Watercolor Portrait: Painting Aged Skin - Lines & Wrinkles

1. Intro: Portraits of one of my favorite subject to paint and the eyes are always my favorite feature on any face. They can display so much emotion and they can tell stories all on their own. Hey, there on Tanja. I'm an artist based in Denmark. And in this class I wanted to try and provide you with some techniques for painting aged skin in watercolor. We will go through the supplies we need. Go a couple of basic techniques and I'll show you how you can apply these to painting lines and wrinkles. And I'll take you through the process of painting and I, which will kill us a chance to practice these techniques. I do have a series of other classes for painting, want to call portraits, covering everything from sketching to color mixing and rendering. This class will be the first of a few classes covering senior portraits. And though it will help to have some experience with watercolor for this, I always encourage you to join in no matter your skill level. If you're upward, join me for this class. 2. Supplies: Let's take a look at the supplies for this class. You're going to need Watercolors. All you need is your three primaries. So some version of red, yellow, and blue. But we'll get back to this in the next lesson. And in addition to those primaries, we're going to need one more white gouache or white watercolor. You will need a palette for mixing. I'm using this plate, but you can use any palette you have. You'll of course need some watercolor paper as well. I'm using hot pressed. I most often tend to use Fabriano paper, but for this class I'm using Saunders. The hot pressed version of this has more texture than my other hard pressed papers, which in turn will give us more working time, though not as much working time. Ask with cold press papers. You can use any watercolor paper you have unfilled comfortable working with. If you're working on a loose sheet of paper, you may want to use masking tape for brushes. I'm going to use these by clear TMA. I apologize, my Swedish is a bit rusty. I recently bought these. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to test them out. They're meant to be sympathetic or for Kolinsky brushes. But all you want is a couple of brushes which will allow you to do both washes and details. You can use any and this menu is few brushes as you'd like. So grab your favorites. I'm using a number 12 and a number six. I also have this brush. I usually use a separate brush for picking up paying form the watercolor pens as well as do a lot of them mixing just to avoid wearing down the fine point on my other brushes. But this is optional. You will need a pencil for sketching. I'm using my point to mechanical pencil. And then an eraser. If you have a kneaded eraser, that's always useful, but a normal eraser will work as well. This is not an absolute necessity, but for small portion of the class, I'll use this Watercolor eraser sponge. To be fair, though I haven't tested out my theory. I suspect that you could use one of those magic eraser sponges or a similar looking sponge in step. Either way, it's not an absolute necessity. Last but not least, we'll need some water, some cloth or tissue to wipe our brushes and tissue to help lift paint. And if you're wiping your brushes on a cloth or Iraq like I am. We can also use a tissue to help remove more water from our brushes. Let's get right into it. 3. Color palette: Let's pick our color palette. In this class, I'm using Holbein paints be can use any brand you have an use similar colors. Grab some scrap paper. It doesn't necessarily have to be watercolor paper. We just wanted to be able to see the carlos, how they behave on the paper is not important for this. I also have a class on mixing skin tones, so I won't take up your time with color theory. What we're going to need some version of a red, yellow, and a blue. If you have on the three primaries, you should theoretically be able to mix any color. If we take a look, I'll reference, we're dealing with some nice warm lighting. And he's definitely got some pink tones in his skin, which is common with fair skin. So if keeping that in mind, let's begin with the red. We can use a magenta or something similar, but I want to keep it nice and warm. So I'm going to choose quinacridone Scarlett from Holbein. This is an odd but really beautiful, pure red. And I believe the pigment used is PR TO nine. If you want to have a look in the brand that you're using, it's a warm red, but it also manages to create beautiful pink tones. Then for the yellow, I want a golden tone because we've got that warm lighting and we don't really have any areas on the reference of look like pure, bright, more clean yellow. For this, I'm going to use quinacridone, gold, which is one of my favorite yellows for skin tones. It just has such a nice sunshine feel to it. If we mix those two together and what I found, we already have good base for the skin. We also want a blue, not only because his eye is reference, but it'll allow us to mix neutrals, tone down that skin to unmixed and pull it into a more green hue, which we do have in some of the shadow areas I'm going to go for at phthalo blue, this is a cool blue. You don't have to stick with either warm or cool palette as long as you test out the cause and see if you can mix a cause and change unique you're good to go with this will definitely be able to get some beautiful peripherals, even though we don't really need that for this painting when maybe this is not the best spot to demonstrate that since there is yellow in this mix, we can also create beautiful greens. So this is overall a really nice tree you to work with. Definitely a very versatile palette. I highly recommend that your tests obviously could cause to see if you're able to mix a different costs. We can see in our reference, you can of course, always bring in additional colors. But using a limited palette like this is a great way to ensure that none of the costs you mix a going to clash. And the more different cause and pigments you bring into the mix, the more difficult is to keep the cost clean looking. So let's try. For a light skin tone mix. We could potentially use watered-down versions of the red or yellow or a mix of the two. If we mixing some blue, we can get some nice neutral skin tones which will be great for the shadows. And to make the column mixes