Watercolor Portrait: from Sketch to Final Painting

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Bia Barrett and I'm watercolor artists specialized in portraits. Have you ever looked at a watercolor portrait and thought, wow, I really wish I knew how to paint like that. I wish I had a technique. When you try to learn on your own, it was just a frustrating experience. Well, I've gone for that and that's why in 2019, I started investing in workshops and classes with some of the best artists in the world. Now after a couple of years of practice, I can finally say that this is my favorite medium. Before, I used a lot of graphite in my work. But that took a long time and it didn't have the versatility and fun that I find with watercolor. Watercolor is also a much quicker process, the painting's taking about an hour for me to finish. During this class, I'll be sharing my entire process from sketch to final painting, getting valuable advice that I learned not only from the masters as well as from my own practice. By the end of these classes, you'll be able to paint a colorful portion based on the photo reference. Hopefully, you'll also fall in love with watercolor. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Let's talk about the class project. The class project will be a self-portrait, and why a self-portrait? Well, they're traditionally used by artists as a form of study, but in this course, I'll also go through how to pick a good reference photo, and it's likely that you have more reference photos of yourself than anyone else. Also, this course is based on photo references and observation. You do need to observe the image or the subject for a long time, and you probably would like to pick someone who you don't mind staring at it for long periods of time. Of course, if you do not feel comfortable with painting and posting a self-portrait, you can pick a different reference image, just pay attention to the best practices that I'll be sharing along this course. Finally, don't forget to share your project with us so that I and your curious can give you feedback. This is a valuable step of the process, and I can't wait to see all your projects. 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's go over some of the supplies you'll be needing for this class. First, here's a watercolor paper. For this technique, the watercolor paper must be 100 percent cotton. Paper that is not labeled 100 percent cotton, usually is made out of cellulose or a mix of both and that's just not going to work with this technique because cellulose slowly disintegrates as you add more water and more layers. Another important supply you'll need for this class are your brushes. Here I have three watercolor brushes. One is 100 percent natural fur, one is synthetic fur, and one is a mix of both. Well, natural fur does hold a lot of water. It's also a lot softer and you can't really keep a fine point for long. As for the synthetic, it's more sturdy, but it holds less water. This is why I opt for a mix of both, synthetic and natural furs, so I have the best of both worlds. It holds a lot of water and it's also quite sturdy, so I can get that very fine point with round tip brush. This is the optimum brush because it's not too small, so I can paint large areas, but as it has a round point, I can use that little point to make a lot of fine details as you'll see in the demos. Now, moving on to paints, whether you're using little tablets like these, or if you're using tubes, the most important thing is to invest in professional grade watercolor. You don't need to buy a lot of them, in this painting I'll be using only three colors to show you that you only need the primary colors to paint a beautiful portrait. This will also help you get more harmony in your portrait, especially if you're starting out, because you don't need to think about how the colors go together. They'll all be coming from a mix of yellow, blue, and red, and this will give harmony to the overall painting. Of course, you'll also need water. I like to keep two cups, one for dirty water and one for clear water. That way, you ensure your colors are always clean. I also have a palette for mixing the colors, and if you're not using all of the paint, you can let it dry and just reactivate when you needed to use it again. It's also important to have a piece of scrap paper where you can test the paint that you are mixing and makes sure the tones are right. Have an old rag or paper towels or even a little sponge to soak up the extra moisture and paint from your brushes. For the drawing portion makes sure you have a good pencil and equality eraser. Finally, we have the optional but very useful extras. A water spray bottle to activate the paints, and some tape to tape down your paintings and make sure they don't move around while you're painting. This is optional too, but if you can work on a surface that's slightly tilted, this will drive the water downwards and will help dry the paper faster. [MUSIC] 4. Choose Good Photo References: [MUSIC] The first step in making a watercolor portrait from a reference photo is actually choosing a good reference photo. To choose a good reference photo, there's two things you need to consider. The first one is lighting. You want to pick a picture that has a lot of contrast, that has a lot of light and shadow. Clear light source because those cast shadows to help you gain the trig dimensionality in your painting. Contrasts creates interests and your painting will benefit from that. Avoid pictures that are beauty or commercial because those tend to have very even lighting, and it's very difficult for you to really have difference of tone and all the features of the face. The second thing to consider is distortion. When you're taking a photo depending on the lens