my synthetic Princeton stroke brush. This one I like for cleanup the most. I need some paper towels and clean water on my brush. And here I feel like the paint from the head went a little bit too far. So I want to rub and then use the tissue to get the pigment out permanently. Here, maybe a bit too. And here clean up the ear in this area slightly. Some imperfections, they don't really matter, but if there's an accent that I need to make like here, then I will try to clean. So this part of the ear is supposed to stay lighter. There some of these parts as well. Okay, now I take the textured brush and we'll try to mix in some gray. And the way I get gray is just mix everything on my palette to get something like this. Maybe it is gray for his hair needs to be a bit bluish. That is what I see on the reference with maybe a hint of turquoise because that's already what we paint with. And at times I will need a bit more blood stone to make it darker. So I'll try here and paint only these parts of the hair that are darker. You can see them here, here, here, and a little bit here, here in the middle there, and on the sides. Here we have to be a bit more careful. What I want to paint is the slight shadow that is between the head and this part of the hair. So let's go. This should not be a hard part. And I started to be worried that I'm overly, like, doing too many details and just being too precious about this painting. And that's not what I want it. I actually want it to be a bit more loose. So I don't know where this perfection that we have comes from that at some point I don't even realize that I started to be obsessed about the photograph. And I just noticed. And when I do that, then I try to pull myself out of that kind of thinking and only focus on what's important about the reference photo, just do what's absolutely necessary in order to make the point. And usually it's the dark accents with the light and mid tone roughly at these areas where it's supposed to be. So here for the beard, we'll do it like this. Now I've bit more just gray color, not too black. And we'll mix some greenish mixture that's just orange with turquoise and try to work something in here. Now I'm diluting a bit. And here just trying to take some paint out because I think I lost some light here. But I also have to dilute some of the gray paint and do a bit more painting in this area, so the hair is not completely white. It's just only remains white in certain areas. I think this is good. And I will try to dry. And let's finish the head now, and it's not going to be a lot of work, but an interesting technique. I'm actually do it with this brush. I'm going to just take a little bit of that yellow, and I will pre wet. I'll start with yellow here because there we lost it a little bit. But I just pre wet this part. The rest is no yellow, only water. And what I want to get some of that structure in here, this pattern. And that's going to be the yellow with a tiny bit of blood stone, something like this, darker. And since we pre wet this, when you start drawing this, draw a pattern like this into the wet background and it stays there. It will look tiny bit like what it does on the photo. It shows some structure. Here is already dry. Maybe pre wet some more. And I leave it like this. The head is done. I would like to fix. Some of this background would like to add blood stone genuine here because I feel like this part of his face has a bit of a different shapes. I was bugging me for a little bit. So I just want to fix. But I still made him much younger here. And here we lost the shoulder. So by adding a little bit of the background here, I might get a new silhouette and the shoulder visible again. But it's slow. I need to do that again. So here, just do the shadow. And add a little bit of shadow here. I'll just do some pattern again. And dry. So this shoulder, I still feel like I want to do one more layer to try and get that shoulder more visible, so it was a bit lower before it was supposed to be. I feel this is what I want here. So just adding the background. Okay. And dry. Now, here on this side, I want to match the other side with the level of accent here. Doesn't have to go too far. Just the tone, you should match this other side. Actually, this feels like too dark. Try to get some out. Yeah, I'm starting to overfxate on stuff. Good. Still, we want to balance the background slightly more. It doesn't really go with all of the rest of the portrait, I just I just feel I have to balance the color. It's only here around the neck. Maybe it will feel slightly better if there's more of that background, even in this higher part of the portrait and some more darkness. Yep. More drying Last time I touched the background, I promise, but there's a way to make this texture a bit nicer and that involves sprinkler. So I just have the sprinkler here. I spray from some distance. And you let it sit for a little bit. Not on the face, though. Face. I want to get rid of it. But then you do this. You remove the drops. I don't know if you can see the impact. It creates this texture in the dry paint sometimes here that kind of blurs it a little bit. It makes it feel a bit more natural here like some. Yep. So there's a bit less of the clean areas has nothing but paint there. Yeah, I like textures a bit more. Good. Now that we fix that, we need to do something about his age because still does not feel like we achieve the kind of structure that this phase has. I'll try to do the eyebrows. We'll try to do some of the wrinkles, and we'll see what we can do. In the next lesson, we will finish the painting process. I'll meet you there. Okay. 26. (WEEK 3) - Final Adjustments: This lesson, we will conclude the painting process for week three, with a few adjustments, painting hair and emphasizing the facial structure. Let's go. I will always have my skin tone premixed here just in case I need something to connect with this part. Thought maybe we could start from the eyes again. Shading mixture, red and blue, red and blue, always, sometimes more blue, sometimes more red, depend on what you need, but always these two colors, nothing too complicated. You don't have to mix 100 shading tones. You only need the two vary the ratio. So let's start with this e. Here, there's a bit that needs more shadow. I'm just basically drawing what I see here on the reference photo. This one, there's here and here. This all needs to be a bit more dark. Here's a bit more red. And skin tone blends it all. If we want, actually, we can wet this entire area. So it might be a little bit easier for us, and then we can use thicker paint to paint in gently all of these bumps and wrinkles and everything. We'll see how that works. You'll need thicker mixture because we already have water on the paper. I can draw it in, and it will dissolve slightly. Because of these pumps, I try to make it one line and do not interrupt the line as I'm drawing here, just add more color where I feel like we need more structure and here maybe add more turquoise where I need the reflected light looking slightly cooler. And then here the skin tone again. And on this side, and here. Just drawing in what I see on the reference. But I do see a lot of red. Sort of been in these parts present quite a lot here. There's like pops of red. Here as well. Okay. And for the inner part of the eye, add blood stone because it was kneaded the darkest parts of the eye. And for the eyeball, it's again, just some dirt and grease from my palette with a bit of the cobbled blue here. Do not leave it white. However, this part underneath the eye, that one needs to stay white. Here, there's literally reflection. And here and here. And here there's wrinkle. Here there's deep one. And I figure that they all have this rim around them that's redder and then just skinton I will dry. Ps to get some of these pores, but maybe I could pre wet this thing. Again, just wet it. Soft brush is needed for this. Otherwise, they would get rid of some of the pigment. We don't want that. Just want to slightly soften. There's a red here. R here. There's a bit of red here continuing with the skin tone. Here as well. Some of it does well here. And here, this part is just darker. You use the turquoise to cool this down. I just try again here on the shoulder to get some of the white spots, white hairs. Yeah, now it works better. When you have thicker paint, it works a little better to get this. Maybe I should pre wet Preet again. Then try again. You have to wait for it not to be too wet. Aus orange. There's pops of orange that I see here in this area and red again here. And then the shading mixture with turquoise cooled down in this area. Here, we need to get with a bit more red, we need to get these wrinkles here and even this. In the eye, we need more gray. A slight bit of color here just to make sure that it's balanced with the upper part. Well dry and we'll see. So I do not want this portrait to turn out into something that's super detailed. I just do a few more quick fixes, and I think we're going to be good for today's demo. Here I just want to remove some of the light. Maybe here just also does not work very well with the soft brush. Need to do the sturdy synthetic brush. Here also. In order to make the nose a bit more plastic, here also quite bit. Or the wrinkles. Also the removal, like the lightening of some parts between these dark wrinkles, it helps to show the structure of the face a lot. So for example, we painted all of the dark lines, but now you have to go back with synthetic brush and emphasize the lightness between all of the folds and structure of the face looks more prominent and looks more like a photo even here. Now, I like this a bit more because, like, I feel like that was the last part that we needed to do in order to really have the structured eyes. And also, in this corner of the nose, there needs to be a bit more shadow here and a bit more here, too. The structured face are more work because you need to pay attention and you need to shade all of these tiny parts. When you have a young person, you have smooth skin, there's less shading, but at the same time, this is more fun and you learn a lot. So we still did not paint the browse. And for that, I'll just use my textured brush here and throw some eyebrows on this and here as well. Maybe slight darkening inside the eye and I will leave the eye alone here. He they're white hair, but we also need to paint the shadows underneath them. So we just gray paint, you can do something like this. And we'll later use scalpel to get them a bit more white, cut some of them out. But there's one more thing still bugging me, and that's the wrinkles around here. Besides the nose, they're supposed to be deeper and darker, and that's what make him look so young. So I want to go back in there and try to darken them, no matter how difficult it might look now. But I feel like without that, it's just not quite what it's supposed to be. And then some red. But, like, really, really dark. Just red and blue. The coped here. So now the last thing to do is to take sople and check out some of the shiny white details, for example, these hairs here. And I will give the portrait some extra lightness here. Here super important in this part. And some to the brows as well. And these reflections. One eye shines slightly more than the other one here. So I try to make it pop a bit more Sure. And there's the final portrait. I do hope you enjoyed this week's demo. It was a little tougher, but I feel like it was not as hard as it was more work. But let me know how did it go? When you're updating your projects with the new photo, write a little bit of something for me and for others, telling us how it went, which parts did you have the most difficulty with? And I'll be grateful to learn what this kind of demo does for you. If it teaches you or scares you, I'd like to know. I personally like challenges, and this is one of also think that we should be painting variety of types, faces. Every type shows you different parts that you need to learn and how to interpret in your painting. So I personally enjoyed this very much. Next week, I'll meet you here again for the fourth one. Please do not miss it. We are going to incorporate one more color new color, very essential one, this one, and we will paint darker skin tones. That color will allow us to mix slightly different skin tones than we these. I'm absolutely excited. I will meet you there. I can't wait for next week's portrait. Do not forget to return, and I will see you there. Oh 27. (WEEK 4) - Creating a Watercolor Sketch / Thumbnail: Welcome to Week four of our five week watercolor portrait challenge. Just like during our previous three weeks, we will start with a warm up sketch that we will quickly color with watercolor and plan our next painting. Let's go. Today is going to be a special demo. We will add a color that will allow us to do darker skin tones. And for this occasion, I have chosen this demo. I think this is such a beautiful face and I had to do a little editing so that I can get the face angle that I want and the hairstyle that I want to show you because this Afro hair is such a gorgeous thing to paint in watercolor, especially. I'm really looking forward to this week. I don't know how that turns out, but hopefully this is going to be the best. We will. Anyway, what I like about this face besides the opportunity that we have here to test the darker skin tones, which are the hardest in watercolor. We also have quite dramatic lighting here. So we have a couple of values in the face. Here is the highlight. The mid tone looks a bit different than when you're painting a fair skin. This is basically shadow, but then there are darker drop shadows and these occlusions that are almost completely dark. Besides the tongue values, there are new s to the skin tone. There are more yellower parts, and there are parts that are more Rugi. Here, we can use the permanent carmine that we already have on our palette, but we also can use more colors to add to this portrait to stylize a little bit. I don't know what it's going to look like, but boy, am I excited? Let's get started with the sketch first. Just map out the proportions Afro is not going to fit this page, but at least I'm going to try. So I'm just finding these straight lines as much as possible. This half profile, almost profile. I like to represent with just one line here and the other line here just to start. And then there's line here and line here. All of this we can map out pretty quickly. Since this is the sketch or a thumbnail, don't have to do too much. Then there's the facial features. Is going to be the line for the eyebrows. Then there's going to be line where the nose ends somewhere in here. Oh, these need to be parallel lines, and then one, two, and three. We will have to divide this part into thirds to find the midpoint of the mouth and then here this shadow underneath the bottom lip. One and the other one just roughly. Yeah, I also like to find out where the nose ends. Maybe here, there's this angle of the nose, and then since here is the midpoint for the mouth, And here, we've got the shadow. Might be a little more difficult to draw, but we will do our best, I think. And this eye, you can try to represent it as basically just a triangle. You don't have to be super accurate, but use this time when you are sketching as an opportunity to just study the angle a little bit. Right. Here is one earring, but really in shadow, and here is another earring. And I will now use the Ned eraser to clean all this, and the hairstyle is just I'm not even going to sketch it because we will only paint it. It's gonna be best when it's just painted. Yep, these black wing are awesome for sketching, but they're just harder to get off of the watercolor paper, which is fine, especially with a painting that has so much like all these darker and deeper values. I don't really plan to do a lot more of that body. Those are the earrings, I'll just do a playful sketch, maybe here just suggestion of the shoulder with the clothes and the neckline, maybe that will fit to the final piece. I'm not sure. What's important is the face. For the sketch, I think we're good. But let's map out the highlights. Oh, here there's a little deeper skin tone. So the highlight is here, definitely here. Here underneath the brows and also slightly here on the entire forehead, when you imagine the head as a sphere, then the light source hits this part. There's the bump, there's another bump. So if it was a smooth sphere, there would be just one highlight over here. It needs to make sense to you what you're painting. If you want to do this kind of dramatic light convincing. Same for the nose. If we were to make the nose, look a little bit simplified. And it probably would look, well, something like this. And this entire part would be light, while this part is in shadow, and there's also some sort of drop shadow. And so here there will be little highlights on the nose here as well. Bottom lip usually gets some highlight, and we would get some here as well, but it's just the angle of the face, is that the highlight can't reach here. It's further away from the light source. Will now remove this. Well, my sketch is far from