less bright or saturated. If we add a small amount of yellow to the blue and then add some red, we can make a beautiful muted blue, which will be perfect for his eyes. Depending on the amount of each call, we can create a wider variety of Brown's as well as grays and blacks. In order to mix gray or black just makes purple and add in a small amount of yellow, more red, and maybe even yellow will give you at Walmart gray or a small blue will give you a cool gray. More yellow and red and less blue is a good starting point for browns. Though you can mix browns that are heavier on the blue and yellows to take the time and just have FUN mixing costs. Being strung a color mixing will be great skill to have no matter what you're going to paint. And it's one of the best ways to get to know your paints and what they're capable of. 4. Eye; sketch: I don't want to spend too much time on the sketching in this class, but I still wanted to quickly take you through this pot to show you my thought process and how I break down subject, I'm going to draw paint. If you'd like more detail on this, I highly recommend you to check out one of my sketching classes as I showed different methods of measuring angles and proportions, as well as working with shapes in order to break down your subject. So for this one, I'm starting out by looking at that angle between the inner and outer corner of the eye. And I'm matching that off to give myself a starting point. We can then take a look at the basic almond shape of the eye and also attach that a corner. And you can use your pencil, check as many of the ankles as you'd like. When placing the iris. I'm not only looking at the iris itself, but also the shapes of the white of the eye. Notice how the bottom waterline has a slight dip. And then where the iris is relative to that dip. Same for the waterline itself. We can see approximately where on that inner Cournot stops. And we can then follow that curve. Before we start worrying about details, we want to get the main proportions in place. So the placement of the eye, eyebrow, etcetera. And can then begin breaking everything into smaller and smaller sections. If you're unsure of how to know how thick to make the eyebrow eyelid or really anything else. Use something you've already sketch to measure the proportions. So for that bag under the eye, we can try and figure out the distance compared to different proportions within the eye itself. I found that the edge on that top waterline and down to the bottom edge of the lower waterline is about the same distance as from that bottom edge down to that shadow line. I also found that the distance from the inner corner to decrease near the outer corner is approximately the same distance as from the inner corner down to that blind near the bottom where the gnosis. Once we're happy with the main proportions, we can go over everything and to find the shapes. But what I wanted to show you in this class is mostly how I sketch out the lines and wrinkles. We know we have this back of fold on the VI. We still want to break this down further. So what we can do is look for other prominent lines or shapes. And if we look at that line that comes out from the crease right here, it's very noticeable. So we can sketch that out looking at the ankle. And we can also place our pencil horizontally to see where the line ends relative to something we've sketched out. Now we can look at the line right below it and we can see not only where it comes out from that bottom waterline, but also the shape that is formed within these lines. From there we have a line very close to the waterline. And looking at the angles, we can bring this down into a triangular shape. We will also cut a line that comes down and crosses that main line. And really that's all there is to it. We want to break it up into smaller and smaller shapes. Have added my sketch to the Projects and Resources tab if you want to use mine. And you can also make and use your own sketch if you want. Once you're happy with your sketch, you can clean up the lines and whether you've made your own or you're using my sketch, you can use a kneaded eraser on a standard eraser to gently lift some of the graphite if your pencil lines seem to dock. Okay, well, let's move on to the faun pot and get painting 5. Basics; controlled shading: For my basic setup when painting, I have my paper on a slightly tilted surface, my pellet, and after the side right here I have my water because I'm left-handed. I have my cloth for wiping my brushes and tissue if I need to live pink or remove more water from my brushes. And then I of course have my brushes radius. Well, we're going to go a couple of basics and I'll show you how you can use those techniques for painting lines and wrinkles. You can find these sketches in the Projects and Resources tab. You can also sketch your own On creates a reference picture if you want to make sure that your sketches are exactly right. Mine are not perfect, but they're good enough for what we're doing here. Let's get some paint onto our palette. I'm going to mix up a random brown. You can use any color of the rainbow for this, but neutrals tend to be good option when Painting people. If you're new to want to call out on you to painting portraits, you may want to take a look at some of my other classes showing basic techniques. Mixing skin tones are other portrait classes. But the two main techniques we'll be using to apply paint in this class is wet and wet and wet on dry. So really quick for wet and wet, you can either what your paper using clean water, apply a wash of paint or pigment, and pick up more paint. In this case, I'm using a darker, more neutral version of this color and add that to your paper. This will ensure that the line between the two cars is going to soften. And depending on how much water is precedent, the pigment will spread more or less. In this case, that X is just softening because they don't have much water in my original wash nor in the pink mix. And I didn't have much water in my brush to begin with either. What you don't want to do with a wash like this is introduce more water than what is already present on the paper. Right now at this paint is slowly settling and drying of just rinse my brush. And I'm thinking, actually, I want to just blend this out a bit more because my brush now contains more water than what was present on the