you're using, especially if you're using a selfie, front lens, and stuff like that or have a distortion of your face where things that are closer to the lens will look bigger than the rest of your face. This can really make your painting look strange or your drawing look a bit off, and it can really hinder your portrait drawing skills. I do not recommend for beginners to use photos that have distortion simply because you're still training your eye, you're still trying to understand proportion and the distortion of these lenses really hinders that process. Another silly thing that also creates distortions are those filters, whether they're TikTok or Instagram, they really change our faces, they make our noses smaller, they make our eyes bigger. It might seem a little bit silly, but they again distort our view of proportions and they can really make your portrait looked a little bit off. [MUSIC] 5. Drawing the Portrait: Let's start by drawing the portrait. For this, you'll need a mechanical pencil or a regular pencil, whatever is more comfortable for you, a high-quality eraser, and a ruler. So the first thing I do is look at my reference image, and make sure that I center the image in my paper. Then, I grab a ruler and map out the main proportions of the face. I don't always do this, but it helps, especially when you're starting out drawing to get the proportions right. So here, I'm just making sure I get the right vertical proportions. The length of the forehead, the nose, the lips, where my chin is. Getting these proportions right, is what will ensure, not only a higher level of realism, but also capture the likeness, which is super important in a portrait. Actually, measuring your reference image and using a ruler is not always necessary, but it will help a lot, especially if you're starting to draw portraits, and you need a guide to help you train your eye. The more you practice, the more your eye will be refined, and you'll be able to actually tell, just by looking at the reference and looking at your drawing, what proportions may be a little bit off. But when you're just starting out, and especially when you're putting down the bare bones of the drawing, it really helps out to have these measurements. Now that I've established the vertical proportions, I move on to the horizontal measurements. So what's the length of my chin, my jaw, and so on. Again, this method for me works faster than if I was using the Loomis method for drawing heads or really any other reference of proportions that is ready-made, because I'm trying to draw from reference and not imagination. I'm really trying to focus and get the likeness of the subject I'm working with. So in this case, it's a self portrait as we spoke before. It's really important you pick a reference that you actually don't mind staring at for long periods of time, because that's the only way you can really map out those proportions and capture likeness. I find this process very interesting because with time you'll realize that nobody has a super proportional face or a super symmetrical face. Everyone has their own particular quirks and particular characteristics that form their likeness. So you don't need to worry if you realized your nose is a little bit crooked to the right or one eye is higher than the other. It's just normal, everyone has that. The more you stare into your reference, and have it as a guide for your drawing, the more you will realize that this is natural. This is also why it's important to pick out a reference you really like because you will be staring at it for a very long time. Now that I have the main proportions laid out, I very lightly look for the big shapes. So what's the overall shape of the head? Where roughly the nose, the mouth, and the eye should be. Again, I have a very light hand. I'm focusing on the big picture, and I try to not detail anything for as long as possible. Because I want to make sure that everything is in it's right place before I really commit to details. This really makes the drawing process easier because if you don't overly commit to details, you won't get attached to that drawing, and in case you need to erase and start again a single part or maybe all of it, you won't feel too bad for the time you invest in. The main advice I have at this stage, is to focus on the big shapes, the big geometrical shapes, and try to also use geometrical shapes for the mouth, the eyes, and the nose, and not to overly detail them. One thing that can also be very useful at this stage, is to see the shadows as actual geometric shapes as well. If you picked a high-contrast picture, which you will hopefully after the class about reference pictures, you will have a lot of cast shadows, and a lot of definition between the light and dark parts of the image. So use those shapes. The shadows can really help you define all the features of the face, and when you map them out, it'll be easier for you to see if the proportions are correct. If the eyes are in the right place, if the nose is in the right place and so on. In the video, you can also see that I'm constantly checking the angles by using the pencil or using the ruler, and that really helps get those shadows right, and get every angle of the face as close as possible to what I'm seeing in the reference picture. I know laying out the foundations and making the drawing, might not be as exciting as painting itself. But truthfully, this is the most important part of the process. It doesn't matter what watercolor tricks or skills you have, if you don't have a good construction underneath, you won't be able to have a good final result. The quality of your drawing is the main factor that will influence how good your painting will be when you finish it. So please, don't rush this face. Take your time. Look carefully