Watercolor Self Portraits: Beginner Basics

1. Intro: Do you want to learn how to paint beautiful watercolor portraits, but you're intimidated by learning how to make skin tones or learning how to draw faces, or maybe you just wanted to learn how to use watercolors. Then this is the class for you. I'm Erica, and I'm an artist and photographer, and I love painting people. In this class, I'll teach you three simple rules for choosing a good reference photo, and then I'll walk you through a couple of tricks for transferring your photo onto watercolor paper. Then I'll demystify how to make skin tones before we apply it to painting our highlights and shadows. We'll discuss details and finishing touches and the variety of different ways that you can complete a background before finishing our painting. Whether you've never worked with watercolors before or you just want to learn a new skill. This class will teach you some simple tricks for learning and loving watercolors. 2. Project: Your project is to paint a watercolor self portrait using the skills from this class and posting it to the project gallery. I'll be teaching you three tips for finding a good reference photo and transferring that onto your watercolor paper. After printing your photo, I'll teach you simple techniques for transferring your image onto paper and how to simplify your photo so you feel more confident when you start painting. Then I'll take the mystery out of how to make skin tones before moving onto our painting. We'll learn how to work from light to dark using wet on dry and glazing techniques to blend each layer from highlights to shadows, before finally adding details and finishing touches. Then finally, we'll examine a variety of different ways to complete our backgrounds before finishing our portraits. In your final project, I'll be looking to see if you've blended your skin tones so that they don't have harsh edges, if you have areas of highlights and shadows and how you've finished your backgrounds. Even if you've never worked with watercolors before, by the end of this class, you'll be able to paint portraits with confidence. So let's dive in. 3. Materials: It's time to talk about the materials that you'll need for this class. The great thing about watercolor is that you don't need to invest a lot up front to get started. You'll need two glasses of water, one to rinse your brushes and another to lighten and mix your colors so you don't contaminate your paints. I have a few choices of inexpensive watercolor paper, and I'll be using an 8.5 by 11 inch coal press because it's a bit smoother, which makes it easier for drawing and transferring images. You'll need a pencil for transferring your photo, and I recommend just a regular pencil because it's soft and easy to erase. You'll also need an eraser to remove smudges and extra pencil lines. Any eraser will do, but I prefer using a needed eraser because when it gets dirty, you can stretch it to clean it and shape it to erase small areas or remove smudges. They're inexpensive and easy to find at any art or craft store. When it comes to watercolor brushes, I recommend using round brushes because you can paint larger areas and details. I'll be using a number 14 for blocking in large areas of color and a four for details and blending. You don't have to use these exact sizes, but you do want to make sure that your brushes are made for watercolor. I'll be using tube paints, but pan paints will work just fine, and it really just comes down to preference. I prefer the tube watercolor because it's more saturated and I combuy it in individual colors. If you're going to use the tube paints, you'll need a tray for mixing. I'll be using a sealable tray because it stores my paint and prevents waste. All I have to do is snap the lid shut, and when I'm ready to use them again, I just add some water to reactivate them. But if you don't have a mixing tray, you could also use a plastic plate or tupperware for mixing. I'll be using painter's tape to tape down my painting. But you could use masking tape if that's all you have. You'll need some paper tweles for removing extra water or paint from your paper and keeping your work area clean. Finally, a printed reference photo that we can transfer onto our watercolor paper, and you'll want to make sure it's the same size as our paper, which is why I chose 8.5 by 11 ". And that's it. We're ready to get started. Once you have your materials ready, join me in the next lesson, where I'll share with you my three tips for choosing a good reference photo. Okay. 4. Mixing Skin Tones: And now it's time to start mixing our colors. This is my favorite part. I want you to take a look at your reference photo and see what colors you notice. This will help you understand what colors you'll need to mix for your painting, and you'll know what they look like before you actually apply them. Okay. I'm going to teach you my method of mixing light, medium and dark skin tones using three different base colors. Let's start with yellow ocher because it's a warm, earthy color. If you mix in some red or crimson, you get a color that's a bit more orange like lighter skin tones. This could be good for that healthy glow on the cheeks or lips or the tip of the nose where the sun hits our face. You could also lighten this with some clear water to create an even lighter color. If you mix in some blue, it will desaturate