paper already. It's going to want to spread because what I social like that water will move to where there's water. Answer, it's going to push the pigment away and create blooms, which can be used as awesome effects, but it's not what we're after in this case. Instead, once you've applied to wash, just let it dry completely before going back in. And if you absolutely have to go back and remove water from your brush so that your brush and paint mix has less water than what is on your paper. We can then go back and carefully do whatever it was we felt was so important that we couldn't wait. But generally speaking, I recommend that you wait. And if you're impatient, just use a blow dryer. And if you don't have one of those won't sit on your hands. I don't know. Wet on Dry apply a wash. I'm not doing the best job here, but it's okay. Then leave that to dry. Once dry, you can do back in and not only are all wash, rinse and wipe off your brush, and then blend out that edge if you want. This is great. If you want to be able to control the watercolor, especially for fine details. Let's try and use this technique for adding some quick shading to this I. Using wet-in-wet, we can apply all wash more base layer. Then while that is still wet, pick up some more paint or pigment and drop this onto some of the areas where we see darker values in our reference. You don't have to be neat. Wipe sacked. We just practicing in this class. Then still, while it's wet. If you feel the pigment isn't spreading enough or the edges aren't softening as much as you want. We can clean, wipe our brush and then use a damp brush to clean up those edges all to lift or shape the pigment where ever we may want. Then leave that to dry. Then for the mock controlled shading, Let's go in Wet on Dry. For this step, you don't want to have much water precedent because then the paint will continue to move and flow around on the surface of the paper and it won't stay in place and that's not what we want. Pick up some paint and add this to each individual shape online. Rinse and wipe off your brush and blend out the edges. If you're working with hot press paper, you're going to have to work faster than if you're working with cold press paper. You want to go back in and blend those edges before the paint sets. If you're working on an actual painting and not just a small exercise or study, you might want to be careful when you've got shapes close to each other like this, because if some of the freshwater from one accidentally moves into one of the previous shapes before they've dried, it could cause blooms to form. Have a go at using this technique fighting shading. So some of those wrinkles. And once you're done, we can move onto the next exercise. 6. Basics; soft shading: With wet in wet, it is possible to use a technique to paint something with more detail while still taking advantage of the fact that the pigment is spreading and our lines I'll softening. The way to do this is with water control. There are three places we can have water. We can have water in our paper, in our brush, and then I'll paint mix. So as an example, if we have Wet paper and I'm just going to make this nice and wet. And we then go in and we have a lot of water in our brush and paint mix. It's difficult to use this for creating any type of detail. You can also be difficult to control where and how the pigment moves. At least for small space like this, it would be great for backgrounds on large-scale stuff. Now, if we eliminate most of the water from one of those places, in this case, let's remove water from our brush and we pick up that same pink mix. Even though this paint mix is very watered down, it's already a lot easier to control it. And if we eliminate some of the water in our pink mix as well, we'll have an even easier time getting some more defined lines are details even on that same Wet paper. If you want, you can use this pattern to practice what your paper go in with a wash of color. And then while that paper is still wet, use paint that contains more or less water to practice water control by getting to know how to adjust the water in order to make the paint behave the way you want. Practice getting both more soft and spread out as well as more fine lines. This is a powerful technique for painting wrinkles. Another way of creating texture is by lifting. Again, working wet in wet. Let's apply a wash off paint. This is a fairly she'll wash so it may not have much effect, but take clean wipe off or damp brush and use it to go in and pick up pigment. You can also use tissue or even a Q-tip for more controlled lifting. But this is a great way to help add texture, create highlights, all correct mistakes. So let's try and add some shading to this second I, just like in the previous exercise, we want to begin by adding a wash of color and then go straight in and deepening some of those more general or larger shadow shapes. While the paper is still wet, start adding some of those more final lines. You can control the amount of detail not only by testing the water on your brush and pink mix, but the more dry the paper gets, the better it'll hold onto the small details. Just be careful to not add more water than what is present within the paper already. If you have areas where the pigment isn't spreading enough, you can soften it up gently going forward with a damp brush. And when you're ready, we can move on to our final study. 7. Eye; base: Let's get started. We're going to start out with the eye. So let's mix up a warm gray. I'm mixing a purple and then adding a small amount of yellow to neutralize it. It doesn't have to be perfect. We can glaze over it to do some color correction later. Just swatching that on a scrap piece of watercolor paper. It looks okay, so let's wet the paper to help the pigment spread and then even layer. And I'm also wedding the outer portion of the iris because I don't want a hot edge between the iris and the white of the eye. You can wipe your brush to get rid of Xs, what I've needed, and pick up and apply the color. Once dry, you can go in again and add some more paint under the top eyelid, as well as add some light shading to the outer portion for the shading and placing the color and Quickly cleaning and wiping my brush. I then go back into blend it out. In terms of value. Ideally, you want this layer to be slightly lighter than what you want on your final