at the reference. Look carefully at your drawing. Make sure those angles and proportions are correct, and slowly start to build up your drawing. This way your painting will already start with great planning. The more you can plan your painting ahead of time, the more you'll enjoy the actual painting experience, because you won't be trying to figure out little details of what you need to get right or wrong. You can just focus on the process, the water, and how the different layers of paint are going to mesh together. I realized some people might get frustrated with the fact that I don't have a step-by-step way of drawing an eye, a nose, and mouth. But that's because I truly believe that when you're referencing a photo, the best thing you can do is to really look at your reference, get those angles, the proportions right, and slowly build up your drawing from geometrical shapes. That's because this way you'll be able to draw any reference image, and not a cookie cutter model of a nose or a mouth or an eye. One last tip that you need to follow before you go into the detailing stage, is to take a pause, go for a walk, have lunch, talk to someone, and then go back to your drawing, and you'll suddenly see things that weren't as clear to you before. Let's go over some little details and mistakes I caught. First, my mouth isn't a straight line. It's slightly tilted upwards, crooked upwards to one of the sides. While looking at the image and my drawing, I also realized one of the nostrils looks bigger than the other because of the shadow that is cast to one of the sides. So it also corrected that in my drawing. I also double-checked every angle in the drawing to make sure that it looks harmonious and is in line with my reference picture. At this point, I realized I was really unhappy with the way the eyes turned out, and I decided to just erase them and start over again. This is why it's so important to keep your drawing very loose, not do a lot of details because this way we'll have a lot of more flexibility. Even psychologically, it will be easier to erase and start over again. I didn't realize it right then. But the reason why I wasn't happy with this positioning, is that my eyes are not really symmetrical. One of them is slightly higher than the other. When I was drawing with that idea that our eyes are in the same little line, that really made my drawing suffer because I wasn't really actually looking at the reference picture, and noticing that one eye is slightly higher than the other. Thankfully, I caught that when I was doing the second drawing. We are making two drawings for this class because one will be used for the monochrome painting, and one will be used for the final colorful painting. It's really important for you not to get overly attached to these drawings. After you make the first one, you can start the new one right away, or you can wait a couple of days and start the new one. But you'll realize that the second one will be way easier because you already know the reference image. You already studied it for at least half an hour, and now you'll have lot more ease building or drawing. Only when I'm really satisfied with the overall image, do I put details in, and here's how the final first drawing turned out. 6. Watercolor Basics: [MUSIC] Before we start painting, it's important to talk about how watercolor works. In watercolor when you're trying to achieve lighter tones, you need to put more water into the mixture and less pigment. Watercolor is a transparent medium, which also means that if you have a darker color, you're not able to go over it with a lighter color and cover it up, which is possible when you're working with oil, or gouache. That does not work with watercolor and that's why we usually work from light to dark. When you want to achieve lighter colors with watercolor you need to add a lot of water and just a little bit of pigment and you'll have a consistency that we call tea. When you add more pigment and a little bit less water, you have a consistency we call milk, and you can see that it's more vibrant. It's a darker tone. [MUSIC] If you go even darker, with a lot of pigment and just a little bit of water, you have the consistency that we usually call honey and this is very easy to control. You can make small details and fine lines with it and that's how you paint the darker parts of the image. This difference in tone within the same paint is what we're going to use in our monochrome painting. Working from light to dark, from more water to less water. [MUSIC] Now, to showcase some of the techniques we'll be using for portrait painting, let's paint a simple sphere that's receiving light from the left. First, we start with a very light coat of paint that's in a tea consistency, so that's a lot of water and just a little bit of pigment. The paint will only flow where you've wet the paper. Since we started on a dry piece of paper, you have full control to where the pigment and the water flows. [MUSIC] To soften transitions between light and shadow, you can grab a clean brush with just water and wet that area of the paper. [MUSIC] Then get more pigment in a mixture that's a milk consistency so more pigment and less water and paint the part of the sphere that's in shadow. Since the whole sphere still is wet, you'll have a very soft transition. [MUSIC] As long as the paper is still wet, you can move the paint around and create the transition you want. But this only works while the paper is still wet. [MUSIC] Another technique that's only possible while the paper is still wet, is to grab a clean dry brush and absorb a bit of the pigment that's in an area in order to lift that area and make it lighter. [MUSIC] In order to paint the cast shadow, which is the darkest part of this figure, I have a mixture of a lot of pigment and just a little bit of water. Since the paper is completely dry when I've put down this layer of paint, there's a very clear cut distinction between light and shadow. These are just the basic techniques you'll be using throughout this class. You can always go back to more simplified forms and practice these differences in soft transitions and harder shadows and also try to experiment and mix different paints so you can learn the differences between each consistency. 