accurate. This is just enough for me to test the colors and see what it's going to look like. Let's get the palette out and see what is the new color that we will use for this week. There we have our fantastic palette of six colors. Have the orange, the red. We also have the carmine, which is super important. These reds are very different that will help us get another tone. This is cobbled blue. Then we have cobbled turquoise. We almost have all of the primaries, both warm and cool. We have the granulating bloodstone genuine. That is helping us a lot with the granulation and with the darks. We do not have to mix all of these to get the black, but we could do it if we wanted to. But now today, we are adding special color, not so special, but actually quite common color that I think no palette can really go without. And this is ultramarine blue. In my case, it's French ultramarine. I think French ultramarine granulate it's more if you want smooth, just get the regular ultramarine, and I'm going to pour it into my palette. We will do deeper mixes with it during the color mixing exercises, but I'll just already pour it here, just to show you what skin tones we can get, not precisely, very roughly. We'll do a more thorough exercise after we draw everything. But this is a seven color palette. I hope that by now you already know how to use many of them that you got used to throughout the past three portraits. So now let's incorporate this one, and then we only have one more to add next week, and you will have a wonderful palette that's complete that you can use for almost everything, basically. So quick overview, we have the orange for more colors here because they go dry Perma red. And I will not pour cobbled blue because we are kind of going to substitute. I will pour the blotto. So we still have the orange. Okay, we still have the red to complete the trio, we will not use cobalt, but we'll use the ultramarine to get darker skin tones. There's one thing is that ultramarine and cobalt, they're not that different. They actually are both warm blues. Mixes with ultramarine get slightly darker. So you can mix ultramarine. We're going to do this twice, but I don't even mind because you need to get used to your palette. This is ultramarine, and we are going to mix it with the orange, you will get green. This is slightly deeper green than you got with cobalt, but it's similar hue. You are also going to mix ultramarine with the red, and you are going to get deeper tone. Look at this. For basic skin tone, I'm going to do it here. Is the orange with the red mixed together, balanced out. Water but slightly less than before, and a little bit of ultramarine. This is the skin tone that you are going to get. Something like this, then you can, of course, balance it with adding a little bit more of the red always add ultramarine then we get the darker version, and for blush or for lip part, you can always add the carmine in it. Actually, carmine with ultramarine, they will make pretty intense purple. These purple undertones, I love to add into the portrait. For now, we'll just use these mixes, and I will explain the mixes more deeply in the color mixing part. First, we will going to use this tone to basically just do the same like before, only with color that's slightly more intense. I like to add more red into the skin tone for the base. And then you have to paint everything besides the white spots. But again, the white spots need clean water. More carmine or red actually when we are approaching nose area here. But bottom part of the nose, I like to do with more yellow. In the sketching part, it's not going to show that much difference. And when we are approaching the area with more shadow, like here, you can just add more ultramarine into the mixture. Here a little bit more carmine. Forehead gets more yellow, more ultramarine and purple when we approach the bottom part. Here, just clean carmine, bottom lip. More intense mixture, less water. Definitely more ultramarine in the mixture here in all of these areas. Here it gets darker. Here I want to add a little bit more just pure ultramarine. You can experiment with how purple you want those skin tone to look. I like them pretty purple, sometimes even not mixing in all of the orange, just letting the purple mixture sort of shine. Basically applying the rest of the skin tone. Here more clean water because there's the light part, and we again going in towards the shadow. Okay. What's interesting is that part where you paint the hair. So you have to pre wet everything, and I just want to try it out here in my sketchbook. You'll have to pre wet the whole page. I don't mind if this matches, this is just for me. And now we get a little bit of that blood stone. And where the hair are the lightest here at the top, it's not going to be so dark, so I will maybe use a little bit of turquoise to make it more cool, but also less intense, less black. Maybe we just do a little bit of that orange, actually. I don't know what I'm mixing. Just some sort of gray. When there's light, it's just gray. It's not going to be black everywhere. Maybe we should mix in some of the warm warmer skin tones, maybe even carmine a little bit into the hair. With a bit of turquoise. We can even use this brush to do the hairstyle with the brush that has sturdy bristles. Good. Now I'm going to add more intensities. I have the blood stone, but I'm going to mix it with ultramarine so that it gets real dark. And in some areas, this is going to be important. Like here, So when you apply the paint into the wet surface and you think, this is too black, wait a little bit. Usually it just fades in a couple of minutes, sometimes even seconds, pretty quickly. Sometimes I just stamp. Here I go in with pretty dark paint. And you can add a bit more water and we will do this. I don't know what color. I'm testing the colors. I like the bluer mixture. I like the warmer one. I will decide in the end what works best when I see it painted. That's going to tell me what looks good. You decide based on your own experience, which is why we are doing this challenge. We are here to get you some experience myself I'll just do these brush strokes, and I try to figure out which works best. But then wet and wet always, not into the dry background, but then I also go back with just clean water and I try to create effects, like I try later some of the water. Oh, not in the face, hopefully. You can cover the I just let this sit and we'll see what that creates. Yeah, we'll have to let this dry, and then we can continue. Too bad about the face, but this is just a sketch. Now, this has dried, so I would like to continue with another layer. I forgot to include some colors for this earring, I'd like to do it now. It's best to do all of these colors while everything is still wet, so I'm going to pre wet this tiny bit. You can actually use the turquoise from the previous week just to give the image some pop. Yep and maybe some red. Not green because that would mess up my colors, but maybe the ultramarine. And I will use the blood stone genuine just to create these divisions as well as in here. Here, I want to do darker background to define. I don't know how that's going to work out on the larger paper, but we'll see. I kind of like this contrast in here, but then has to happen here as well. We will need color for the shadows, and so that's red and ultramarine. You can dilute slightly, and we can just quickly block in all of these shadows spread with clean water here. Definitely here. And sort of here on this part as well. And then bottom part of the nose, I won't bother with details, but in the final one, we'll do more detailed version. Lips, I want to work more like with carmine and if I want to darken the carmine, use the ultramarine especially for the top lip and below the bottom lip as well. So shadows in the face is red with ultramarine and lips is carmine with ultramarine. The reds are very different. One is warmer, one is cooler, carmine is definitely turn more purple. Won't use that for the face that needs to stay less purple. But for the lips is fine. Here, maybe just slight bit of carmine. And here we need more. Here I need a bit more, but just lighter color, and we'll definitely need a lot more depth here. Here we can negatively paint around this part to get this earring. Or at least just a suggestion of it. I'll see how I will handle this. There will be two main challenges of this demo will be the skin tone to get used to the new mixes for this darker skin, but also the afro hair. But you're going to love that, but the result will greatly depend on what type of paper you can get for it. Now, I will get the calligraphy brush to do some eyebrows, a suggestion we do not want to slave over the sketch here a bit more of this shadow here. We'll dry and we'll see where we are. I'm already loving it, but let's do some cleanup and some white pencil stuff. There's my synthetic brush with just clean water on it, and yep, I lost all of the highlights. Let's see if the paper lets go. If not, we'll go straight to the colored pencil. It might want some of it go. Here as well. And maybe just a tiny bit here. Lips. This worked out pretty well, pretty fine. The mid part of the I might need the smaller brush with darker, blood stone on it to do some details. I want to do too much here because I don't like to waste too much time on the scale. We've got so much to do, but, like, maybe tiny bits here, just to define the earring and hear those dark parts between the light parts and also help and taking some of these out. Please don't add too many details around this because it might become a hero of your painting, but this is an accessory. He's the hero of the painting. There's my white pencil. Let's try to add some of the beautiful highlights just to see what it would look like with more details, with more precision, since I kind of just threw all of the colors at the page, hoping for a quick result. No, that's not good. What would work better there for the reflected light is actually removing pigment just gently like this. That's good enough for the reflected light, and then there's some highlight on her ear that we can actually draw this part of the earring and a little bit of this. Oh, and did forget about one shadow. Here be knees, the nose, needs to be a little bit stronger. Obviously, I'm not going to use the white line for the final piece, but here just tempting. Hopefully, the Afro turns out a little better, more elaborate, but it still looks like an Afro. I think we got pretty quickly we got that information across, and that is the foundation of expressive painting is that you try to do least amount of brushstrokes and get the information across to the viewer. So this is what we did. I'm absolutely excited to paint this piece. I love painting. Darker skin tones, they're quite challenging, but also painting afro and different hairstyle that always challenges me. I just think she's going to be so beautiful. I'm not quite sure about one thing. While I know that this painting is not going to be too colorful. I want to just limit it to this color palette, having maybe a carmine pop here and there and a little bit of turquoise, but it's not going to be as colorful as the previous one. But I have to decide on the final tone that I'm going to use for the hair. At times I have dark, like, almost black. At times, I have blue mingles into purple. So I have to decide so that it's more maybe uniform. And this is my sketch. We're gonna use seven colors. Not all of them. Cobbled actually is not gonna be used all that much in this painting. This is pretty exciting Tamil. In the next lesson, we will draw this challenging portrait together on a watercolor paper. I will see you there. 28. (WEEK 4) - Drawing a Portrait: Lesson, we will draw this portrait step by step. Let's get started. There's my reference photo, and we kind of went over the basics of sketching this already when we did the sketch. But I will do that again. We will just quickly try to block the main shapes. We will try to do that with straight lines. Use as many straight lines as possible while working on this. So I try to start here, and then I focus on the angle. Like the angle here, then this angle of the forehead. This angle here, this one, I have to decide how big do I want the face to be this afro here. Maybe I will move it slightly. You need to sketch very lightly so that it all fits. And then the angle for this brows. And the same angle will go for the nose and here one and two. Here is going to be the mouth and here we need kind of the nos. I'm just eyeballing this. I don't want to measure too precisely. Probably it will need some corrections, but can do that later. Very rough sketch. Okay. I don't want the face too big because I want to work in the background. The size that I printed is about right. I actually quite like this basic sketch. I just need to make sure that everything aligns that all of this will be working out. I just try to do the line like this to see what lines up with what? So the tip of the nose should line up with middle part of the mouth like here. So that's about right. But then here, the chin is supposed to be a bit less than what I drew. In this part, slightly less. Good. Then maybe the length of this ire thing. I pretty much fits the way I eyebald. The worst part will be to measure the nose actually here and the distance from this part of the nose to the eye. Yeah, and see if this eye is positioned well. So here, if I hold this angle, if I put just lines to make sure that this angle is right, then if I put a line like this, it should go through the iris, basically, and mine doesn't. So that tells me, here's my iris that the eye is too low. And I need to put the eye probably somewhere here. This was way too low. And now the brow is too low. I need to increase this. And, yep, I think I think this is good. I really am tempted to do the portrait a little bit loose, just not measure so much. But This is the first, very, very rough sketch. Now I will try to refine, and so my needed razor is something that I really need to use here. These construction lines, if they're too thick, then I need to go in with the dust free razor, as well. But just for the lines that you see are just too thick and stay there. Here, you can do a bit more of the rougher lines because we are working with the darker skin tone. You can do more drawing when you're painting darker skin tones. The drawing will be covered with paint ultimately because the paint will be in a deeper tone. Now I feel like maybe the mouth isn't quite where it needs to be. Here is the tip of the nose. And here's we're supposed to go here, maybe a little bit like this. And then this one Maybe there's also this shadow that messes with me, the shadow underneath the nose. Might be some trouble here. And there's the nostril. And then there's shadow here. All of this is in shadow, so I'm going to do some hatching very light one. You can already just do a little bit of this framing of the highlight, as well as as here. Here's going to be highlight. The structure of the bottom lip is really well shown. So I'm trying to also maybe drop it more in that area. Here, like the bottom eye is not really that visible. There's just darker tunnel values that I can see here, here, we can use the hatching. Just map this out real quick. Oh, my chins. Never so great. But also important for the profile views. The chins in profile views, they tend to do quite a lot of grief. Good. This eye, you should be always drawing only what you see. If you don't see something, we only see dark value. We don't see the lines that are framing the eye, do not draw it, do not try to invent it, only focus on the areas of light, medium, and dark and that will save you a lot of trouble and also a lot of work. You only see that here is just an area of midtone, just do this. Not everything needs to be defined by the outline. Underneath the eye is a similar situation. Here I just see an area of dark, basically, of a shadow. So I just do this. I don't see the insides of her eye and I don't invent it. I kind of like it. But she looks very different before we put the paint in there. Here is the highlight if it helps you not to put paint in there, you can do that always. It definitely helped me, but sometimes I just I already know how to paint around, so I don't need to put the pencil in there, but I know that at the start, it can be really helpful. The hairline is kind of blurred out, so I won't try to invent that. I will not draw anything that's going to be done with the brush. The ear part, we need to put shadow. There's the earring. The other earring. Like I mentioned, you can really do the hatching a bit more than what you normally do. Then here we can do the darker part. And there's the shoulder. Oh, I smudge a lot. I've been really gentle with the kneed erasor so that it only gets the last layer of graphite and my lines stay visible. I love these kneadable erasor. They're super helpful. And here I'm just a tad bit of the neckline. Here's going to be the hair. It's gonna be super fun. Now, I think I'm almost done, but I just want to emphasize a few of my lines. I think this chop let might be a bit more here, more intense. Yeah, there's shadow here. And I think we're done. Now I'm going to take a rest and then I will come back. We'll try to find mistakes with my three methods just to make sure that everything is where I want it to be, and then we can start finally painting. I will see you in a minute. Good morning. I took some rest between drawing and painting stage. And now, as per usual, I threw my drawing on the ground to compare with reference. I don't know if I'm getting better at this, but I can't find any mistakes except one. And there is this angle of the jaw. I feel that here it is a little bit more sharp. This angle and I made it more soft. That's what I'm going to correct. Also, I have a huge neck, which needs to be a bit slimmer here because of the shadow. If you don't see tongue values and only see lines, it is very common to misinterpret the proportions. But these two things, the angle of the jaw and this neck line are the ones that I'm going to now correct. I'm going to finish the drawing process by correcting the two things that I noticed and that is here, the jaw line. Very slightly, this was not a huge drawing mistake, per se. And also the neck, which was a bit larger, I feel. But again, I might be wrong, but if I'm wrong, then I will just cover this with the dark background. Good. I think at this stage, we are ready to start painting. But before we move on to the painting session, we have to do the color mixing drill. I know that many of you remember the color combinations, but it is still very useful. We won't spend more than 5 minutes doing that. In the next lesson, we will do a quick color mixing exercise to get more thoroughly acquainted with our new seventh color, and so I will see you there. 