painting, just so that we have some room to make adjustments. Let's mix up blue for the iris and we want a fairly neutral blues. So in my case I'm just adding blue to lift or gray and using that as a base. Not quite happy with that. So I'll add some more yellow. What the paper and apply the paint. My paper is still not completely drying the white parts of the eyes. So this could go wrong and I could risk having some pushback pigment. But I might allowing that blue to ever so slightly bleed out into that gray color because I want that nice soft edge around the iris. I do recommend letting the gray color Dreyfus though, just so you don't risk pushback of pigment on Bloom's forming. While that's still wet, we can make some more, but with less water precedence so we can get a darker value and it won't spread as much in the paper. We can then use this for the outer ring, as well as to mark off some of the shading and details within the eye. This does not have to be perfect. We will go back in and finish the eye near the end. But again, I'm leaving the iris attack lighter than what I want in the final painting to make sure there's room for adjustments. I like starting out by adding some paints with the eyes because it really gives you a sense of how dark we need to go with the rest of the painting. Especially since we usually think of the white of the eyes to be lighter than the value of the skin. But that's not always the case. You can save the rest of the blue if you want. But because I'm restricted to this small space on my palate when filming. I'm going to get rid of this for now. For that inner corner, we can make some red and a hint of yellow to get a nice flesh tone color and add that to the Painting. Then mixing in some more red and some blue to help make it darker, slightly more neutralized version. We can use this with deeper tones right here, between the white and the fleshy bit. Finally, before it dries, I'm going in with a clean wiped off brush and lifting some of the pigment to get a lighter value here, like in our reference. Let's get started with the skin. Mix red and yellow and add in blue to help neutralize it We are aiming for warm flesh tone. You'll probably hear me say there's a few times throughout this class, but you don't have to worry too much if you call it doesn't match the reference completely. All mine for that matter, we just want an approximate color later. If you're not quite happy with the color, you can always glaze or to help push it in the right direction, trying your best and use it as an opportunity to practice color mixing. The more we paint, the better we will becoming not only mixing the cause, but also at correcting them. Besides cause, I'm not as important as you may think. If you focus on having the right values, you can get away with a lot when it comes to the color choices. Who's to say that we can't change the lighting or the hue of our reference. It's all painting. There are no rules. Now what your paper and make sure it has a nice even sheen. We're going to start working on the lines that we have in our sketch. I'm using tissue to help get out some more water out of my brush because when there's less water pressing, the pigment won't spread as much. And we want to be able to maintain at least some detail for this next layer. We can then go in and work our way through the painting. I like to start in an area. Why no, we have to go darker just to test out the strength of the color mix. And once we know it's not too dark, we can add paint to some of the lighter and more delicate lines. You don't have to be super accurate with the step, but we do want to be fairly neat, especially on the skin below the eye. Usually when painting with watercolor. If you have a pencil sketch, for every layer of watercolor, you at the pencil sketch usually becomes less and less visible. But because watercolor is transparent, and we're making these lines with Watercolor, they will at least to some extent remain visible because with every layer of watercolor we add on top, these are going to darken slightly. You can also darken that shadow area below the eyebrow and onto the eyelid. And for this, I'm cleaning and wiping my brush to blend out that edge. Then using the tissue to get rid of the water again before continuing. If your paper starts to dry to the point where the pigment no longer spreads, just let it dry completely and then re-wet it in order to continue. You don't want to stress, we want to be able to enjoy the process. So what at your own pace? For the shadow shape that comes down from the tail end of the eyebrow and down here, I'm making sure to not have too much pigment on my brush. The lines haven't yet fully dried, so I don't want to use too much water, but I will be going back in and defining those lines to make sure they don't get lost. For most of the pink mixes on my palette. I'm not adding too much water to the paint mix itself because I want to be able to control the amount of water present using mostly my brush. And in terms of how I know when I'm happy with a color, when mixing, a lot of it comes down to experience, but something that helps is that when swatching, swatch it approximately in the same value you want it to be on the painting. You may even need to glaze a couple of colors on top of each other to see if you're comics this work together the way you want them to take your time and spend as much time on mixing as you'd like. Don't rush it. Color mixing is one of the most valuable skills when it comes to painting, and especially with watercolor, where you can always go back for the shadow up on the tumble forehead. I did add a bit too much pigment, so I'm just wiping my brush and blending it out. Whether you choose to just wipe your brush or rinse and then wipe your brush is completely up to you. Whatever method suits you the best. In my case, it kinda depends on the situation and also on how much pigment is left in my brush or how much pigment got out of my brush when wiping it. As long as the paper is wet and we're working wet on wet, it's usually easier to lift the pigment if you do end up accidentally staining it. Whereas if you're working wet on dry, it's often better to rinse my brush first Now it's a good time to start thinking about the eyebrow and you have a few options. If you want, you can use masking fluid to mask off a lot of the Harris that you want