7. Monochrome Painting: Let's make our monochrome painting. This is a great way to practice only focusing on values and not having to worry about hues. I made dozens of these before I moved down to color. Grab the drawing we made in the previous lesson and tape it down to a inclined surface. The inclination will help the water flow in a single direction and will make the painting process easier. The steeper the incline, the faster the paper will dry. Here I have a piece of cloth to dry off my brushes, two cups of water, one for clear water, one for dirty water. The watercolor paints I use, though for this portrait, I'll be using a single color, burnt sienna. Always choose a dark pigment like dark brown or dark blue when you're working in monochrome. I also cleaned up my palette so you can actually see me color mixing. I don't usually do this just because watercolor can always be reactivated and used again and also, I have a piece of scrap paper where I test out all the paints I'm using. For this one, as I said before, I'm using burnt sienna and as you can see, it can achieve very light colors when mixed with a lot of water and very dark colors when there's almost no water and it's mostly pigment. Before I start painting, I always like to soak my brushes for a few seconds into water so that they can become malleable again. Also notice I use a different brush, a cheaper one, totally synthetic, just to mix up the paint and activate it with water because this movement can really damage the expensive watercolor brushes. I really recommend you buy a cheap brush just to mix the paints and so you don't have to worry about damaging it. Since we're focusing on values, I edited my picture to be in black and white. You can do this in various apps by just lowering the saturation of your reference image. So for our first layer, it's mostly water and just a little bit of pigment. In watercolor, we often call this layer T because it's supposed to have the same consistency of T so you can see it's very liquid and it's very light in color. Since we don't have any really bright highlights in the painting, we can confidently cover all of our portrait with this initial layer. Remember, watercolor always lightens up as it dries so don't be afraid to cover it up. If there are any areas you want to lighten up while the paint is still wet, you can do so by taking a relatively dry brush, a clean brush, and wiping the area because the brush will soak up the paint and that area will become whiter. Another way you can lighten up an area is by taking a little bit of pure water and putting it there because it will reopen the fibers of the paper and it will move the ink out of that spot. Please note that both of these techniques will only work while the paint hasn't dried yet. After the paint has dried it is really difficult, if not impossible for you to rework your watercolor painting and make lighter marks. You can tell whether the paper has dried or if it's still wet by how much light it still reflects. Here in the video, you can clearly see that especially at the top of the painting, there's still an area where there's a lot of reflection so that indicates there's still water in the paper, it's still wet. Unfortunately, in this specific case, as the paper did not really dry there even after the rest of the painting had already dried, it indicates to me that this paper was damaged. This sometimes happens in storage or sometimes happens in production but these areas don't really soak up the paint and it can be really difficult to work with. In this particular case, I didn't mind because it is in an area that's going to be dark and it doesn't have any details so it won't show up as much. But I'm going to show you a close-up so you can tell what it looks like when your paper is damaged. After that first layer completely dried, I mixed up some more paint with water, this time to get a darker tone and I'm defining the shadows. However, I later discovered or I realized that this was still too light for the shadows. Right after I did this layer, I mixed up some more paint to do the shadows again. The big lesson here is do not be afraid to darken your painting. It is the contrast that will make your portrait interesting. Let's mix some paint. For the lighter layer as we said previously, you only need a little bit of pigment and a lot of water. This has the consistency of T and is used in the lightest parts of the painting. For our second layer, we need a deeper consistency that will give us a darker color. For this, we need less water and more pigment. What we're looking for is something with the consistency of milk. Yes, this is usually called the milk layer. After adding more pigment, I have the consistency I was looking for. But I always check with my piece of scrap paper because remember, watercolor also lightens up as it dries. It's always nice to test out your color and make sure that you have what you want. This is the consistency you're looking for in the second layer, milk. One thing to keep in mind, even during this step of the process is always look at your reference. Have a very careful eye and take your time to absorb the information it gives you. Because although we marked out the shadows in the drawing portion, it's still important to train your eye to see the different