29. (WEEK 4) - 7 color palette - Mixing Exercise: Lesson, we will incorporate a new color, and this week's addition is very important for mixing deeper skin tones, so do not skip this one. Let's take a look at it. I may have to, again, pour some new paint into these wells. Maybe not this. These ones are pretty filled up. Carmine, I don't pour so often because I always use it diluted, so I don't need a huge mass of color. But the blue and red always I need more fresh paint from the tube because I need the consistency to be thicker. So in this case, I will use the ultramarine I think we can also prepare some coupled, but you don't have to do too much of it. I just want to compare some mixes and we'll see what works best with this reference photo. There's my coupled blue and red always I miss enough blood stone. Oh, I might need more of this. So we have the orange. We have the red. And we have carmine. Usually carmine is being used diluted like this. Lips parts like around the eyes on the nose, maybe slightly on the cheeks, but most frequent I just use it like this. Pure form. And then the skin tone, usually we mix with the orange and red. You can mix them just like always. Let's first start with the fair skin tone with a bit of water so that you know that this is the baseline that we're starting from. And then we need to add a little bit of ultramarine blue in the mixture. You add a little bit. You create a swatch and you observe how the tone turns darker and also cooler. So base of the skin tone for dark skin tone is still a little cooler than for lighter skin tones. Now I add it a little bit more of the ultramarine blue, and here we can add even more. In my experience with skin tones, it can't brown like this. You always have to use more red in the skin tone. It should be more like this. So I try to balance the mixture. So that it is more on the red side because skin has a lot of veins, so we need to take that warmth into account and make it more towards the red. But I can add more ultramarine and look at this. This turns really, really dark. When you use thicker pigments, still red and blue, you get this kind of color. This might be useful for shadows as well. Don't really need all that much. This were combination of three colors just to clarify, here's the ultramarine that we used. One, two, and three, all of them together are essentially all of these. All of these skin tones. You can create really intense purple by using the carmine with the ultramarine, that gets you crazy purple, something like this. Now, if we mix it into the skin tone, that also gets interesting variants of this. When using carmine, it gets more purple. But just focus on these three basic colors for the basic skin tone. I just like to experiment with this a little bit. For the hair, we will be using blood stone and then more diluted bloodstone I would like to try blood stone with this purple undertone. I would love that. But I would like I think that she will look great stylized with a bit of purple. Okay. We will throw a bit of turquoise around, too, just for the earrings for some pop of color. So now I kind of experiment with what the entire composition of color is going to look like, but these two colors, these are gorgeous. Purple and turquoise. I just want to try to mix red with cobalt I'm not sure if we need cobalt. Cobalt is lighter, so I think that we can do everything with ultramarine instead of cobalt. It gets us the shading mixture that is just lighter. So I don't think we need it. It's not that different. It's better if we only use the ultramarine. So again, to sum this up, we are adding ultramarine to our palette. Ultramarine is not that different from cobalt. They only have one thing that's different about them. This is cobalt. And this is ultramarine. So they have very similar hue if you dilute ultramarine like this. If you dilute cobalt, they will look very different. You will have a hard time distinguishing between them because they're both warmer blue. For example, turquoise is something between blue and green. So this is cooler. It's under color where you will find it next to closing up on the yellows and greens, basically. So that's cooler kind of blue. This is still, I think in the blue area. But these two, cobalt and ultramarine, they are warmer kind of blues. The only difference between them is that pigment wise. The cobalt is going to be much lighter. And the ultramarine, when it's thick, it's almost black like it's very, very thick if you have high quality color. And the thickness also matters because with watercolor, we don't always just use the diluted paint. If we use only diluted, then we would not need these two colors. On our palette, one would be enough. I would opt out for ultramarine. But since we use it thick for fair skin tones, cobalt is the base, and ultramarine is going to be the base for the darker skin tones. But you can switch between the so today, the color mixing exercise might take you a few more minutes to get acquainted with this, make sure that you know how to mix all of these. When mixing dark skin tones, you have to mix the orange with the red and the blue together, but in a way that the resulting brownish color still looks more on the red side. Try not to use for skin tones anything too yellow. With all of this and the palette prepared, we can move to the next stage which is actually the painting stage. For today's demo, let's do this. In the next lesson, we will begin the painting process. This one will be extra interesting. I will see you there. 30. (WEEK 4) - First Layer & Afro Hair: Lesson, we will begin the painting process. We will start applying skin tones, but in this layer, we will also tackle this challenging hairstyle in a technique that we haven't done before, so let's get started. I'm excited to do this. Painting part. Finally, something tells me that there's going to be a lot more work during the first layer when we try to do the hair, which is going to be a huge part of this painting, but maybe the painting would at least be finished a bit quicker. See, however, we should, and I think that for this painting, it's very appropriate if we prepare a spray but that is like this so that we can do some effects in the background for the hair, this is going to look fantastic. And also prepare this paper, and I'm even tempted to kind of shape it like the face. So don't do the same as I did with the sketch when I sprinkle the watcher here inside the skin tone and then it got all blurred out. Might not be a bad idea. That should be enough. Something to cover it later. So let's do the face part. So first, I always prepare the basic skin tone. So that is red and orange. Then I pour some ultramarine in it, balance it out. All right. So careful about the highlights. Let's start over here. I still want to do waters down skin tone to be a bit more transparent. I have also the purple color prepared here on this side of the face. There's definitely more of that darker tonal value and cooler. So here, maybe we just orange, we connect with lighter color. Also, let's not forget that here is highlight. I covered it up a little bit. Lights. And then here beneath the ice, there's the blue part or bluer part again. Definitely only pure water here to connect. Very careful here around this area is also more like the basic skin toned with just a hint of the ultramarine bloom. Here is a little bit more of the blue, but let's use a thinner brush for these trickier parts. And And here there's more of red, here's more redness. Then here's more blue. Definitely here. Lots more of that redness. Bluer with carmine for the lips. Here to this part, I can return later, put some water in it. But I need to get to this part. Otherwise, it dries on me. I wouldn't want that. So here a bit more of that bluer skin tone. Here in this part as well, actually the here too. Here this entire part. We have to be a bit careful to go around these earrings because they are supposed to stay white. Don't have to be 100% white. It's very bad if we run out of paint, which I did. So I prepared quite a lot, but it was not enough. It's not ideal. Here is this part I feel pretty purple. And then here is more warm again. And here is pretty purple again. Clean water. So That's just the basis. I want to do something here and also kind of connect this part in some way. And we need to do the fresh turquoise, we need to kind of incorporate it while everything is wet. Intuitive, but I like to edit while everything is still wet. And now the hard part, the really hard part will be the hair. For the hair, we need to wet all of this background, clean water, and maybe it's time to do it without the incline. I always start painting incline, but now it's maybe time to not have an incline anymore, but make sure that everything that this is all pretty damp. I don't even wait for the face to dry. Maybe that's risky, but I just want the hair to be incorporated a little bit into everything. The hair play into the face naturally. So this is wet now. I spent some time usually to pre wetting this surface. We'll see how that goes. And then I'm going to use the bloodstone genuine, maybe with a little bit of carmine, just to warm it slightly. And maybe let's start edding it. And you will see what it does. It just will create these blooms or bleeding effects. We want it lighter at the top, so you can add more water. You can leave out spaces between the hair. Here, even, and it's gonna be softer. I'm going to add a bit of turquoise too just to balance. Maybe the turquoise could be sitting more like here at the bottom, but I feel like somewhere, since the turquoise is here, it should go somewhere else in the painting. Let's put the turquoise, the bottom of the hair and carmine with a little bit of blood stone to the top. So that's carmine with blood stone. I use dilute it like this, and that's gonna go here the top of the hair. I know let's paint. This is gonna take some time. You need to pre wet so that it stays wet for at least a little bit. There's going to be a bit darker around the face. Can use the drops. Just try to mimic the texture of the hair. You want to use more carmine in some areas. As the surface keeps drying, then it keeps on being more and more reactive. But also the spreading will not get so far anymore. So you need to be adding and adding stuff. You have to start where the hair should be more spread. And then when the spreading is not going to be so profound, you can add somewhere around the face where the hair is not supposed to be all that spread and can be a little bit sharper. Can use larger areas here at the bottom. I don't even mind that here it's so watery and splattery. It's going to be part of the design. Here as well. So what we're going to do now, even especially here at the top of the head, going to add a bit a few of these, but then we're going to use the sprinkler, and that's so important for this particular effect. And I sprinkle from a distance to give a little bit of these gloomy effects. Maybe let it sit like this. So no incline right now. Sometimes these effects turn out great. Other times, it's not really working all that much, really have to be connected with the color and the watcher does. So you need to observe all the time. He I just want to support the silhouette with darker paint. I don't want to add too much in the second layer. What I do in the first layer is best because it's fresh. And here I'm painting these bottom parts of the hair. Might not have to paint so much anymore. I will do an incline again, try to just get rid of all of these large pulls that I can see right now. In this area, it's very hard to see the pulls because there's so much granulation and texture going on, but that's fine. Okay. But I still want to do with clean turquoise to do more of the effects. Maybe more of this pure blosson as well. And I think we really need to drive everything. I'm not sure about this earring because it's supposed to be more in shadow, like, hidden away. It maybe we could cover it up to connect it with everything to make it slightly different, but at the same time, somewhat connected with all of what's going on here. Maybe just add some clean water here. Yep. That I can agree with. Good. Now I have to take a step back from the painting. Can't see anymore anything, so I will let this dry. In the ext lesson, we will start applying shadows to the face. I will meet you there. 31. (WEEK 4) - Painting Shadows, Part I: In this lesson, we will do shading around the face. We will mostly use the wetting wet technique that you can remember from week one to make sure that the large shadow shapes stay evenly placed. Shading dark skin tones is one of the more challenging parts of watercolor painting. But in this challenge, I just wanted us to get some experience with that as well. So let's get started. Finally, the painting dried and we can start working on the details. I just love how the hair turned out. However, there's some work we need to do over here. In this part, I would like to do some shading of the face. Definitely need to deepen this part, and I just want the most important part to be behind me so that I can pay some attention to the stylization. So let's get started. Here, just for better clarity, I can fold the reference photo. And maybe I could start by gently here massaging these harsh edges that happened because there was so many layers of dry, semi dry and different stages of watercolor. And so there's maps in the piece. However, it's not a big deal, really. But on my palette, I want to mix the red with the ultramarine. Blue and prepare for some shading. I also want to mix the ultramarine blue with carmine just to set this purple aside just in case that we need it for some accents, maybe perhaps. I also want to set aside or prepare aside some pure carmine as well. Red and blue over here. Okay. We will do similar technique that we did during the first layer, and that means we need to pre wet everything. We will wet all of the face so that we have better control over how the shadows are placed, where they're placed, how it all dissolves. Hopefully that works. Okay. And now with both brushes, I will work a little bit. The skin tone that will contain less blue, I will need for some shading here in this part. Just add some to this semi wet stage and deepen the tone. Maybe I could try to use some turquoise just here on the edge to do some reflected light here around the eye as well. Also this part below the eyebrows, we need to be slightly darker in areas that are tighter, you can use thicker pigment and smaller brush like here, for example, so that the pain doesn't fly everywhere. Sometimes I tend to reach for cobbled just out of habit. It is not a big deal. It's just not going to be so dark as when I use ultramarine, And here, I go in with thick pigment. And I always keep in mind when working this, like, wet and wet that everything that I put down now is going to be much less dark when it dries. It's going to lose a lot of the light. A lot of the intensity is going to be lost. I even reached for some pure blood stone to paint the lashes, and this needs to be incredibly thick. If you have pigment on your brush, that's too watery, it will spread. If that's what's happening to you right now, then stop rinse your brush like this. Take thick pigment on the tip of your brush, and that's how you work wet and wet. Spreads but only a little bit here, while this is what we can work in some of these just to connect the hair. This part is going to be harder to execute. I would like to