to be highlighted before adding paint to the base. I'm going to use gouache for those Harris. So in my case, I'm going to go straight in and get started on that base. I'm first using some of our flesh tone mix to add few strokes where the skin is visible. This does not have to be neat. It's just serving the purpose of creating some transition between the skin and the eyebrow. We can then make some brown. I'm making it a bit heavier on the blue and yellow. I don't want it to be green, but when looking at can reference it is leaning in that direction. We can use that to cover the rest of the base for the eyebrow. Then go back in and add a few additional strokes. Again, we don't have to be very neat, but we do want to try and follow the direction in which the hair grows. And we also don't want to make it too dark. We just don't want an empty space with whitepaper as that can look quite distracting when the I-bar is so prominent. I'm going to get rid of that paint as well. But feel free to save it if you have the room on your palette. Now let's get some paint onto the rest of wallpaper so we can let it dry before moving onto the next step. We want to mix pretty much the same skin tone we were working with before. And if it's not quite at the same, it's okay. Remember, we don't have to worry that much about color mixes. Wet your paper than going with the pink mix. Wherever the lightest areas on the skin, we want to apply a super thin wash. And for some of the shadows we can add a more saturated Watch. You can follow the curve down along the cheek and up near the site of the nose. And we can deepen the shadows under the brow at bitmojis. While this layer is not going to make a huge difference, but we are picking up on a few more shadows and slowly starting to build up the mid tones. Once you're done, let it dry completely. And when you're ready, join me for the next lesson. 8. Eye; deepening values: Okay, We're going to go with the skin again to get some more color on the paper and build up the values. First color, we're going to mix a brown or deep flesh tone for some of the shadows. And shading. The shading on his face has a golden hue leaning a bit to what screen. So from my brown I'm using a decent amount of yellow. Then adding the blue, not enough to make it green, but enough to turn it down a bit and make it more neutral. Because he's also got a lot of red in his skin. I'm mixing red into a portion of the brown mix. Bringing in a lot of these different colors on cues that we see is going to give the skin a lot more depth, even if it is subtle. You can then wet the paper, but avoid the eye. You want the paper to have that even sheen. Make sure to add enough water to allow for more working time, but not so much that you end up with pools of water. I'm removing a lot of the water from my brush because I want to be able to control where the pink flows. You may prefer to have a bit more water precedent that's up to you. Whatever you feel is more comfortable to work with. We can start with this deeper shadow area up under the brow to test the strength of the color and still keep it a tad lighter than what we want on our final painting. We can pull the shadow out onto the side of the nose and down here into that fold. And then for some of those lines in this area, we may want a bit more red. For the most part, I'm not rinsing my brush in-between picking up the different column mixes, I'm just wiping it to get rid of some of the leftover pigment. If you have a lot of paint in your brush, you may have to rinse your brush more often. Or you can add paint to all of the more golden shadows first and then senior brush and go in with the red tones. Because there's not a lot of water. My brush now and my pink mix, I do have to go back and pick up more color more often. So when loading my brush, I'm spending that time looking at the reference to decide where to place that next load of pigment. I'm also working my way up into the brow, just a few strokes, but nothing that's very precise. I'm allowing a lot of this class to be in real time so you can see exactly at what speed I'm working. So feel free to speeded up if you think I'm too boring, It's okay. I understand. You won't hurt my feelings. Only a little bit. Of course I am cutting out parts where my hand is inactive or bit-score. I'm wetting the paper because I feel we know how to do that, but I'm very curious to know if seeing it at the speed is something you find helpful. And then I'm starting to really look at the value changes in the reference. As an example, at this point, we've got a lot of very light values. So if we take a look at the cheek and treat bone on the reference right next to the eye on our right-hand side, the lightest value of the skin is darker than the lightest value on the cheekbone as we move down the face. So we want to add some paint to this area to pull it back into the shadows so it doesn't stand out too much. Likewise, we want to deepen the skin on the left-hand side of the cheek as well. But here I'm going to rinse and wipe off my brush and then pick up some pure red, making sure it's not very saturated. I'm going to bring this onto the skin carefully, placing it in small strokes. The Wet paper is going to help spread the pigment so it won't look streaky, but I'm being very cautious of not overdoing it. I'm also using some of that red on the water line and using tissue to keep that edge clean. We can also add some red to the nose and forehead, really anywhere where we see more red in the skin. Just be careful to not add too much. Now that the papers no longer quite as what I'm going to switch to my smaller brush to give me more control. I'm going to look for a few of the smaller shapes, but not the fine detail just yet. So up on the eyelid, we can add some paint to show where the lashes go. Because even though we don't really see the eyelashes, we can see a subtle change in value. We can also deepen the value off the crease as well as some of the deepest shadows. And I'm going to deep met further in the upcoming lesson. This will still help add some form to the eye of faith, which in turn can help us see where we need to add more paint or make adjustments. When adding the different details and enhancing a lot of these different shadows with helping divide the phase on this eye area into smaller, more manageable portions. And I talk about this a lot