your color because blue and orange are opposites. You'll get a more to down skin tone. This is perfect for under the eyes or shadow areas. By mixing purple with yellow ocher, it will also desaturate your color because purple and yellow are opposites. A two opposites on the color wheel will desaturate each other. Just play around and see what happens. If you add burnt sienna, burnt umber, or million to yellow ocher. You can experiment mixing them gradually until you get a color you like. So by just using one base color, we've already mixed eight different shades. We can also lighten any one of these using some clear water to create even more gradients of color. Because remember in water color, there's no white, so the way we lighten our colors is just by adding water. Maybe your skin is a bit darker. You could start with burnt sienna. We want to ask ourselves two questions when we're mixing skin tones. Does the skin have warm or cool undertones? Is it light, medium or dark. There's a lot of other variations in skin color, but this will help you get started. Adding some red will create a warmer more saturated color. This could be good for the blush area of the cheeks or the lips or mid tones. Mixing in blue will desaturate and darken the color for a richer, more darker skin. But be careful because darker colors will overpower lighter colors. Make sure you add them gradually because blue and red are opposites. It will tone down and create a more subtle purple color. This could be perfect for shadows or blush areas. If you mix in some green to desaturate it, it will create cooler undertones or mid tones. Now, if you're trying to mix darker skin tones, I generally use burnt umbert. It's a bit cooler and more opaque than burnt sienna, and I use it for mixing darker skin tones or dark shadows. Now that we know how to adjust our base color, we can experiment and make adjustments to customize our palette. We know if we mix in red or orange, we'll get warmer skin or warmer undertones. If we mix in blue or green, the undertones will be much cooler. If we mixed in violet, we'll be creating a color that's perfect for very deep shadows or areas of high blood flow like the cheeks, the lips or the tip of the nose. If you start with a base color and use it to mix all your skin tones for your portrait, it will look much more natural and cohesive. Now that we've mixed our skin tones, it's time to apply what we've learned. Join me in the next lesson, where we'll start painting the first layer of highlights to our painting. 5. Painting the Highlights: Unlike the ylicor oil where the colors are solid, watercolor is transparent, so it takes longer to build up color. You need to let each layer dry before adding the next one. In today's lesson, we're going to talk about the importance of working from light to dark and establishing the highlights or the lightest layers of our painting first. The first thing I do is I tape my watercolor paper to a board or you can use a clipboard or any hard surface. What this does is it prevents warping and it helps to keep your paper flat while you're painting. It also creates a really nice clean white border around the edges of your painting. Look at your reference photo and mix up your lightest skin tone first. You're going to be using that to paint in a base wash all over the face. I'm using a wet on dry technique, which means that I'm just painting wet paint on dry paper. To get started on our painting, we're going to block in large areas of color first using transparent washes. This means we're going to have much more water than paint when we mix our colors, so we should still be able to see the white of the paper. You really want to be careful to preserve the highlights in the areas like the eyes, the teeth, and the lips because it's really hard to get those back if you've painted over them. You can use things like guash or colored pencils, but it really doesn't look the same as if you preserve the white of the paper. I'm using some clean water to softly fade the paint as it moves down the face and into the light, which will start to establish the highlights on the tip of the nose and chin. Okay. You want to make sure you're rinsing your brushes and using clean water so you don't dirty your paint. I'm applying a light wash of color to the entire area of the hair, and I'm using my brush to just push and pull the paint down the paper, so I'm allowing the white paper to show through the translucent paint, which means that my paint is actually watered down, and there's less paint than water. I used to get hung up on painting every single piece of hair. But when you paint it as a shape, it actually looks more realistic, which sounds counterintuitive. But we'll cover more of that in the next lesson when we discuss painting shadows. Where the hair touches the face, I'm being very careful not to allow the colors to touch because I don't want the paint to mix together. I'm just using the tip of my brush. I've saved the darkest colors of the clothing and hat for last to give the rest of my painting some time to dry. Dark colors can muddy a painting if they bleed together and will be much harder to cover up. So for now, I'm just focusing on establishing the highlights. You want to make sure that you're using the appropriate size brushes when you're painting. So I like to use larger brushes for larger areas of my painting and