connect this with the hair in a way that feels a bit natural because the hairline is just not so visible here. It's blurred out. This brush just to stamp. I'm only trying here to somehow create a softer transition between the hair and the forehead. In the meantime, everywhere else it's dry, so I can't work the other areas anymore. We can work, I mean, but we work wet on dry. And so I will have to blur everything, and that gives me more room for error as if I pre wet. Solution is to dry everything then wet again and continue. Sometimes a good trick is to maybe use the sprinkler again kind of too big of a droplet, but sometimes it evens out the textures, and by adding more kind of texture into the wash, you blur out everything and it does not no longer seem so sharp. That was too big of a droplet. But now we can watch everything else in here. Just everything else. And we can start shading. That needs to be much darker than what we have here right now. Hero is going to be area that's a little bit more light. You can use your brush to pull out some of the paint and here as well, because this is going to be reflected light. We can even that light can reflect the color of the earring, for example. So we can add some turquoise. I think that's a good idea here. But then it could go like this even. And here we would This shadow over here would be a little bit sharper. Just to get this real dark. I try not to touch this anymore. That's very dangerous. It dries quickly, and it would be very reactive right now. But I can grab a smaller brush. I lost it somewhere here. And try to work around the lips and noes wet and dry. That area is also dry, but can start to work a little bit more. Here. Here, and then just red, diluted red here and just kinton with a little bit of the yellow base here. Tiny bit more here. A little bit more here. A bit more red. And the top lip definitely has very dark purple going on. In the dias, I will fill this. I will fill it up. And blue with carmine. Maybe even with some of the blood stone just to make it real dark. And to paint some of these structure of the lips. Now, I want to use this. 32. (WEEK 4) - Painting Shadows, Part II: Now I put everything flat and this is dry and I like how the face is turning out. However, I need to focus everything a bit more towards the face. Here seems so chaotic and messy. This was just the first layer of shadows. With this, I'm not going to touch, but I just do a few adjustments so the face is a bit more framed and I need to get more focused to the face, maybe blur that earring. But I think the main thing is to clean up the smudge. Here is the line for the shoulder. And maybe here's another line. I need to put some dark contrast in this area. I feel like this needs to get diluted a bit more to lose this edge a little bit so that it's not so visible. I will see what it looks like if I put here if I kind of paint the shoulder a little bit more This just a stylist choice, what I'm doing right now. I'm just trying to figure out how the composition could benefit now. I think it could be dark at the bottom and keep it light like this at the top. I'm a little bit worried to lose this lightness. So I probably will not touch the top. However, this bottom part really needs some framing. It needs more framing around this neck part as well, so I'm just going to use blood stone and try to fiddle around this earring. Like I need clarity around the face a bit more than I need the earring there, so that's just my thought process. I need the silver to be a bit more visible. Now it stands out more. That's the question. I could try to erase, but I could also try to do skinton here and just basically for her to have the body up until this point so that it's more obvious that that's clothes. Another looks a bit more like skin. No? I think so. We don't have to be too precise. Just wanted to make that area have a purpose. Now, here I feel like almost time for hair dry. I would just feel like these strands of hair would also have some sort of shadow. H. Time for hair dryer. So we're quite close to finishing this painting, but unhappy with the amount of details. So I want to do a little bit more of the darkness and a few more strokes that define the features in here in this part of the face. I also want to use the brush for removing of the pigment to try to get a little bit more light here. So I am just rubbing the pigment off with this synthetic brush. Here as well. Only a few more, and then we can a few more maybe here also. I feel like here we've lost some light that helped us define the structure of the face in this area. There I go in with Softer brush because I don't want to remove so much. I just want to lighten. Yep. Now I will take the small brush and we'll mix the red and blue together or thick mixture to be able to get the darks, sharp and real intense darks. No. Okay. I'm just defining the eyebrows tiny bit more. I feel like I need to add some darkness in this area. This also goes and here is a lost edge where the dark part mixes with the hair. H Maybe I will use the synthetic pointy brush to get a crisp line here. But like only for this part. And we need to get the nostrils. It is still blue and red. No. Bad shape, wrong shape. And here when it comes to shadow, I feel like I need to emphasize here a little bit. Maybe just tiny bit here still. And also here on the forehead, I don't I don't feel like I have enough of the tone value quite correct here. It's just tiny twigs that we need to pay attention to and add if you feel like something's off. It's going to be very different depending on what your own painting turned out after the shedding layer. Okay. So maybe the upper lip needs a bit more of that blue with a little bit of blood stone. I just want to get slightly deeper purple here and these few details and then just connect with clean red that's left over on my palette. And here we still have some parts that we need to draw to describe just basically the structure of the lips here. Yeah. Another adjustment that I have going on, I felt like here was not quite accurate value, so I needed to add a thin layer, not something too dark to the neck. In the next lesson, we will finish the painting process. I will meet you there. O. 33. (WEEK 4) - Final Adjustments: This final lesson, we will conclude the painting process for week four and apply some details, adjust the overall composition, and do some background tweaks. However, you can do your own style depending on how your painting turned out at this point. I made a decision to add extra background layers which your painting might not need, so try to consider which parts of my painting process can be useful for you and which you can skip. Let's get started. I assume that's a tattoo on the cheek, but I want to draw this. Okay, one more layer of bloodstone around the silhouette of the face because I don't feel like I've quite captured here that I have enough contrast there. Here from this point. Okay, I've decided that I want to add the background to the top as well, just like we did during the sketching process. So I'm going to do it here, sort of paint the silhouette of the hair, and then pour clean water Okay. And here, maybe with clean water, just pull the edge a little bit so that it doesn't stay all that sharp. And I feel like this could be a nice play of light and shadow. Because I felt like it's not. It looked like not finished. So girl needs to use some turquoise, as well. And I want to try to let it drip a little bit, but not from here. So I will first remove all of the water from this point so that it doesn't go through the face. But I want some of this paint would be nice if it drips to test the design. So we'll see. But I have to be careful about here not dripping. And I love it much more now. There was something missing and I did not know what it was. Until now. So I really like to utilize watercolor in this way. Always it feels like you can destroy the portrait when you're trying something like this. But if you don't touch the face, if you keep it dry, this is the focal point. Everything that happens in here, all of this flowy paint, it can do whatever it wants. It will most of the time when you don't stress about it, it looks great. I also feel like successful design does not have way too many colors. That there's one dominant color, which is the red or the carmine. It shifts from the more warm red here towards the carmine. There are some undertones of purple, but then there's the turquoise. So it remains simple, and that's why I think that the design will look nice. I really love how the background turned out, but it's time to maybe finish the earrings, and I'm going to have to check the entire painting to see where to add a few more white details and will be done. For the earrings, maybe I will first try to scratch out or lift some of the pigment with the stiffer aquid brush. This one is the round with the tip. And here as well. Sometimes I can do pretty crisp details with the lifting technique. Other times, it just doesn't work because of the paper, and that's when I just do the rest with the scalpel. And here and here I want to lift some of it as well. I I will try to maybe with a bit of a dark pigment with blood stone. I just want to maybe emphasize this insights here of this earring in this way and then connect. I hope this will not turn out as a super detailed piece that I wouldn't like very much. And here, there's also some sort of shadow that the ring has around it. I will need to slightly emphasize the surroundings here as well. Here, this one, I think I'm just gonna leave like it is kind of blurred out. Maybe this painting is finished. I'm just overthinking it. Okay, I'm going to try to lift one more highlight here on the shoulder. And I'm now going to try to do some highlights with this couple. Maybe emphasize these highlights around the eyes to make it glow a little bit to emphasize the focal point as well. These highlights, I think are pretty successful. I don't have to scratch there, but here on the lips, we could add more here in this second earring, just a little bit, just a tiny bit at the bottom. Here, no, 'cause that one should be like hidden in the shadows. But then this part that connects with the ear that I think could use some highlight. Yep. And maybe even some parts of the hairs. And definitely here. Well. I think we're done. This was one of those paintings where you don't know when to stop. Like, you feel like it's finished but also not finished, you could do more. Some areas might feel a little bit messier than you thought, so you go back and back and back, and this insecurity ultimately destroys the watercolor painting every time. I'm not going to fiddle with it anymore. I'll just sign it. We will call it done. By the way, sometimes paintings are like this. Sometimes you are not entirely sure, but then maybe in time, you can identify what was the reason why you felt that the piece is not quite there? Maybe it was a stage that you no longer can fix, meaning that you worked too much in certain areas. Once that you identified, it doesn't matter when. It could be months, it could be weeks. Then you can repaint it. You can do the entire piece one more time, but try to do it more fresh and a little better. So that is my advice, and that's just something I think all of the painters do that they see a potential in a piece, but it's not quite there, so they repaint. I saw some really master artists repainting their work even three times until they made one that was finally fresh. And in those repetitions, they gathered the confidence in the brush strokes because they already knew what they were painting. This is the whole theory behind why we are even doing the sketch before we paint the finished piece, but the finished piece can also be repainted. It's my entire point. I'm going to sign now This week's portrait is now done, and congratulations to you for sticking with me up to this point. I'm so very proud of all of you for doing this challenge alongside me, and I can't wait for next week when we paint our last portrait. It will be a fantastic one, so don't forget to return, and I will see you there. 34. (WEEK 5) - Creating a Watercolor Sketch / Thumbnail, PART ONE: Welcome to final week of our five week watercolor portrait challenge. I'm so proud that you endured up until this point, but we have one last portrait to tackle. In this lesson, we will sketch and plan colors together and prepare for one last painting session with these. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Week five. Oh, my gosh, this is the last week. I hope that you are not sick of portraits yet. But the feeling that I was going for was confidence and more share in the hair process. I know that it can get a little bit tiresome. However, let me know when you submit your new projects or update your projects. I would love you to write some of your feelings around the challenge your experience if you feel like five portraits every week is just enough or not enough or too much. For me, personally, do this quite often, but feel like we should end this week with something a bit more challenging, something different than what we've created up until now, and I've chosen this beautiful reference. I have removed the background so that we're not distracted by the other colors and are only free to choose the stylization that we want. I don't think the challenging part will be the color. The challenging part will be the drawing because there's one new element besides color this week and that's the teeth. The smiles, the expressions, those are always the hardest. Harder smile than the profile smile. So that's why I've chosen it. In the complexity of this angle and the facial expression, this is one of the ones that I find manageable. Hopefully, I will feel the same when I'm struggling with my drawing in a few minutes. Yeah, and besides this, I also have chosen this beautiful flower to tackle because my next class that I will publish after the portrait one will be slowly transitioning you towards floral painting, which later this year, I want to incorporate into the portraits something that I do in my profession quite often and I find it very rewarding. Today is just a little bit of the taste of the floral painting as well. We will not do anything that requires too much detail, but I will just show you an approach that's very quick on how to capture this very efficiently in watercolor. Also, I manipulated this reference in order to distinguish the light and shadow a bit more. I feel that the shadow part is too much in shadow, so I will try to find balance between them so that there is some mid tone because the way that this reference turned out, you only see the highlights and the shadow part. There is mid tone. We will try to find a lot of mid tone when we paint. So today's lesson, this particular first lesson is all about sketching in the sketchbook, planning the reference. All of these thoughts that I have about the reference, they are theoretical, and they will turn into my actual feelings about this reference when I start drawing it, sometimes I find out that it just was not a good idea, but hopefully it's not the case. Let's start drawing. I have my last page in this sketchbook. So I want to make it count. Maybe I will sketch on the entire spread. So I want to quickly just capture there's going to be flower or the floral piece that needs placing, but there's also the structure of the entire head, which I find is best if we simplify something like this. And then there's the And then the neck here, something like this. Then we have the angle, this angle that we need to capture, that's the angle for the eyebrows. Here, the eyebrows and the eye will form a structure, something like this. We need to simplify as much as we can. Then there's the nose. The nose is always a triangle, but here, be careful because it's lifted slightly up here. And this entire part is kind of lifted as well. Here is the mouth and there's the chin. There is this beautiful, cheek line that goes with the expression that she has, and then here we see the brow and the lashes and parts of this eye. So just quickly exploring like this very roughly. I like the makeup as well. Here's the eye and lips and the teeth. Let's just not draw teeth yet. Let's only draw the lips for now. Yeah, this looks a little bit weird, but hopefully I can get there when I block everything. There's the cheek. The chin is going to be a bit larger and there's the ear. This is the hair line here up here. The hair is going to grow like this. There's the flower here. Very quickly, I need to now soften and we'll see. So the eye needs to be slightly smaller. Here, the lashes, boy, are they long? Very. And here there's a fold. And then here there's a shadow and the nose itself. Here the shadow continues. Sent here step brows This is going to be very difficult to sketch. Like a bit more challenging, but we'll do all our tricks in order to make it work. Hopefully, it will. Don't worry. It has to it's the last day of the week. So we have to finish even stronger. I think my sketch is shaping up. There's the earring of some sort. O there's the inner part of the ear. This is all going to be very much in shadow. Look at me smudging everything. Yep, here is going to be the giant flower. Okay. This is enough for me when it comes to sketch, I get the expression is there, I think. But we will need to spend more time during the sketching process. Do not draw the teeth. My sketchbook, there's not enough room for elaborate details. This is just enough. We will tackle that in more detail when we draw them on a watercolor paper. So here just leave space and just care about the silhouette. You have this sketched out at least roughly like this. We will find our palette and we'll kind of swatch all of those old and new colors. 