in my different classes. But dividing the face or whatever you're working on into multiple, smaller shapes makes it a lot easier because you can sewn in onto one small section at a time and not worry about all the surroundings. We can deepen the shadow on the side of the cheek and don't mind the fact that I'm using this small brush. It's not the most logical choice, but it'll still get the job done. Sometimes you're just enjoying painting so much that you forget to use that knock enough yours. I can't be the only one. My paper is too dry for the pigment to spread at this stage, I'm going to mix up one final color for this lesson. We want a nice warm flesh tones. I'm adding red and yellow to some of the existing comics. And if you don't have any other previous column mix left, oh, I've just add a tiny bit of blue to tone it down a bit Wet the entire painting, including the, is the color within your eye is more cool tones than in the reference. We're not going to change the eye dramatically, but the white of the eye is reflecting some of the warmth from the skin. So I want to bring in some of those same tones. I'm going to bring this mix onto almost every part of our painting. I'm trying to get a more saturated wash in those shadows and a share wash on the parts of the skin with the lightest values. But we just want to warm up the whole thing. I'm not adding much paint to the lightest point out the cheekbone, a few places on the forehead, down the center of the nose, and the skin under the eye, including the water line. Because we want to make sure that these areas are still lighter than the rest. Just work your way through the painting and app paint where ever you see fit. Look for the value changes in the skin. Even though we're mostly just trying to warm up the skin tone at this stage, we are still deepening the value slightly due to the nature of the Watercolor being transparent. For the lines are wrinkles as well as some of the skin right under the I am going in with red. I'm not rinsing my brush. I don't mind if we still get a trace of that other comics because we don't want that skin to be pure red. But when looking at the reference, the skin and Lines in this area appears more red than a lot of the skin in the surrounding areas. So we want to try to capture that. Ready to start adding some details. Let's move on. 9. Eye; finishing eye & brow: Let's finish the eye and eyebrow. Going back to the white of the eye and the iris, I'm going to mix up a neutral color and I'm not quite sure how to describe this other than mod, I want that earthy shadow color almost like a gray, olive green on the color of dirty water from a lake, which doesn't sound nice, but nonetheless, that's what it's making me think of. Of course, the call you want may vary slightly depending on your painting. But don't be afraid to experiment with just practicing. Then for my second color mix, I'm going to add some blue to this mix to get a more muted, dirty blue. We can then Wet out paper and we don't have to add a lot of water because we don't want the pigment to spread all over the place. We want to maintain some sense of control, but still be able to get soft edges. I'm adding our murky lake water mix to the white of the eye on that right side. And then switching to the dirty blue for the iris. I know I should not be in charge of naming paint costs. Keep an eye on the edge of the iris and use a clean wipe off brush to help lift or shape the pigment if it bleeds out into the white of the eye. Before moving onto the left side, I'm rinsing and wiping my brush, adding some of our lake water mix rinsing. I'm wiping my brush and then blending that out because my paper was not wet enough, go on the side for the pigment to spread. While the paper is still wet, I'm going to add in some pure red to try and capture the slight redness I see in our reference. Placing it here on that outer portion of the right side. And then near the inner corner. Then using a tissue and just taking out most of the water from my brush. Then going back in with our dirty blue and deepening some of the values within the iris, as well as adding a few details. My paper is still wet enough for the edges to soften. If your paper has dried too much, you can re-wet it onco in Wet on Dry and blend it out manually, whichever method you prefer. Those details within the iris, I'm looking at the value changes. So up near the top we definitely have some of the target values due to the shadow from that eyelid. I'm also adding some super fine strokes because we do have some detail or texture going on as well. At this point, my paper is very close to being dry, so this is a perfect time to add the pupil, mixing up a black or dark gray and using that for those Final back details. It's up to you how precise you want this to be, as long as we'd get the general look, it's all good. Again, I'm going to wipe my brush, pick up our lake water mix, and use this for the darkest values at the top. As I'm moving to what's the inner corner, I am picking up some red as well to warm up the mix a bit. I'm rinsing and wiping my brush and using the damp brush to soften these lines. And for that lower one line, I'm using what tissue to help lift some of the pigment as it got a bit calmer than what I'd like. Finally, before adding the highlights, I want to deepen the value of parts of the iris and more just a tiny bit. And I'm using the dirty blue for this Take your white gouache or white watercolor and add some to your palette. We can use this to add the highlights for the brightest highlights, you can go in with fully opaque gouache and feel free to go in with a second layer if it's not quite bright enough the first time round. And then if we allow the gouache to mix with the moisture in all brush, we can pick up some of the less prominent highlights as well. Okay, let's tackle the eyebrow. We're going to mix up a deep brownish color, like the shadow color we see right here, as well as in the deep tones of the brow itself. The column mixing is similar to our murky lake color, but with more yellow and a hint more of the red. I know I've already said this, but don't stress too much when it comes to color mixes. Focus on the values and you can get away with a lot in terms of color. I'm going to be using this color to also paint some of the areas of the eyebrow, which should maybe be painted with a lighter