values. Since we're on the topic of shadows, in this reference there are places where you want a softer transition between light and dark and in others you want a harsher line, a harsher more defined aspect to your shadow. In order to get that softer transition, what I do is I have a clean brush and with this clean brush, I pick a little bit of water and just wet the areas adjacent to where the shadow will go. The paint will be able to flow to the wet areas, but it's in a more controlled way. You'll have a softer transition, but you don't risk losing that light and dark effect you have going on. Now that the previous layer has completely dried, we move on into the smallest details of the painting and the darkest areas. For the small details, the darkest areas which are like this parting of the lips, the nostrils, the details of the eyes. We use a lot of pigment and just a little drop of water, just enough to make it workable and usable with our paintbrush. The consistency of this layer is similar to honey. This is the honey layer. As you can see, I'm still using the same exact paintbrush that I was using in all previous layers. This is why I love a round-tipped brush. It is so versatile. You can paint large areas and as you can see here, it can come to a fine point, and with that small point I can do really small detailing like the little nostrils or even the fine lines of the eyes. After I painted the darkest darks, I realized my shadows were still not dark enough. I went back and corrected that by darkening the shadows once again. Remember, this is a study of values. It doesn't need to be perfect. You might have to rework it as I did. The main idea is to understand how dark or how light the values need to be to convey the depth you want in your image. This can be tricky to get on the first try for two reasons. One, the watercolor will always dry lighter than what you put down on paper when it's wet, so you need to account for that. But it takes a while for you to get used to it and really be able to measure how dark you need to go for it to dry the right shade when you're finished. Another issue is that value is always relative. When the paper is white and you're first putting down these layers, it looks dark relative to the white of the paper. But when you go to the darkest layers, the darker layers may really indicate that your mediums, the middle shadow are just not dark enough. While watercolor does have this general rule that you should go from light to dark just because there's no undo button and watercolor is a transparent medium. You can't really go over it with a lighter color and lighten it up later. I still encourage you to experiment and even do something similar to what I did here, which was to go to the darkest dark and then look at it again and see if you really need to darken those middle tones, those shadows. Remember, this is just a way for you to figure out how you're going to do your final painting. It doesn't need to be perfect. Now onto the hair. To give off the illusion of strands of hair, I usually have a very light hand and make all these movements back and forth. That will help create very fine lines to taper off and will give the illusion of strands of hair flowing in the same direction. Now for the highlight part, I have a clean brush with some water and I'm wetting the paper beforehand so we have a very soft transition from light to dark. Since the other side of the hair is mostly in shadow, I don't have to worry that much about details and I can just cover the whole area in a darker tone. After I darken that cast shadow, the only thing left to do is the dress. First, I wet the paper with a lighter and more watery layer, and then I get very concentrated paint and just put a few drops in and let the paint flow. I thought this would be a nice effect and will give off the same idea and feeling that the dress pattern does in the reference picture. Here's the final result. Now that you're done with the monochrome painting, let's move on to color. 8. Color Mixing: [MUSIC] Before I get into the colorful painting, I want to talk about how I mix the colors and how I achieve a variety of skin tones. Keep in mind here I'm just using the primary colors, so yellow, red, and blue. For most Caucasian and East Asian skin tones, so lighter skin tones, I generally go and mix some orange, so a little bit of yellow, a little bit of red and I just play around with that. When you're diluting it a lot of water you get really nice skin tones from different tones of orange. Sometimes I add just a little bit of blue so I can see different variations of cool versus hotter skin tones. Some people, they have this green undertone to their skin and you can really capture that by adding a little bit of blue to your mix. When you're looking for darker shades of skin so if you're painting non-white people, indigenous people, black people, brown people, basically what you want to do is add more blue and add a little bit more red. That will get you some different variations of brown. Again, you have to really observe your reference and see if that brown is more reddish or more bluish. There's also the variations of light. Always keep in mind that skin is not uniform. This is not a cartoon. Real people have blemishes and they also have variations of skin tone just based on how much blood those areas of the face have. If you look at the picture, you can see that my cheeks are a little bit more reddish than the rest of my face. That's because we generally have more veins over there. You get more blood, you get more red. A lot of the color variation you will see also depends upon light. Here I'm also mixing darker paints even though I'm painting myself. I'm East Asian and white. Because all these shadows they will be brownish hue, sometimes