35. (WEEK 5) - Creating a Watercolor Sketch / Thumbnail, PART TWO: Here's my palette messed up like this from the previous week. We have first color, which is the yellow orange, we have permanent red. We have permanent carmine. We have our cobble turquoise, we have ultramarine. So these two, you will alternate depending on which kind of skin tone you are painting. For fair types that don't have all that much pigment in the skin, you are okay to use cobal blue, and for darker skin types, it's best to use ultramarine because your mixes will be deeper. And then we have the cobol turquoise for accents, which will not use all that much in this one. And here is our new color. And for this one, I need to clean, actually, this dirty part of the palette. And the new color is actually one of the primary, so this is cadmium yellow medium. We can use an addition like this in our palette because this is yellow that's lighter than what we already have here, the yellow orange. And in some cases, for some designs, you will need a pure light and striking yellow in the painting. I think we'll utilize for these wonderful parts of the folkwork and I want to actually use it for stylization for some parts of the background. So that's why I think that the yellow is absolutely unnecessary for me almost all the time, because the yellow orange, it can work in mixes the way yellow can. But if I want to use clean striking yellow, then I need that kind of yellow in my palette. And so I think having this one as the eighth color is a great I'm going to pour the new yellow there so that they're close to one another, the orange and the yellow. I do not have the lemon yellow that's even lighter and more vivid, more saturated than this cadmium yellow on my palette because I rarely use it. Lemon yellow can produce striking very saturated greens, but not even landscape painters need that. Usually they need muted greens. I opt out for cadmium yellow. Medium, this color from Sminki is insanely bright and just vivid. Even though in long term, I'm going to be substituting this for anything that I find is the closest to what it looks like that does not have cadmium pigment in it. When I completely forgot about bloodstone, this is now the eight color palette. We will go into more detail about the color mixing in the lesson that is dedicated to color mixing like we do every week, so we will keep them close by for that to come. But now that I have everything in here, and we can start Coloring this quickly. So maybe this time, I would like to start with the yellow. And or had so many yellows in my studio, but this one was absolutely my favorite. I am just so sorry to let the cadmium pigments go. They were the brightest, like, the most incredible colors to work with. If you're not paranoid like I am, then you can definitely use them and get beautiful color intensity with these pigments. So I envision doing the yellow splatters, but also we will need to combine this with red because here is a lot of red. So here I'm using the permanent red. Maybe we'll need to use a little bit of carmine as well. But carmine would apply here because even the flour has light and shadow, so the light is here, and more the shadowy part gets in this area. So I will mix it with a bit of bloom to emphasize this part. And here with cadmium, permanent red, you can even add a bit more water in it so that you get slightly lighter and warmer here in this part. When it comes to flowers, if this is wet, this red flower, you have to squint your eyes at reference photo, and this is going to be very abstract, but you can grab a little bit of the blood stone mixed with permanent red to get this kind of dark color that you can see here in the shadows. Now everywhere where you see that this appear dark spots appear, you can just mark this spot with your brush like this. Here. This is going to be very abstract because these are random. This does not make any sense because the flower it has handles all directions. So you only basically paint very abstract when you paint flowers, which is what's actually hard about it, but it does not take a long time. If you can focus on transferring these values here, roughly, it doesn't even have to be 100%. Then you're going to get beautiful flowers soon. Here and here. Like that. And this is a couple of brush strokes, but we already have some sort of flour there. But I also want to replicate the green. I'm going to take a little bit of the blue, a little bit of the turquoise, maybe a little bit of the new, beautiful yellow. And then now we have the green. I'm going to darken it a bit with blood stone, and you can do these green stems that I see there. I see some of the green here as well. Then we have these parts that are lighter. I don't know what that is. Probably is just buds or some decorations. Maybe. For those, we will use the synthetic brush just dampened in clean water, and you have to have tissue there, and you can just try to remove while this is wet. Maybe that will work also when it's not wet. So this might be the only week where we do not start with the actual phase. I'm going to try the other synthetic brush, the flat one because sometimes it helps me to get the pigment out slightly better. And with this one, I'm going to add more stems, maybe just draw shadow around these and they are here as well. This is the fastest way, look. Why do we bother? This breaks even better. And then here, I also want to use the flat brush to just maybe remove some pigment around this part of the roses here to create these petals that turn around the center of the flower. Yeah, sometimes less is more gonna leave it like this. Now we can do the actual face. She's not the palest person, but she also does not have very dark skin. So we can use the orange and some of the red, clean the red first. Both of them balance the mixture, add some water in it, and then we can start by applying here, clean water only in the areas that get the most light. And then you can use a little bit of cobalt and mix it in the skin tone to cool down the skin tone in these areas. There's going to be quick change between light and shadow. Like this. Here is almost white. But then there's carmine here on the cheek. Almost white. I do not want to lose this light. Carmine and then shadow. Again, all of this is basically in shadow. And then we repeat the red kind of here, repeat the red to do the pattern on the dress. We repeat the yellow. What else do we have there? We have this blue there. We have to decide if we're going to use turquoise or maybe work with a mixture of cobbled and turquoise. Something like this. This is what is true to the reference photo, but it doesn't also mean that it's going to be benefiting the painting the most. No so I might like this, but I can also try doing green. For green, let's just mix the ultramarine with a little bit of maybe yellow. Oh, yes. Ultramarine and yellow, and we will get this green. Maybe we could use that green instead of the blue here and in the hair as well as here in order to get some effects. And then I don't want to forget to add the bloodstone for the hairs. Think I'm going to want to use it for the background as well here. And we'll see if that works. This part of the face has a lot of light, so might be great to put something darker next to it. I need to throw some colors on the page to see what works. But even the turquoise could work. This first layer is absolutely crazy. I'm going to remove some of the wetness and then dry. Then we go and do some more layers and the pencil and we'll figure it out. Like, what do we want to do in this painting? Which colors look great together unless I sit and dried, not wet, then everything is theoretic until you seat. That's why we do the sketch. Hopefully you realize that can be very helpful even though it's some extra work, but I never regret doing a sketch. What I always regret is not doing a sketch and going straight toward the color paper because that can cost me a lot of papers and a lot of time because large painting is more time than this quick sketch. Like I said, I'm going to leave this dry and I will come back to do a little bit more work. Okay, so this previous layers dried, and I will continue by trying to shade some of these parts of the face. So I mix red and blue, permanent red with cobbled blue, and I will try to apply the shadow. This shadow is going to be quite extensive here in this part. And here I add just a clean water to soften this. And then maybe here around the ear, there's going to be more of the skin tone. The ear will be slightly more red, but also less dark than the shadow. And then there's going to be the shadow on the back. Here we'll be transitioning from some color that's coming from the dress, something like that. And on the other side, just clean skin tone here. But then with smaller brush, I will have to do some shading on the nose. Here a little bit more shadow than there is right now. Just like roughly to get an idea of what is going to look like value wise. Here's gonna be even darker. This portrait will definitely fulfill the challenge format. And then there's some dark spots in the ear. Okay. And the teeth part, it can be diluted greens or blues, but just in this part. Okay, and then very dark pigment to the eye for the eye here. And the makeup. Here, the fold needs to be darker and this eyeballs always either blue or green. It's just not white. Okay, and then one thing is the earring here, but I just don't want to do more than this is enough to describe the earring. I feel I want to work a bit more in the background around the face and around this. Around this flower to use the negative painting technique in order to cut out some of these parts. I don't know if that's going to work here because there's dark hair and darkness on the dress as well. I feel it gives it a nice contra to the final I don't know if that's going to be good. I think that the Turquoise is going to be something I want to keep there, but not sure. This portrait will have way more colors than I'm used to for limited palette. But that was the intention. Another layer probably needs to dry, still throwing some paint around just to get an idea. I'm basically thinking with my brush right now. I'm not being too precious about the sketch. I just want to harmonize everything or just put two colors next to each other to see what they look like, just experimenting. I want to have tonal values roughly where they belong here or here. Roughly, not too many details. I will take care of the face in the final painting. I don't think that the shading of the face will be the problem. Just want to see what kind of arrangement we need to make in order for the painting to look interesting. Okay? And then maybe maybe lips need to be more red. Okay, we're looking at something. Now I will dry again and we'll see. So now I want to maybe lighten some parts, use my sturdy brush for lifting pigment, and afterwards, we'll just use pencil, and that's it for the planning session. Here, maybe I want to try to lift some of these spots a bit more. I feel the lifting technique is just so important. It does not work all the time, but But when it works, it can help you out. Big time with light that we've forgotten. Here, try to make this area a bit more clean. Oh, that's nice. And here, maybe just talk tiny bit so that we have the reflected light and on the ear, there's going to be some more of that reflected light here. Here as well. Oh, by the way, during the drying, I just took a brush with thick turquoise pigment and I realized that she did not have the makeup on, and I love that about the photo, so I edited that. But that was just one stroke of my brush. Now, with white pencil, I'll do everything else. Like, I'll try to look for these highlights and strong contrast areas that I might have covered with paint, but the lifting does not work there anymore. Y y Maybe I'll take a pencil and do some more of these accents here. We'll talk about the teeth in the other drawing parts where we can get a bit more detail. So when you do the sketch, the smile always needs to be this one triangle, simplify the shape of the teeth altogether like this into one triangle. But notice this silhouette here, you have to have that correct and it will work. Never draw the individual teeth, especially on a small surface like this one. I just the simplified version that will help you get them correctly. Avoid teeth, including me, I did avoid them for so many years. But once that you figure out these tiny little tips and how to do it in a way that's quick and simple but mainly simple, then you will never avoid it again because you will find your own way to simplify this. So this is a sketch, and I will have to think about it for a bit because I feel like it's filled with color, and the color could be cleaner, which means that I feel like I have too much of it here. We probably will have to do the reds, so we can't work without the reds. The reds, one and the other, they need to happen and I need to have the yellow as well. These warm colors are a must, and then the blood stone is also a must. But so far, the work. The moment I start to mix the greens and the turquoise and the blues, it gets messy because too many versions of the cool colors. Ideally, if we use the entire range of warm colors. We can't use entire range of cool ones. We have to choose one cool color, and we have to stick with it. So it's either going to be turquoise or we will mix a green that will pop or we'll just use cobalt and let it pop. I don't know. I'm conflicted, but I think we could use the combination of turquoise and cobalt and mix those two, but only work with that mixture. Cobalt turquoise, it helps that blue to shine to make it stand out. But it's also a little bit different shade than we used in previous two paintings. That's the way to go to only use this combination and just not use the green. But I think that I'm leaning towards this solution for the final piece. Now when we have everything planned, I think this might be an interesting piece. It might not be so bad at all. We will apply this huge shadow that's across her whole face. We will do this wet on wet so that it gets a little easier for you. In the next lesson, we will draw this portrait on a watercolor paper slowly and step by step. I will see you there. 