value or a slightly different color mix. But I want to show you that it's okay to have it be close without being the same, even if that means it won't look exactly like the reference. We want to come in and pick up on some of the shapes we see. And again, we don't have to be too precise. I'm sure this gentleman can forgive us. And quite frankly, sometimes life's just too short to worry this much about the details of a stranger's eyebrows. If some of the hairs or shapes stand up to you tried to capture those. But for the most part we just want an approximate gist of what we're looking at. When it comes to eyebrows and portraits. The most important thing is the overall shape. Second will be the values, because how dark or light someone's, I've always change their appearance dramatically. Once we have that, we can go in and add a deeper or more saturated layer and get some of that paint onto the skin as well. Because seeing as how much the brow dominates this eye, we really need to get those shadows in, in all of these to get the right look. We can work this color right under the brow and into crease. I'm also going to use it to D1, the upper lash line. And then we can go back into the Froude self and pick up on a few of those people values. This is where if you want to follow that reference more closely, you may want to be careful adding this much of this more muted brown and use a lighter, more yellow or golden toned comics. So once we have that switching to my big brush, we want a slightly more golden brown. So I'm adding yellow to the remaining comics. We can then go in and pick up on some of those Final lighter values in the brow and pull this color out onto the skin as well, both near the corner or on the side of the nose, as well as on the right side where we have that shadow shape moving from the brow and down below the right side of the eye itself You don't need much water in your brush with this. But if you do end up with some hard edges, you can use a clean brush to blend that out. We can also add this call to the eyelid and you can see how much getting these darker values in French form the painting. Remember when we started this painting and how dark the white of the I looked when there was no other color on the rest of the paper. I love how putting costs into contexts can alter the way we look at them so much. And it's the same with any painting we need the context. In this case, with this portrait or this eye. We need those dark shadow tones to make the rest look right? It's amazing how much adding these final shear washes all layers of paint can change the whole picture. Well, painting, I guess the small tweaks at so much. So even though we're not trying to make it perfect, It's still worth taking some time to at least get the values somewhat correct. Watercolor paintings often have a reputation for being quite light, but don't be afraid to go in with those dark values. Let's go back and pick up hogwash. This is optional, but I'm mixing some of the remaining watercolor into the wash. And the reason why is just to tone down the white for this first layer of hair that combined with the water in my brush, will make the color quite sure. This way we can build up the texture and practice adding hair almost like a warm-up before we go in with the more opaque strokes. But again, this is optional. And you really won't see this too much on the final painting, but it is still going to add some texture. Then we can go in with the opaque gouache. You don't have to add each individual highlighted or white hair you see and reference unless you really want to. All we need to do is look at the reference and see if some of the hair stand out. And for the hairs that do stand out, just trying to get the approximate shape and placement in. And then for the rest of the hairs, we can go for a much more estimated placement. Instead of necessarily looking at each individual hair. Try and see where in the brow you have more highlights and where we have more of the ground-based showing through. At this point, you'll probably be able to see what I was talking about with my comics been too dark for parts of the eyebrow. And we can definitely point out areas that a backup, I don't quite match the reference. We can paint more of these highlighted Harris using quash to help correct that, or even lift some of the pigment from that base. But it's not something we have to worry about if we don't want to, because it brow really isn't all focus for this. Now, we are painting these Harris with white, but when looking at the photo, they're not bright white. So what we can do to turn them down is to glaze over them with some watercolor. I'm mixing red and yellow to get elect flesh tone, but you can also create a more yellow mix. And then once a quash is completely dry, you can use this and lightly go over the brow with your brush to tint them. We want to be careful and barely touch the paper so we don't re-wet and spread the gouache. Alternatively, you can, of course, premixed watercolor into your gouache before painting the Harris. But this way you'll be able to see exactly which hairs on which areas of the brow you want to tone down more than others. Feel free to go back-and-forth and make adjustments if you'd like. And when you're ready, let's finish up the rest of the Painting. 10. Eye; Final details & class project: We're almost done. Let's finish the skin. The very first thing we're going to do is just give the side of the cheek or head more shape down here in the right corner. I'm not going to worry about the hair. We see further up. And I'm not going to add a whole lot of detail here either. But without it, The face is looking a bit too wide, so this will help give it the right shape. If we mix up a deed, golden brown, we can use this to go and mark off where the side of the cheek and cheek bonus. We can add some shading to both sides, pulling some of that paint mix onto the lower portion of the cheek as well. Having this detail down here isn't as super important step, but it is going to help frame the face on Al-Qaeda, frame the cheekbone, the eye and everything else a bit better at some blue to neutralize a call some more and use this for some of the deeper shading. And we can pull some of this up onto the temple as well. If working up on or close to the eyebrow, be mindful of the fact that the gouache will rewet and smudge if we