smaller brushes for the details. I'm being really loose with the clothing at this stage. I'm just blocking in large areas of color, and I'm working my way around the painting. I'm using just the tip of the brush to control where I lay the paint where it touches the hair and the scarf. It's very tempting to want to keep loading your brush with paint. But you'll notice that the pain on your brush goes a long way. You want to just add a little bit of water, use a damp brush and just spread that paint as far as it will go. You can always add a little bit more or build your layers as you go. You don't want a brush that's soaking wet or dripping because then you'll end up with a soggy paper, but you want to make sure that you spread your pain out and you use whatever paint is left on your brush. Because the way watercolor paints work, they dry than when you apply them. In the next lesson, when we start adding shadows, you'll see that the highlights are going to start peeking through, and it will start building layers of color that will be much richer than if you just laid one thick opaque layer. A. Now I'm using a small round brush to get that really fine detail on the lips, and that's going to allow me some really fine control so that the color doesn't run all over the face. If you get some extra paint on your paper, like I did, just wipe off the extra paint or water onto a paper towel, and then use your damp brush to lift the paint from your paper. I find that if I'm trying to remove paint from small areas or details, using a damp brush works much better than using a paper towel. Okay. Now that our highlights have been established, we need to set our painting aside to dry. You can just let it sit for a few hours or you can use a hair dryer to dry it gently. Get your painting up to this point. Establish your first layer of color and remember to work light to dark and general to specific. When your painting is completely dry, you can join me in the next lesson where we'll start learning about how to establish our shadows. Well, we'll be adding more layers to build up color and add depth to our painting. 6. Painting the Shadows: Now that our painting is dry, we can start to establish shadows to create contrast in our portrait. We're essentially creating the illusion of a three dimensional image on a two dimensional surface. Now that we've established our highlights, it's time to go in and start defining our shadows. I'm going to continue to move around my painting like I did in the first stage, blocking in translucent shadows and waiting to apply more opaque areas last. I'm using a technique called glazing, which is applying what paint onto dry paper or onto areas of dry paint. Glazing essentially mixes your colors on your paper. And so you get these areas of variation of color right on your paper. I'm asking myself, where is it darker and where does it overlap. Using a clean damp brush, I'm lifting some areas of excess paint and blurring the shadows. I'm really thinking about the hair as a shape at this point. Keeping in mind the places where it curves and curls away from the face to create a sense of movement. Here's where we'll really start to see the contrast build. I've mixed up a more opaque shade for the hair, and I'm darkening in areas where the hair is in shadow or where it overlaps or separates. I'm also darkening in where the hair falls against the face to create some contrast and to define the jaw line and cheekbones of it. Even with really light hair, it should frame the face and not blend into it. To create the deeper shadows, I'm going back in with a darker, more opaque wash and using clean water to pull it down and blend it in with the rest of the hair. This is when I start to define the larger pieces of hair. Still keeping it loose, remembering to paint in large sections and not individual strands. Here's where simplifying our drawing is going to really help us as we start to define and block in the shadows. We want to sculpt out the planes of the face to create that illusion of a three dimensional image. You'll notice that I'm painting with the shape of the face, meaning I'm not painting up or down or side to side. This would make our painting or our portrait look flat. Instead, I'm following the curves of the face, sculpting the cheeks and the chin area, and connecting the shapes around the mouth and the nostrils, so there's no outline. Hard edges can make our face look cartoony and we don't want that. I like to keep the clothing very loose, and I'm just painting in large areas of color. I'm using a mix of Prussian blue and black because any area that we see with our eyes that looks black isn't actually really a true black. It's always going to have a bit of warmth or coolness to it. You want to mix some warm or cool color in it just to give it some depth because there's going to be some sunlight showing through it. I like using a large brush to apply looser washes of color without leaving brush strokes. Even if I have patterns or texture in the clothes, I lay down a solid color first, building up the layer slowly and allowing each layer to dry a bit. I just keep building the layers until I get the contrast I want. Painting darker washes over dry layers and softening the edges. You want to make sure to use the tip of your brush to control where you're placing the paint and spread the paint evenly over your paper to avoid