36. (WEEK 5) - Drawing a Portrait, PART ONE: Lesson, we will draw our last watercolor portrait, ensuring that our proportions are as correct as we can make them doing our best as always. Keep in mind that you are leveling up your drawing skills with every single portrait that you draw by yourself, and the extra effort that you put into your sketch is admirable. Let's go. Welcome in the drawing part. Of this wonderful week five portrait. The only portrait that we will do horizontally, I don't know why. It's just usually I do the portraits in a portrait format. Well, this is the landscape format. I don't think that one looks necessarily better than the other. It just depends on the composition. And the reference photo kind of guides us towards this layout. So I'll do it like this. So from time to time, my mechanical pencil gets messed up, does not work anymore, so I'll grab another one, but it always has the same led. It's the pentel to be lead 0.5. At first, I will try to just block where I want the face to be positioned. I want it kind of almost same size like here, and I want to have it more on this side because here's going to be the flower. Maybe I will just mark the angle of the forehead, the angle of the eyebrows, measure this part. And then here we have the nose. This part, you can also measure from the top of the eyebrow to the nose to the bottom of the nose. Here I'm off already. I like this. Here, this part, I will use my straight lines to see what lines up with what. So if I have the corner of the nose here, then it will line up with this where the eyebrows begin here. The width of the nose. Yeah, more or less. Less, actually, a bit less. And then this part of the nose, here's the nostraw. I'll just eye bull it for now. Here is going to be the bottom of the eye. And There we come back later to fix the proportion and here is another one. Now. Here's the cheek part. Then the entire mouth part is going to look weird for a bit. You'll have to bear with me. And now from bottom of the nose to the chin, I will measure. Yep, it's roughly here. We only do the triangle for now. And now what we need to figure out is the distance from this line, that end of the mask of the face from here, probably somewhere in here. And then what lines up with the bottom of the ears like roughly here is going to be the bottom of the ear. Like estimate how wide the ear is. Okay, so something like this. We will see if that works. And then there's the flower. This is very rough blocking of all of these shapes. Actually, the flower needs to be here. This is the roughest sketch ever. Extremely rough. Before you refine any details, you need to take a break and remeasure everything. You can establish the points yourself. But usually, I try to look for these landmarks like top of the head to the top of the eyebrows. The eyebrows are not in one line here. They're under an angle, but this is the highest point. So usually I measure this distance. So straight line and straight line, and these two need to line up. Look, they don't already see that they don't how easy it is to make a mistake. I need to be up here with the top of my head and not lower. Then top of the eyebrow, too, let's say you do a straight line here, and then you measure this distance so that you find out whether that one is okay. And roughly, it seems to be fine. Then you can measure top of the eyebrow to the bottom of the nose. So that's different distance from here to here. This only applies if you have the reference photo roughly the same as what you are drawing, but you can still measure and compare distances, even if the reference photo is on your mobile phone, for example. You can measure the distance from here to here and find and compare a similar one. Like, similar one will be chin to noes, for example, this is just what I found very quickly. So you can measure and compare them on your drawing. And those relationships of different distances will tell you whether you have some mistakes that you did not notice before. So that measuring is extremely useful. You don't have to do it every time. I don't do measuring every time. I oftentimes eyeball everything, but when I want to get more of the likeness or do commissions, which I now don't do, but I have done in the past, then everything needs to be as accurate as possible, and therefore I utilize the measuring technique a bit more in those cases. You're just going to be shadow. So, yep, measure everything before you do refining. I'm going to take a break, leave all of these mess here, take a photo for you so that I can document the drawing stages because this is a tough drawing, and then we'll come back and fix everything or fix what we can spot. So I want to continue now. After measuring everything, I want to start refining all of the features. So I will grab the needed eraser and I soften my sketch like I always do. I got quite a lot of smudge lines on my paper, and now I still did not get rid of all of them, but I just want refine those that I find most promising or truly rightly placed, then we will get rid of all of the unnecessary sketch lines. So here, This pencil will come in handy really a lot in this one, I just drawing here. Then the nostro then here is going to be shadow, drop shadow. This I can clean now this space. There is a curve in the lower part of this nose. Here, I need line that's very, very soft, almost invisible, only that I can see because there's huge contrast here. This is very dark. This is very light. We'll get to the mouth that one more complex, and I want to talk about the teeth. But here, I feel we can get some nice curves here as well. And there is the reflection in the eye. H. Here there's the thickness of the lashes, and they're quite noticeable, so we have to draw them one by one, which is not what I normally do very frequently. But if the makeup is so bold, then I have to draw. This is the direction of the shadow. Here is going to be the shadow as well and here. And then the lashes. All right. And then here we have the thickness of the other eye. Here we have the brow and the lashes really stand out in this area. I'm hoping this is all not looking weird. Good. I think we can now move on to the mouth, finally. So I want to talk about the teeth. The teeth should never, never, ever be drawn one by one, you should always get the whole silhouette of the teeth, never divide them with a line. And what I mean by that here is one triangle that we need to get and we need to get a proper shape of that. Let's draw this here and here, this is one triangle. Imagine the entire face curving like this. At hand is this bottle. It curves like this. Let me wrap a paper around it so that you can see it's like this. This is the skin. And so now imagine that we have lips. We have the part that divides one lip and the other lip, you have the upper lip and you have the lower lip. But now the lips and the teeth also, they're wrapped around this form, see? So we have to take into account this roundness and also the teeth will kind of round up on this side, this side is always wrapping around, and that's important because of the light. There's going to be shadow here in this area and lots of light here. But also because when you imagine it three D, then it's going to be easier for you to draw this curve. Now here is that one part of the mouth and here, here we have the teeth wrapping around, all of them, wrapping around. Here is a curve, and then the lower lip is wrapping around the teeth here as it curves around the face. And here there's a corner, so this is going to be dark upper lip, lower lip. Upper lip will always be darker than the lower lip. But it's going to be something like this. Now that you have this shape, nothing here in between, you have this shape, then you can start finding the tiny little indent in the lower side of the teeth line. Imagine this as one line being kind of slightly interrupted here at the bottom, and then here, you don't draw a line, you just find where it's interrupted. This is one point that interrupts first and the second tooth here. And then the other one kind of indents here. And then the other one and now we're done. This is just one line, and this cannot be too dark. It's just subtle. But the very similar indents are going to come from the top as well. But, you very lightly press the pencil. Don't draw them too harsh, like this. And then another one, see And then another one. This is mostly in shadow anyway, this entire thing. So there's just one, and there's never do this, never draw the line across the teeth. That's how you get them more or less accurate or at least it's not going to look too weird. But this is going to be the hardest part of this portrait, hardest part for you to draw. When we fill this with color, it will all come together, but more or less, this all will be in shadow, while this front part will be more in light and here their accents. And then here's going to be chin. And lots of all of these lines that are supposed to help. You need to clean up like here and here between the eyes on the forehead, lots of cleanup to get a nice silhouette here as well. I just want to go over this a little bit so that But I can be sure that this is okay. The eye looks fine. But I think it looks fine. Okay. So here we have that part of the face, and then we have the ear. I do not stress about the ears, usually. Just more or less, if it lines up where it's supposed to, then it's fine. Usually just let it go and focus on other parts of the portrait. And then, yes, there's going to be the earring. And here, the folds of the this part was more precise. This part will be a little bit more free. But then we still have to check the sketch if it's correct. We'll see. There's going to be the red flower, no, this is weird. The top of the head is a bit weird. But here is another part of the hair with maybe a ribbon here. This can be very sketchy. This can be very rough outline. You don't have to. Maybe that goes a bit too far, you don't have to be very precise. You do not need individual flower petals to be drawn there. This is just enough. We will paint everything in very spontaneous way with very free technique. Okay. I'm a little scared for this portrait. It has to turn out well because it's the last one, but it's always with last portrait, we're exhausted after five long weeks. Part of us want to kind of finish the challenge and just want to be done with it. But the part of me that cares about this portrait, I find this portrait beautifully. I hope that I'm not going to mess it up because I get impatient at the end of the project. One last cleanup, one last just checking of my lines. Okay. Never get the chin right the first time. Always fixing the chin with every single portrait. We'll see if it's good later when we place the color, but I feel like this is as accurate as I can get. With these proportions, I'm not sure about this part of the neck. I feel the neck should be a bit shorter. Yep, here. And it. The neck, actually, it can give the face a whole different expression if it's drawn incorrectly that face can feel I don't know, startled even. It should be just fine. The other earring kind of shows in here might not be too important, but maybe we want to include. We'll see. I'm going to take a little break because at this point, I can't tell. I'm just not sure about anything. But then I will throw the painting on the ground, maybe take a photo of the reference and sketch are, and we will see if there's anything that I can spot. You probably see the problems right now, but I can't. So when you look for too long at your own drawing, then you cannot find your own mistakes anymore. It makes you blind. I will see you in five 37. (WEEK 5) - Drawing a Portrait, PART TWO: So I threw my drawing on the ground and I found one major error, but I think the eye is a little too small, but maybe that's just because in pencil, there's not enough contrast and that makeup could probably be able to fix it. Something about the upper lip also, it is a little bit too down. I need to lift it slightly, literally give her a face lift. But the main problem that I found with my drawing is bottom part of the ear I should be closer to the face. So I try to remeasure that, and this is what I came up with. So I'm going to have to move this part and also move that part of the earring, as well. I'm going to try to do this before I paint because that's going to be very hard to fix later. Okay, and I also took a photo quickly on my phone of my sketch and reference. When I'm quickly switching between them, I'm noticing that my head is slightly wider than it should be. So I will try to make the eye definitely a bit larger and just make the head a bit more compact this way. Yep. Okay. We'll try to make sense of this. But please spend time with your drawings, give it some time, give it a few more. If you are eager to paint, then at least half an hour. Then go back to it, try to fix it. And only if you absolutely cannot find any more mistakes, then you paint. But that extra time is going to be I promise less and less with every single portrait that you draw because that's how you learn. Let's be honest, it depends on your level of tiredness because when tired in the evening, I can see less mistakes. And in the morning with my fresh head, probably I can see more. I can find them easily and the corrections take less time. So that's also a major factor. Sometimes my level of tiredness also influences the painting, but mostly it influences the drawing. I do highly recommend take your time, do a couple of revisions with your drawing and only paint when you're sure. Do my revisions now smaller than it's supposed to be. So that's one problem. The other problem is the ear. This definitely needs to be moved. But I think this angle is right. This bit needs to be here. And here we need to do a little bit more like, make the entire head more compact. Yep, now I like her more, much more. She's very elegant. So I don't want to do her injustice. I need to move this one as well, tiny bit. And the forehead here's just a bit of the hair. Forehead can be very important feature for a portrait. Oh, yeah, the lip, I need to lift that upper lip a little bit like that. Y. And drawing facial expressions, I always try to think about what makes this expression look like that. And in this case, it might be this angle, this particular point. First of all, it's dark, so we need to make it slightly darker. And second of all, this point needs to be sharper. I never know if something will work unless I try. And then if it doesn't I have to try to figure out, why not? What is behind it. But I think also here, like this shadow might also be playing a role. Well, I probably won't be able to make it better at this point. So I just want to try to paint and we'll see. Okay. Last time. If my painting doesn't work, then maybe I will just use the sketch again and color it again. I give up the best I can do. Rest will depend on the colors. I managed to draw something. Let's hope that this portrait works out. I'm excited. In the next lesson, we will do a quick color mixing exercise to get acquainted with the last color on our palette, making sure that we know how to use it and combine it with other colors. I will see you there. Okay. 38. (WEEK 5) - 8 color palette - Mixing Exercise: Lesson, we incorporate a new color and this color ensures that our palette can produce all kinds of vibrant tones, including bright yellow and light saturated green, it's an important one. Let's take a look at it. Welcome in the last color mixing session that we have in this class. Now when we add the last color, which is the cadmium yellow medium to our palette, we now have an eight color palette. I do consider this a full palette. You do not need much more to work with watercolors and paint almost anything. These combinations of these colors will give you green, subtle greens, but also very vivid greens. So let's go over it. This might be the most extensive color mixing exercise that we will do. I will still try to keep the wrap around courtet so I will start with skin tones, but then I will give you suggestions if you want to combine these colors and paint anything else because this is a beautiful versatile palette that you can use really for any. Put the tubes aside, I pour new and fresh paint into the palette. Maybe accept ultramarine because I will not use this all that much in this particular demo. I will start with skin tones. This is yellow orange, and this is permanent red. When we mix these two, we will get what? You know this. Even in your sleep, you will be able to tell how to mix skin tone because you've practiced this for so many weeks. And there you have your skin tone that's a bit on the yellow side, and here is your reddish skin tone. You can pour clean permanent red into skin tone when you're painting accents like skin on the ears, especially on the sun, like on the light. And you can also use that for lips, for nose, and then you can use carmine and dilute the carmine and add it to your skin tone when you want to paint cheeks. Lips is great to paint with carmine. So this is your third color actually here, permanent carmine. And now we've added the fourth color that's warm, and this is beautiful yellow cadmium, which is semi opaque because this color can be vivid even on its own. It's not fully transparent, but you can mix it into the skin tone, even if you have skin types that lean towards the yellow a bit more if you want to, but we will not do that. We will just stick to yellow orange and permanent red. That's just good enough. I will use the yellow mainly for the accents on the clothes, for the earring, maybe and some stylization. So we'll not use that for skin. And then you have the most important colors from the cool side, this is cobbled blue. Cobbled blue can be mixed with red. Careful not to mix with permanent carman but to mix with permanent red to get the shading mixture, mixture that you can use for shadows. If you put more blue in it, it will look a bit different. And when the red prevails, you can see that. Exactly the same way can be used ultramarine blue, which is naturally darker than cobbled. With your permanent red, it form also a mixture that's slightly darker, but will be very similar to this one. So I use cobbled blue for a lighter skin tone, fair skin tones, and the ultramarine for deeper skin tones, which I find very versatile. It gets me to the deeper tones a bit more fast than cobalt. Belt would need more layers and might be slightly overworked so I use cobbled for that. Then we have this beautiful accent color. This is cobbled turquoise. That one, I usually use it as a pop color. I use it for stylization, for clothing, for my paintings to pop a bit more. This beautiful pigment, you could not mix it. It's a primary color. You could not mix it from any of the blues that you have. It's really good versatile color to have in your palette. As a recap, you have to keep in mind that it's slightly opaque so it can muddy up all of the rest of your colors if you mix too much into it. I just use it as a standalone pigment. Most of the time. However, if you want very vivid greens, you can use this one and the new wonderful yellow and there gives you those combinations give you this crazy green. So if you want saturated greens, then use cobble turquoise with the new yellow cadmium that we acquired into the palette. If you want muted greens, you can use the cobalt or the ultramarine even. You can try to mix it with the yellow. You will get it's still quite saturated, but it's slightly more subtle