in a more reddish hue. I really wanted to capture that. For darker skin tones, I really like to start with a purple, so I mixed a lot of blue and red and then keep adding just a little bit of yellow so I can get a more neutral, more brownish hue. But in darker skin tones, purple is a great way to start just like in lighter skin tones, orange can be a great place to start. Here since this is a demonstration, I'm mixing a very small amount because I just want you to see the range you can get from these three tubes of paint. But once I know which colors I actually need for my portrait, I want to make large quantities so that I don't worry about running out while I'm painting because it can be very difficult for you to achieve the same hue once you've run out of a specific mixture and you need to make more. Always make more of a mixture of paint then you think you need to finish your portrait. Don't worry about being wasteful because watercolor will dry on the palette and it can always be reactivated with water. It doesn't really go bad. You can really mix as much as you feel comfortable with so that you have enough for your portrait. If you have leftovers, it's fine you can use them again. You can mix them with different paints and get different tones and hues. It really isn't going to be wasteful and you're going to be really thankful for it once you're painting a portrait and you have enough to complete it, you don't have to worry and stress about, well, what if I run out of my main skin tone? What if I run out of this shadow color? You really have a less stressful experience if you just mix large quantities of paint. This is basically what I'm preparing to do at this stage because I want to have all my paints ready, or at least the main tones that I need have to be ready before I start the actual painting process. That's why I said at the beginning of this video your painting really starts with the palette. Just like you're drawing, your initial drawing serves as a map and markings of where you need to paint. Where is the shadow? Where is the light? It's a guide. That planning also happens on your palette. You have to have the main hues and main colors you're going to use already mixed. Then when you're getting into the rhythm of the painting, you don't need to stop and mix more paint. I really want you to experiment with these three colors and see what hues you get and make sure you have all your paints ready for our next step, which is the colorful painting. 9. Final Painting: [MUSIC] Now let's go into the final painting. In this video, I did not include the reference photo, just so you can see clearly what I'm doing in the palette. The actual painting process starts with the palette. When you're mixing up your things, when you're getting the right tones, the right hues, the more prepared you enter your painting with all of these paints ready, the easier the process will be. Just like in the previous painting, we start with a tea layer. It has a lot of water and just a little bit of pigment. Here already found one improvement upon the study that we made. One side of the face is lighter than the other because the light source is coming from left to right. In order to get this soft transition and effect, I painted one of the sides with my paint mixture and then I diluted it a little bit more with water so that there's a very soft transition and a lighter tone on the left side. Even after diluting some of the paint, there were still areas that I wanted to be even lighter, like the highlights. For that I used a technique that I mentioned in the monochrome painting, which is, having a clean relatively dry brush to absorb some of the pavement and lighten up that area. Now, I wanted to talk a bit about the rhythm of the painting. You may notice there's a certain speed which I'm using to work here, which in this case is pretty fast. Why am I working fast? Well, watercolor is a medium that dries very quickly. To get soft transitions, you need to work while the paint is still wet. That will vary according to the climate where you're painting in. Here I was painting in the summer in Brazil, it's pretty hot and the paper dries really fast. If you're in a colder climate or even if it's winter here, I have a little bit more time to work with, and the rhythm of the painting changes. But you have to be aware of it to work with the watercolor and not against it. Now that we're working with color, you need to be aware of the slight hue variations you can see in your reference. Within the same layer of a tea mixture, you might have an area that's more reddish like the cheeks here, or an area that's a little bit more gray. Really paying attention to these slight variations will help bring realism to your picture. Because instead of having the skin be all uniform, which is not what happens in real life, you can really capture all the slight variations that are caused by how our blood is distributed in our skin and faces, or slight discoloration that come with age and so on. [MUSIC] Now that we're painting the neck, I have to think about the same thing that I did when I started painting the face. The light source is coming from the left and one of the sides is lighter than the other. After having an overall very diluted wash going through the entire body, I'm grabbing more pigment and having one side be darker than the other. The transition becomes very soft because all of this paint is still wet. [MUSIC] After that first layer is completely dry, I'm just going over with a very light wash, so a lot of water, just a little bit of pigment, and doing some color corrections. Basically I'm mixing different hues. Again, just a lot of water and a little bit of paint, and I'm just coloring these areas, so there is that variation we were talking about