any puddles or pools of paint. Those could wrinkle your paper or create areas where the paint could bleed or smudge in other areas of your picture. You can avoid those petals by evenly spreading out your paint or by making sure that your brush is not too heavily loaded with either paint or water. I've allowed the face to dry and now I can go back in and start building my layers. I've mixed up some darker skin color with some vermillion orange, and I'm using a smaller brush to go back in and paint the shadows everywhere I see them in my reference photo. I'm using the glazing technique, you want to make sure you're blending the shadows with a clean damp brush to avoid any harsh edges. The key to painting shadows is to keep blending the edges so you don't see any lines. I'm placing the shadows around the eyes, the cheekbones, the jaw line, and the chin where I have a bit of a dimple. Okay. Then I'm defining the area around the nose and the mouth. Our skin has very subtle changes in color. I like to build my layers starting very light and gradually getting darker and darker until I've achieved the colors I want. Smaller brushes are better for details and blending small areas. Even if your eyes are a lighter color, your eyelids are still going to cast a shadow over the upper part of the eye, and the edges of the irises tend to be a little bit darker as well. Make sure you use a smaller round brush and be careful your brush isn't dripping wet with paint or it will bleed into the rest of your painting. If that happens, remember you can just dab your brush onto a paper towel and lift that extra pain out. The areas underneath the nose and sides of the face and under the lips tend to be more in shadow. I'm just continuing to gradually darken those in and build those layers of color. When we look at our faces, we don't have outlines, so we just want to see subtle changes. By building the color slowly, I can achieve a more natural looking color, and you want to make sure to keep blending your colors to avoid those harsh edges. I've mixed up some crimson and violet, and I'm just going to paint in some very broad strokes with my larger brush to indicate the plaid pattern in the scarf and overlapping my brush strokes, blurring the edges a bit before setting it aside to dry. We want to make sure our portrait is completely dry before we move on to the details and background. Now that our shadows are established, we need to set that aside to dry. In the next lesson, we'll talk about adding details and finishing touches before moving on to the background. This would be a great time to upload your progress to the project gallery so that you can gain feedback and inspire our community. I can't wait to see what you've created so far and how you're coming along with this project. 7. Final Details: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to focus on the details of the features of the face and the clothing, and we're going to emphasize the mid tones between the highlights and the shadows. Now that our painting is dry, it's time to start establishing our details and finishing touches. So the first thing I do is go in with a smaller brush and start defining more sections of hair with another glaze of water color. Smaller brushes are great for details because you have a lot more control about where you're placing your paint. Each time I add a layer, I'm building onto the previous one and creating more dimension to the piece, which will help it look more realistic. Pay careful attention to where the hair bends, where it separates, where the light falls, and where it overlaps. This will be where you find the most contrast. Then we can paint in the idea of individual strands to create motion. Then I move onto the eyebrows, painting in just the general shape. It's really helpful to lift your brush occasionally and you'll see I'm not drawing a straight line. I'm lifting my brush, making short little wispy strokes so the eyebrows don't look drawn on. It's like a little flicking motion where I lay my brush down and just flick the end up with my brush. Then because the upper eyelids and ice sockets tend to be darker, and in shadow, I'm going back in and darkening those areas with more of my mid toned skin color. I'm always blending with a damp brush. The area under the eyes tends to be a bit more blue, especially if you're someone with under eye circles like me. So I'm using a little bit of blue to desaturate my skin color. Then I'm going back in with my darkest brown and painting in the darkest shadows of the hair underneath the hat. I'm using a more opaque mixture at this point, but I'm really allowing some harsher edges to create contrast between the face and highlights and the hair. I'm softening all my lines with a damp brush. But I'm going back in and really defining smaller sections of hair at this point. Still treating the hair as a shape and just really paying attention to where the hair separates and where it curves. I'm just darkening the upper lash line and the pupil area. I don't want to add too much detail, but I do want to define the eye area just a bit to give the indication of lashes. You'll want your smallest brush and make sure that you wipe any extra paint or water off, or you'll smear your painting. And I'm just putting my brush down and pulling it along the edge of the eye line. The darkest part of the nose is the nostrils, so I'm