than here. But I would mix it with yellow orange to get subtle greens, yellow orange plus cobalt blue. And that gets you muted greens. If you mix the ultramarine blue with the yellow orange, then you get deeper muted greens like forest green. Look at this. This is even deeper than here. So you get all of these beautiful greens, which we might not be using today, but just so you know that you can use your eight color palette to create a whole range of different tunnel values. Then we have one color that's special. We have color. It's not supposed to act purely like a black substitute because this is warm black or warm dark. It's called blood stone genuine like you know, and it granulates. When you have all of these colors, most of them are smooth. So brands will give you ultramarine or cobble turquoise that granulate more than mashminki colors, and that's good because that also can make it very versatile. Like to combine the granulation with smooth pigments in my paintings, and this particular blood stone pigment, I love to use it. You can take it and mix it even into these greens and then that will give them a little bit of the granulation. Now you can play around with your palette, mix all of these combinations, and you will see what you discover, combining smooth pigments granulating pigments is so much fun. Oftentimes it give you beautiful duochrome effect. So eight colors is quite a lot. You do not really need more than these colors. Regarding color mixing, I do plan this year to do a whole class just about color mixing, but also about how to build your palette if you are all of the kinds of different watercolor painters. So if you paint portraits, landscapes, animals, et cetera, which pigments you should always start with and how to reduce some colors and how to add some colors depending on what you paint. Look for that. But today, I just want to utilize these beautiful colors in this new painting. I think we went through all these colors. I just like to combine the carmine with the blood stone. That's one of my favorite mixes and it gives me this duochromatic effect, but it's like a volcano paint. Look at this. It's wonderful. One thing that I've been thinking about the sketch that we did two lessons ago. This one, and I've been rethinking colors, and I think the turquoise yellow and the bloson is great, but I would like to substitute in the final piece my red for carmine. I would like to do the carmine flower. I feel that the red does not pop that well against the turquoise. So that's just a theory. I need to see it on the paper. So I'd like to do the car minor with this beautiful turquoise, because I feel that these colors, they are best complement. It is better compliment than red with turquoise. And then I will use yellow for accents because I want these two really screamed. This is going to be the most vivid piece that we've done, and then support this with a little bit of ultramarine blue. So I think this could be the main color combination. Yep. Some of these might be turning green directly on the page, but it's going to be great. This is how I want it. The dominant red will not be permanent red, but I will make the karma my dominant color, and this is the color combination that excites me more, what I've been seen here, and hopefully that will work. Do you see the difference this one to this one? I think she's going to look great with this color. And with all of this prepared, I now feel warmed up to do first layer of my paintings. In the next lesson, we will begin the painting process. This is our very last portrait painting in this challenge. I'm excited to go through this with you again, and I will see you there. 39. (WEEK 5) - First Layer, Flower & Background: In this lesson, we will begin the painting process. By Week five, you are already familiar with what our process entails. In the first stage, we usually apply skin tones as well as the background followed by shadows and details with the final stylization in the end. However, sometimes we have extra elements in our painting and we have to think about what would be the best approach, what to paint first. So in my demo today, I decided to start with the flower in her followed by the regular portion of the skin tones and background washes. So in this lesson, we will kind of get a peek into how I paint flowers quickly and effectively a subject that I would love to incorporate into portraits in my future classes. Let's go. I'm so excited. At least the first layer I should get done today. Let's mix some colors that we will use first. I will need skin tone. I will need deeper base for a first layer. And that is because this part of the pace is just it is all in shadow. I will already be using the shading mixture. And that means the red with the blue. In this case, it's permanent red with cobbled blue, and skin tone is just yellow, orange with red, diluted. That's going to be in this area. Here are some highlights that we will not want to cover with paint, and I will need carmine set aside because I want to use it for the flour, as well as for the lips, cheeks. Let's do this. We will need to do the flower wet in wet in a similar way that we did during the sketching process and we will not make a big deal out of a couple of these parts. Maybe we'll actually start with that. I'll prepare all the colors and we'll focus on this one to start with. Here's going to be my skin tone. Yellow orange with permanent red mixed together, diluted. Here's the skinton. I'll rather prepare more than less because I don't want to be mixing when everything is wet and I'll be in a hurry. Here is the skinton and here is going to be the mixture of red and bubbled blue. I will make it a bit thicker and this might be more of it because there's going to be such a huge area. Okay. I have these two prepared. This is fine for the skin to maybe a bit more of that yellow orange and carmine here, diluted carmine. And a lot of carmine. Good. So I will start by pre wetting this with my brush, large brush. This part only around the flour for now. And then when it's wet, we can take carmine. I can mix it up a little bit here. I mix up a little bit thicker carmine because this is already wet and I will start applying it. Look how that spreads. This is going to be we'll just eyeball some of these floals flower petals. Some parts will be will be less dark. Here is the flower. Hopefully you can see. It's okay. If it spreads, it should spread. That's fine. In this part, we need to start adding a little bit of that cobbled blue so that it gets slightly more into shadow like this. This part needs to be cooler. I just mix cobbled blue with that carmine and we can start adding the dark spots like we did during the sketching process. When you screen your eyes and you see some dark spots somewhere, you can just add them here. I try to add more just thick carmine here when I'm in the part that's more on the sun and a bit more of the blue in my mixture as I move towards this part. But it's just always needs to be slightly darker. Here I need a bit more of that blue and all needs to be done while this is wet. We can also take the brush, synthetic brush, and we can use the brush with clean water to get out some of these highlights. Here there's a highlight. You can just lift it from the page here. There are some highlights. One, two, three, and then there are these tiny white flowers. When you take them out, you need to apply the shadow. So that's going to be a little bit of cobbled blue mixed with a little bit of bloodstone to create this pale gray, and apply it here in the middle. Okay. These darker accents here at the bottom. And then we can just mix a green with turquoise and I guess a little bit of yellow, but we have to add blood stone in order to make it darker and thicker. This is my green mixture, and I'll just draw the stems here. Since this is still kind of wet, you need to draw with thicker pigment, don't have too much water on your brush. But also, with this green, we need to do this. The green parts in this flower here, but you can be very abstract. You can just add them like this. Let it breathe. This part is already dry, but never mind. This is good enough. I don't want to touch this anymore. It's just good enough. I'm not going to dry this because I will do the skin tone now. For the skin tone, we'll just do the process like always. So we apply the skin tone tiny bit of the skin tone. Here a lot more of the skin tone here like this. And then we apply clean water to connect and don't touch it anymore here as well. Clean water skin tone. And a little bit darker here. And here the wash needs to go deeper. It just needs to be darker. But I will want to add a lot more red here in this part and some carmine in this part. It looks horrible. It's true ugly stage straight from the start, right from the beginning. Here a little bit of that red to the nose. Clean brush and more red here. Like smaller brush I meant. Now, very careful about the teeth. I want to draw this part with a bit of carmine on my brush here and here. Just connect with clean water. Almost don't touch this highlight, but the teeth, this part needs to be gray. And here gray and here gray, the only highlights are here on the top of these two teeth. Everything else is gray. Like the eye ball is not white. Even the teeth, they're very rarely completely white, I mean. So we need to connect everything so that it looks believable and more realistic. Okay. Here and here, we can keep this. And here, just clean water. Really clean water here. This is a lighter part. Don't know why I have so much pigment in here but lifted because that part of the chin, here, the lower one, it has reflected light. I should not be having so much pigment. The pigment will be focused more around this part here. This part is more in shadow and that I just want to connect everything. Here I'm going to be using this very expressively parts of this yellow let me paint the yellow on her dress with a little bit of orange here. Tiny bits of yellow here as well. So pattern. Now I want to maybe do stylization. Not worrying about skin tone right now. If I don't like the painting after this layer, then I will have to redo. Carmine, we'll connect. Now finally, the turquoise. We let go of the paint. This might turn out very bad. But also can be lots of fun. It's ridiculous for me to comment this part because I don't know what I'm doing ever is just an experiment. And the only thing that I'm risking is my paper, which I have plenty of. That's how I need to talk to myself about it because I would be too stressed. I always convince myself that the worst thing that can happen is that I ruined the paper, and then I have more paper in the studio to ruin, so it's not a big deal. Okay. Okay, I will collect all of this crazy water. Now that I have the large pulls done, I need to get written here to define at least some parts of this pattern, but we have to do it with very thick pigment because there's so much water here. And so I grab a little bit of this yellow, and I try to go back with the yellow and just do parts of this pattern on the dress here as well, just and then the cobble turquoise like that. You have to have it thick. Pattern. I'll just draw a pattern, draw a floral shape here as well. It doesn't have to be exactly like on the reference, just to say that there is a pattern somewhere. Adding a bit more carmine as well. Now, the only thing that's missing is the blood stone. Maybe we'll leave it to the other layer, but the bloodstone is part of the pattern here, that those dark accents I find very intriguing. So I'll try to add some while it's still wet so that it runs a little bit. I forgot that inside this earring, there is a skin tone in here in this part. Go back in here and do this pattern again with thick pigment that's the rule of the wetting wet technique is a very thick pigment to draw the pattern on the earring. Here are some yellow parts. Now, there's not much for me to do, but wait for it to dry. And then we'll see what needs to be refined, but every mess, even a mess like this can be refined. You can make some parts a bit more defined with second layer, third layer. So now I will wait for all of this mess to dry. Then we'll take a look. This would be a big deal, but if you don't try to fix it when it's wet, it's going to be fine. You have to leave them to dry completely, and then we can gently massage this part. This dget, we can actually work with it. But if you try to fix it while it's wet, it will only make bigger mess. That's one thing I learned about this particular paper that can not go back into semi dry and semi wet wash. Okay, I'll meet you here in maybe an hour when all of this is dry. In the next lesson, we will start applying shadows to the face and deepen everything. I will meet you there. 40. (WEEK 5) - Painting Shadows, PART ONE: This lesson, we will do shading around the face. We will use combination of wetting, wet technique and applying shadows wet on dry to adjust. We will also incorporate detail where it's needed. Let's go. So let's continue with this process. I will now want to deal with the most difficult thing in this painting, and that's going to be these shadows in the face, trying to fix the imperfections as well as painting hair. I guess I did not do the hair because it was not important and the layer kept drying on me, so that was the reason why I skipped it. Hair is black or near black is very dark, and so you can add that any later. First of all, I poured clean water onto my brush, and I will try to rub this a little bit. Just rub this a little bit. Maybe we don't even have to try to fix the edge because we will work wet and wet, so we will wet the entire face and neck. And then we will place shadows in that layer. So I guess you can try rubbing it a little bit. But other than that, we have to wet this entire part of the face. Try not to wet the edge of the flour. But the entire face and the hair needs to be damp. But only stay in the contours of the face for now, and we will try to tackle the large shadows. Here, I will wet everything besides the earring. Nose. Not sure if we will be quick enough to do the nose in this area also, but maybe we'll see. And I will mix the red and blue here on the side to get this darker mixture for shading. And let's try to now add this into the wet wash. So it should come in here, here also, and here, but it should not be this way. You can try to remove some of the pigment. This is why when you pre dampening, some areas, you have to stay within the contours of the face if that's possible. Here we have to careful around the neck area. And maybe I will work a little bit here in this darker part of the ear, but already trying to separate the inside of the ear and the outside. Now I will mix a thicker mixture here and get some accents in there. But wetting wet is best. Now, here I want to use a bit more carmine. I guess these other shadows they will they will need me to work a bit more precise with thinner brush here a bit more red, here a bit more red. This area rather not dark. And the rest with small brush. No, I can't return to this area. I have to do the hair because this dries so quickly today. And I have my bloodstone genuine, but here we have to kind of be mindful about the contour of the flower. Here we have to sort of negatively paint the contour of the flower and maybe grab the textured brush and much better with the hair. Don't have to be so dark. But here I want the hair kind of at least a little bit to spread in the wet surface because that will look more natural. You're slightly darker. Okay. I'm trying to focus, but we can't do too much before the paper dries and so I will not try to force it and you know my opinion about the semi dry stage. I do not want to completely mess things up, so I would rather take my hair dryer and dry everything than continue while the paper is reactive. So now, maybe a little bit of these eyebrows with the soft brush. Just a tiny bit so that I can see contours here. And here as well. And I want to fill in these ice as well, because that will help us see the tonal values. And a bit more darkness here. I'm working with blood stone for that. And we should use the turquoise for the makeup. So thick turquoise color do this. We have to dry at this stage because I could do a mess if I touch this. But I think that we've done a good job with fixing this part. I do not want to work all that much here. This is turning out to be my favorite portrait, but let's not mess this up now. I don't think that here we need too much work. I would show some structure here because I just was not able to do it in one go because it was drying out so quickly, so I had to decide, and I decided to prioritize the hair. But now I feel like one last time I need to wet this area or dampen it. Then go with a little bit more dark shading mixture like accents here in this part and here around the neck to show some structure because it's not very good. And this layer, if I wanted to only fill in these tiny parts of the shadow that could break this huge area that we need to fill. So I'm going to risk this one more time, and we'll gently This is what soft brushes are made for. They can do this very gently. I will pre vet everything