with the skin. [MUSIC] Now we move on into the milk layer. There's more pigment and less water in this mixture. One thing that I learned with the monochrome study of this portrait was that I was just not getting that shadow dark enough. Here, I really was careful in mixing the paint so that it is very dark so that I don't need to be going over this shadow again and again like I did in the monochrome painting. [MUSIC] Just like in a monochrome painting, when I want to soften the transition between light and shadow, I grab a clean brush loaded with a little bit of water, and I just wet the areas adjacent to where the paint is. [MUSIC] At this point, I do want to warn you that every painting has "ugly stage". For me, this was it right here. This is a point in the painting when you start questioning your choices, everything looks a bit off and you start to wonder if it's even worth going through with it. Let me tell you, do not give up when you get to this stage, trust the process. This is only temporary and it only looks wrong because you haven't finished it. So keep going and even if you don't really like the final result, you still have learned a lot from the process. [MUSIC] In the clip coming up next, there's something I regret doing to this painting. Basically, when you have a cast shadow, you may have some reflected light bouncing back to that shadow and having an area become lighter. I try to capture that with a wet brush taking away some of the pigment within that shadow. That can work just fine. But I feel like I overdid it over here, I overworked the painting. When you overwork the painting, when you go through and work the paper too much, you get these tricks and marks that I just don't find aesthetically pleasing, so please do not overwork the painting. [MUSIC] Now that the previous layers have dried, we're moving on into the honey layer. This is a paint mixture with a lot of pigment and just a touch of water. It's very dark. It works for small details and darkest parts of the painting, such as the eyes, the nostrils and so on. To mix now dark browns and black, you can use browns and blues, and that will give you a very dark close to black pigment. If you do not, however, own brown paint, just remember that mixing yellow, red, and blue does get to brown, so you just have to add more blue to the mixture. [MUSIC] Although as a general rule we're told to work from light to dark in watercolor, you can at this point do other washes with more water and less pigment just to get the right hues you want. Sometimes to change the tone of things. That's not an issue. The reason why there's this general rule is just because once you go dark with watercolor, you can't really lighten that area. I showed here a couple of tricks where you can do that, but these techniques have their limits. You go from light to dark just to be safe, just to make sure that the lighter areas are preserved. But after you paint the darkest layer, there's nothing that stops you from going back and correcting or fixing or making little adjustments to your painting with lighter washes. [MUSIC] Now that we're mostly done with the skin, it's time to paint the background. Here I'm using a very light wash and the background is lighter than the hair, so that's why I'm painting it first. I also covered the part of the hair that will be the highlight because when I looked at the reference picture, I realized it was a similar hue to the background, which I saw as this very light grayish green. I also started painting the hair while the paper was still slightly wet because I wanted a soft transition between the hair and the background. [MUSIC] Since the hair is darker than the rest of the reference picture, I already started painting it with a milk mixture. This will also cover up any of the T layer of the background. [MUSIC] I just wanted to mention a detail that makes a world of difference, the white of the eyes is never ever really white. I usually use a tea mixture of a light gray to paint the shadows on. Painting these shadows will give your eyes depth and well realism. [MUSIC] Moving on to the right side of the hair, I'm using this almost black mixture because this entire area is in shadow. For that same reason, I'm not worried about detailing this part, making every single strand of hair. I don't need to give that much information here again, because this area is in shadow. What matters the most at the end, is the impression you get from the overall painting, and I don't think that having a lot of detail in really dark shadow areas adds to that impression. [MUSIC] Now that we're done with their hair, all that's left is painting the dress. Here I have a different approach from the monochrome painting. I'm starting from the lightest colors because I do want that bright orange and the light green to be preserved. I'm loosely painting flowers here because that's what the pattern of my dress was like. But I'm not being overly precise with it because I want people to focus on the face and not the details or the patterning of the dress. These are also choices you have to think about when you're doing a painting of a portrait. You can choose which areas you need to detail the most, that will draw the most attention to them, and which areas could be kept simpler. [MUSIC] Here's our final painting. I hope you enjoyed this demo. 10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Well, we've reached the end of our course. I really hope you enjoyed this whole process and learned a lot about watercolor portrait painting. I look forward to seeing your projects and giving you feedback. I also would love to have your feedback about this class. You can reach out to me either here on Skillshare or in my Instagram at biabarrett, and I'll be glad to hear from you. Until next time.