using an opaque wash of burnt umber and black to just darken that area a bit. Then I move on to the lips. You want to make sure you've rinsed your brush really well so you don't get any dirty colors bleeding in the teeth area. I've mixed up some crimson and violet. You could also just mix in a warmer color into one of your base skin tones. But since I'm wearing some lipstick in this reference photo, I'm using a pink mixture. The lips are always a bit pinker even when you're painting males, so be sure to use a warmer skin tone for the mouth. To create that healthy glow, I've mixed in some vermilion orange to my base skin color. The cheeks and tip of the nose are another area where there's a lot of blood flow, and also where our skin tends to reflect the light, so it will be a bit warmer even in darker skin tones. Finally, we can go back and add the final details to our clothing. I prefer not to get too detailed instead of just darkening the shadows and defining the lines and shapes of the plaid a bit more. I'm just keeping it loose and continuing to blend the edges so it looks more soft. Okay. So by adding multiple layers instead of just one solid layer, we've created subtle variations in color that look more realistic. Each time, we glaze a new layer of color, we're blending the previous colors together. This would be a great time to share your progress in the project gallery to get feedback and inspire our community. I'm really excited to see your portraits and I can't wait to see how they've turned out so far. Once your painting is dry, join me in the next lesson, where I'll share with you three ideas for painting your backgrounds. 8. Painting the Background: Now that your self portrait is finished, it's time to start thinking about the background, and we have a few options. You can never go wrong with classic white. It's simple, clean, and doesn't distract from your portraits. When I first learned to paint, I used to leave all my backgrounds white because honestly, I was afraid of messing up my portraits or I wasn't sure what to do. And to be honest, that's okay. Okay. You could also paint a watercolor wash on your background. There's a few tips if you want to choose a watercolor background. You want to allow some areas to be covered and others to show through. You want to keep the background simple to keep the focus on the portrait. You could use either a very light or a very dark color to create contrast. You want to choose the color that's in your painting, so the colors complement and don't distract from the image. You can also dab areas with a paper towel if you want to remove any extra paint, and this will also create some texture and some interest in the background. You can also experiment by adding more watercolor washes into the background using a wet on wet technique by applying wet paint onto a wet background or wet paint onto wet paint. This will add and tide dye effect. A third option is to paint your background a bold color. A lot of times I use gold paint when I want to make a bold statement. It really makes my portraits stand out, and there's a symbolic feeling of royalty to the color that I think elevates my portraits from a regular person to more iconic. You can use any metallic or bold color if you want to elevate your paintings. Lastly, you could add lettering. I created these portraits using quotes from several famous women. The options are endless. There's really no right way. The point is to just get creative and have fun with it. Congratulations, and I can't wait to see how they turned out. So if you're comfortable, share them in the project gallery so that you can inspire our community and I can give you some feedback. I can't wait to see how you used the watercolor techniques that you learned in this class. 9. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You've made it to the end of this class. I hope you realize how easy it can be to start painting watercolor portraits and you get inspired to continue creating. We've covered everything from choosing a reference photo to transferring it onto our watercolor paper. From there, we moved on to mixing skin tones and establishing our highlights and shadows. And from there, we moved on to adding details and completing a background for a finished painting. If there's one thing that I hope you take away from this, it's that I hope you continue to be creative and aren't afraid to continue to explore watercolors. Don't forget to post your paintings in the project gallery so you can continue to inspire others and get feedback from our community. If you share your work online, I'd love for you to tag me so that I can comment or share your work in my stories. You can also follow me on Instagram so you can see more of my finished artwork. You can share your thoughts, questions and comments in the discussion page of this class. This is my second skill share class, but I'll be sharing more related to watercolor painting, and photography in the future. If you like this class, don't forget to follow me so that you can be notified of any future classes. Please leave a review and let me know what you liked most about this class, what skills you learned, or what could be improved. All of your comments will be valuable for improving future classes. I hope you learned as much from this class as I did creating it. Thank you so much for joining, and I'll see you next time.