without hopefully destroying the paint underneath and only wet the face in this area. I'm not going to paint here. I don't want to have maps anywhere, so that is why. And then I will mix the thicker mixture from red and blue slightly thicker. We'll make sure that my brush cannot be dripping with paint. Oh, that's maybe too thick. And here I will try my best to get some structure. Maybe even a bit more bluer in this area. And blue here. Already dried. Already dried. Here we need to get shadow as well. We'll do this part separately wet on dry because there's just no way that I can do this because it just dries so quickly. But that's okay, we have different conditions, every one of us, depending on where we paint, depending on the humidity in the air, and we can't complain about that. We have to work with what we have every time. So I will try to do my best with what I have. I will dry this and work the rest or wet on dry. We were supposed to go with a little bit more red tone here and not such blue one, that would be better choice for the ear, I believe. I don't know why I went with the blue. Here is one still trying to get more depth here. And more blower part. Just more blower part. And here as well. And here as well. Okay. Drying time. 41. (WEEK 5) - Painting Shadows, PART TWO: Clean up this mess, but maybe it looks a little better, but I now know why working with two layers only is the best, but you have to train for many years in order to achieve the depth you need in that first goal because when you re wet and rewet, then it just leaves streaks, especially with darker skin tones. The more pigment there is, the more of a chance of you lifting it with every second addition. This is fine. It's just how we learn by train again and again. And I like to analyze my process this way, even though none of the paintings are perfect and none is done in one go, then I at least know what to focus on in the next piece. So right now, I would like to focus on the shading around the eyes, around the nose, and then the lips and the teeth, which will be so important right now it looks a bit weird. And we will now work wet on dry. So on dry paper, well not pre wet anything anymore. And I will use the one mixture that I always use for shading and that's red and blue, red and blue. But we'll have to do some more work. Yep, in this area, especially. So here, there's the makeup. I feel that around it, you don't paint through the turquoise because it will you will doll it down. But we need to add here some more depth in this corner. And then I want to adapt here below the eye. As well. And so here I'm using the technique where you place the pigment to dry paper, and then use clean water on your brush and sort of try to blend it with the previous layer. Usually, it works just fine. Like this. Then we also have to take a little bit of that red and go inside the eye here. Just make sure that here, you kind of leave out a little bit of white space or lighter space so that the eye can pop. That is the thickness of the eyelid that needs to pop there. And here, it can be more of the shading mixture, but I'll just use turquoise or blue or some sort of gray look like it's a ball so that It's usually grayish on the sides and a little bit more white in the middle and that makes it look like a ball. Slightly better than before. I will use the shading mixture with a little bit of the platton genuine just because she's wearing makeup. So these parts, they're going to be super contrasty here and also here we need to sort of draw a little bit more than usual because of the makeup. Here and the lashes as well. In this case, I will have to draw individual lashes with the tiny brush. Okay. And also the bottom lashes. And here this is, I believe the eyebrows is good. Okay. I'll continue with the shadow here. Oh, my gosh, I should have done that before the lashes. Now I have to be super careful in this area. Yeah, usually I just leave the lashes to be the last, but this time, I was a little bit but not purposefully. If you paint this way, then you can accidentally smear the detail, which we would not want to do. We want the detail to be nice and crisp. But there definitely needs to go shadow. And I will mix more of the shading mixture. Place here. Oh, my gosh. This is not good color that was an accident. Something got into my brush that's not supposed to. Okay. So now I will for this paint here. And here and here as well. This is what the shadow looks like, but now we have to control the edges. So some of the edges need to stay crisp. But most of these like over here and even here, we need to dissolve slightly. But then you have to go back in with thicker shading mixture, while this is wet preferably. But as you saw, it doesn't always work. And here in these areas where you can see the shadow is a bit more dark and accent here and around the nostril. And then also here, I'll try to add this into the wet layer so that I don't have to. Another layer. Now I'm lifting some of the pigment to reveal a highlight here. Okay. That more. That shadow needs to be real dark over here so you can place the darker, a bit more bluer paint and then pull outwards with something that's a tiny bit more transparent and redder here. Now, since we're working wet on dry, I will probably try to dry this just to make sure that it stays where I put it. Okay, so are you ready for the difficult part? I hope you are, and that's the teeth. When it comes to the eye, I might just lightly correct this part and maybe deepen the dark part of the eye. Here tiny bit. But other than that, I don't feel that it needs much more. But what definitely needs adjustments is the lips. So I'm preparing the carmine color here and we'll start with that. Even the red color here, it has some sort of change. It is brighter and lighter here in this area. So that's where you can use almost pure red. But it's darker here. I would even mix it with the shading mixture in that area. It would start with this. See it's real dark. Here. And it's also dark here at the bottom. But then as it gets towards the light, it is lighter and the red really pops there. When this is painted, we need to get the color of these gums and we need to color that area. And so that could also be usually it's just leftovers from my palette. It's bits of carmine, bits of the shading mixture, diluted so that you can find a color similar to this. It's not going to be very vivid or vibrant, but you can start filling in these gums in here. With that color like that. Now, the actual teeth also has shadow. And for that, we'll need some sort of gray. I have some grays here that they come from my blues, the blood stone, even, you see. But I feel like on the teeth, it also has some sort of yellow undertone, so I'm going to mix in a little bit of yellow, just a tiny bit. Gray is, I would say greenish type of gray, something like this. And that's good for this teeth here. So I'm going to color the teeth, but on this side, here are the highlights, so pay attention to the highlights and do not color the highlights. Yep, I think something like that works. And then the lower lip is the same. Carmine mixed with a shading mixture, you can darken it tiny bit maybe even with blood stone here, and we need to get these accent here in between the teeth here and here. And pure carmine, but diluted, of course. And on the lower lip, you can draw this pattern that you can see on the reference photo is that there is some sort of pattern on the lips. I know this is tough. We can do it. Okay, I'm going to dry and we will see what that looks like. I don't think we're bad, if I leave it like this and continue with the shadows underneath the lips, that could be fine, but I still feel that the teeth, especially in this part, need not a separation, but the accents in between from the bottom side could be a little bit more visible. And so here and here just for a contrast. Here. These will only be those are only more or less a regular accents. Okay. All right. I'll try to add the shadow below the mouth, which is, again, red and blue shading mixture. And that one shadow starts here in this area. That's the one, the tricky one that we already tried to get that one going in this area. And both sides, I need to try to blend with everything else. But there's one below the mouth, too, and that is a very important one. It kind of goes to the lower lip from the side a bit. Just follow the reference, notice the reference. Here I went a little bit too far. And I feel like we could have the skin tone ready, just basic skin tone. And in this area, the more of the regular skin tone shows than the shading mixture. Okay. I still feel that the lips are not red enough. One more layer of red is going. Be she's got lipstick so I need it to pop a bit more. We'll only know this after drying because reds are so difficult to get in watercolor. This all is in shadow so Yep. I feel like this is fine. I want to do a bit more shedding around the ear, and we're not all that far from finishing this. So here around the ear, I feel like we need crisper edge. I did not manage to do this very well in wet and wet layer, and I went over this area twice, but this happens. So one more and one more here from this side. Also, just to keep this edge of the ear a bit more crisp. Good. Maybe some parts of the ear as well, but I want to keep more loose, then this part definitely needs to be crisper. Cool. As for these earrings, the pattern just does not have to be too loquid, maybe I'll just add a bit more of this breaking of this earring. And here, I feel like I want to just with clean water, remove some of the pigment here and here. Just remove, lighten Good. Maybe that would be better to do with the thicker brush because the pigment went over my lines in some areas. Here we forgot the earring. Do we want it there? Maybe not? Don't know. Maybe yes. I want that to be like yellow, but in the shadow, something like this. Before we add some details, I forgot this part of the hair. So let's do it. I will pre wet here tiny bit. And with textured brush, I will first place the dark hair. So here, here and a little bit here. That's the part with dark hair. Try to go always when doing wet and wet I just remind you work with more thicker pigment. But then the red ribbon. If you want, we can leave it like this. It's quite comprehensible, but I could do the accents with carmine that turn out. Well, pretty quickly. In the next lesson, we will finish the painting process. I will meet you there. 42. (WEEK 5) - Final Adjustments & Challenge COMPLETED :): Lesson, we will conclude the painting process of our final week five portrait. We will apply another background wash to adjust the stylization of the portrait, which is completely optional. We will paint difficult details around mouth and teeth and tweak every area that might need it to tie everything together. Let's start. So I guess some last adjustments. I'm still thinking about the background or more of the blood stone to be in the background, but it's not necessary. Also, I want to experiment a little bit. Now, I totally risk in ruining the painting, but I want to experiment because I'm telling you my reasoning is that this is quite large area and I don't like the texture, how it turned out, and I can't fix it anymore. I would be reworking the same area third time, fourth time, and watercolor paper doesn't like that. But again try to do this trick where I kind of do some variety in that texture without destroying the character and the tone, and I will do that with sprinkler. Maybe this will turn out bad. So I'll just spray. This a little bit. Wait a bit here in this part, and we'll do this. Kind of just remove the pigment. Could look like a weird texture, but I really like what that looks like. Worked more in the hair, but I actually wanted it in the face a bit more. Where I don't want it, I clean it fast and where I want it, I live for a bit, and then I will clean it. I didn't work very well here only work in the hair. That's fine. I can go over the hair one more time with bloodstone and cover if there's too much of these spots. But I like this texture. I like that one. It can be very useful if you have spots that need a little variety. Et's rethink the background. I do think that the background could deserve a little bit more, just a tiny bit more of the bloodstone being involved, and I even want to use it to cut out a little bit of this flower. I did intend to place it there. I want to here connect this, and here I just want to cut out the flour. And here the dress, but I need fresh bloodstone because my diluted bloodstone is just not the same. Okay. So here I feel like we need more contrast, and I try to care for the silhouette of the flour. While here, I want to incorporate it into what exists. Okay. Other side, let's do this or something similar. So here the texture goes like this. Here is the dress. And I need to be careful around the face. So taking my brush that I can best control, hopefully, and we'll do this. Negative painting technique, around the face. And here the forehead. But very light in this area. This looks crazy, and you definitely don't have to do this. You can just leave the colorful background that we had here previously. I just want to develop my own way in stylizing this portrait so that it is instantly known as mine, and I do like darker backgrounds that frame the figure and the portrait a bit more. So that is why I'm going for this style, but absolutely, you can do lighter textures, less color, less craziness overall. And here I will do a little bit more of the turquoise and we'll try to connect everything. Now I will dry and we'll see what that looks like. But before drying, of course, I need to get rid of this extra water. Now, I've dried everything, and I must say, even though I have stuff to fix, still, but just a couple. I love this portrait. Like, it's beautiful. Look at these textures. The face is not ideal. Here is a little bit messy. I would have to paint it again in order to try to get this one be a bit more clean. But overall, I just I like the atmosphere and I think even the smile turned out more or less fine. But let's try to clean some stuff maybe with the synthetic flat brush that I'm using this aquite here I'd like to see maybe a bit more of these hairs, floating hairs. Maybe I'm just going to try to rub some of these out like that. Yes we will do some with this couple. But if I can try to remove some of these. So that here we have silhouette that is comprehensive. Maybe this part of the ear could be a bit more shinier. And this one as well just tiny bit. I try not to lighten too much, but this helps me with showing some structure of the ear here as well. Because I always feel that this ear turned out a little bit more flat than deserved. Then with thin brush and a little bit of the blood stoned. I want to emphasize this earring tiny bit more maybe a few more of these floating hairs here. Now I want to do the cobble turquois straight from the tube and just emphasize this makeup. That could stay shiny even when it dries. And here, Shiny bit lighten this part of the clothes. Lighten here as well. Maybe lighten here, tiny bit more. And here is Oh, yes, now I like how that shows the figure here in this area. Here, too. Just a bit. Those are tiny details, but they can do a lot for the portrait. You can feel unimportant. I just want to see whether that helps or not. And here Good. Maybe. This part of the flower, too. I'm not going to even touch the flower because I wanted it this abstract. I absolutely love it. It's very fresh. Everybody knows that it's a flower. You don't need to do details here. Plus, this is the focal point, not that. One more thing to tidy up is this part around this cheek. I'd like really this part to shine because that's the smile. And also, I lost the light on the notes, and I noticed this before, was waiting for the opportunity to fix this. Here, we want the light to be a little bit more aggressive and tiny bit here and a lot in here. Sure. Good. Okay. And the scalpel, a little bit of these floating hairs, maybe. Here part of the flower. Tiny parts of these earrings. And I don't even normally be here. There's not going to be too many things to do with the scalpel here. Maybe here some. I could maybe scratch out some here the highlights, mainly. There's one here. Yes, I feel this is accurate, but also maybe bottom lip. And I will the eraser and I'll try to do this. Because there's the lost edge between the tooth and the background, it doesn't have to be pencil there. But I will not fiddle with this painting anymore. And even if I wanted to, the paper would not let me anymore. It's been rough on the paper. And so let me sign. Since I used so much water, then the paper literally is just letting go of the pad. I don't even need to use knife to get it out. And this is the final piece for our last week of colorful portraiture in this particular challenge, I hope you enjoyed. Our last portrait is now done. Doesn't matter if it turned out perfect or not. Finished is the most important metric when we are starting to learn a craft like this. I could not be more proud of those of you that endured up to this point, and now it's time to update your project. Oh