pick on too much with a wet brush. So just be careful. But I'm still going to go in and add some of that shading that I didn't get to add before adding the Harris. In this lesson, although we are going to add texture, I don't want to spend ages on it because having to spend hours to complete the smallest details can get discouraging. So instead, let's lean into the fact that we are working with watercolor and then allow for more unpolished or less rendered look. That way. We get to add some texture without being very precise at all and without spending too much time on each area. Let's go in and add our first bit of texture. So I'm going to take this color and deepen the value up here on the brow bone. And then right here for the inner corner in the reference, we have some skin texture that kinda just looks like a couple of lines. So let's just add a couple of strokes. Are lines like this. We're not going to nitpick on the details. We just using our brush to almost sketch out a quick, somewhat loose impression of what we see. Because I have a decent amount of pigment in my brush. I'm going to drop that down here on the nose, where we do see some of those deeper values as well. Quickly rinsing and wiping my brush and blending out those edges. Let's pick up some more paint, but keep the value light so we don't need much pigment for this. We can then go back up near that inner corner of the eye and work our way down that main shadow shape falling the pattern we see, it kinda looks like little U-shapes. And rather than worrying about each tiny bit of texture on each Fine Line, we can work just like we did with the eyebrows and look for shapes or lines up, stand out. But it doesn't have to be exact. Remember to just have FUN with it. If you add too much or too dark of a stroke, clean your brush and use it to help lift some of the pigment again. Once we get down to the bottom of that row, we can continue by adding some swift fine strokes onto the cheek. And wherever we might feel the need to soften the lines a bit, we can go in with a clean, damp brush to soften some of those. It just it's all about finding a balance between not being too precise about it and not overdoing it. The only way to learn how much it takes to reach the right amount? To rub off the Band-Aid. And David ago, we're throwing ourselves into the deep water here. Now of course, if you want, feel free to do some tests on a scrap piece of watercolor paper. You don't have to do everything I tell you to. If you're not ready, you can pick and choose between the things you agree with and the things you don't. It's your painting you decide. We can also enhance a few of these lines from our original sketch. If you take a look at the reference right under the lower waterline, we have some more texture which really mostly looks like little lines or even some more small U-shapes. When working in this era, we may want to add some more red to alcohol OMICS. When we go over the texture with a damp brush, some of it may almost completely disappear. And we can choose to redo it or treated like a happy accident and just leave it with that much more subtle texture. The coal is not to capture every Fine Line at every tiny bump, imperfection or whatever else it could be allowing yourself to experiment. I'm going to try and pick up some more of the red tones in the skin. So we can add some more red here. Let's get some more red onto the nose because we do have quite a bit of red here as well. Rinsing and wiping off, I'll brush and blending that out. Same for some of the texture on the forehead, placing the color and cleaning the brush and blending it out. Now, if we look at the skin, there are quite a lot of little contained color changes. So to imitate some of this, I'm going to gently dab the skin with my brush and short quick strokes. And yes, if you're thinking it almost feels wrong to beat this rough and loose. I understand. But when adding texture like this, the two options that'll often give you the best result is to either be fairly precise and carefully place it. Details aren't be more loose and almost random in your approach. You can also use the same Technique been On Wet paper instead, if you want these details to soften and look less painterly, have a go. And if it's not, you, then feel free to use a different method. I'll leave it as is. I'm running out of paints on Quickly mix some more brown, and then go in our some of the texture on the inner portion of the eyelid. Again, at this stage, I'm mostly adding red to the skin. And I'm also going to add a bit more red to the lower waterline and right below the inner corner of the, I. Consider this playtime, just enjoy the process and have been experimenting with adding textures. You can go back and forth as much as you want. But I'm going to answer the final step. The last one of the supplies I mentioned at the start of this class is a Watercolor eraser. And as I mentioned, I suspect that those dense magic eraser sponges might do the same. The way this sponge works is that it's scrubs the surface of the paper, thus scrapping off some of the paint. And you can actually get down often to the color of the paper if you want. But please note that you ask rubbing off fibers from the paper. So it may leave the surface more rough and the paint may not behave all look the exact same. If you're going On top with more paint, definitely something you'll have to play around with. I don't use these often at all, but I want to show to you as an option what can do with it. So I've depleted my water and squeezed out as much as I could. We can then take it and going onto the painting and gently scrub to lift paint. We can use this not only for some of the brighter highlights onto correct mistakes, but we can also use it to further enhance some of those color changes we're working on before. This is definitely not unnecessary step, but it is a lot of PFK-1 to play around with. And it can be a very helpful tool to have on hand. I'm not lifting much paint at all. Just enough to slightly like nephew of the spots. For this class, I'd love for you to paint a small Watercolors study that includes the lines and wrinkles. You can use one of the three images I've provided or use a reference of your own. But if you share your project and you're using a different reference from the ones I've uploaded. Please share it together with your project