Watercolour Portraits: Painting Warmth, Contrast & Atmosphere

1. Welcome To The Class!: Hello, everyone. My name is Will Ellison, and today we're continuing our portrait series with a new watercolor painting that focuses on warmth, contrast, and tonal richness. Each portrait brings a slightly different challenge, and in this class, we'll be exploring how to paint harmonious tones, balancing warmth and shadow while preserving softness and flow. We'll work step by step, starting with structure and drawing, moving onto transparent washes and finishing with expressive confident brush work. The goal is not just likeness, but feeling, capturing the atmosphere, light, and personality of the subject. I've been a professional artist for many years, exploring lots of different subjects from wildlife and portraits to cityscapes and countryside scenes. I've always been entranced by the possibilities of watercolor. But when I started, I had no idea where to begin or how to improve. I didn't know what supplies I needed, how to create the effects I wanted, or which colors to mix. Now I've taken part in many worldwide exhibitions, been featured in magazines, and been lucky enough to win awards from well respected organizations such as the International Watercolor Society, the Masters of Watercolor Alliance, Windsor and Newton, and the SAA. Watercolor can be overwhelming for those starting out, which is why my goal is to help you feel relaxed and enjoy this medium in a step by step manner. Today, I'll be guiding you through a complete painting, demonstrating a variety of techniques and explaining how I use all my supplies and materials. Whether you're just starting out or already have some experience, you'll be able to follow along at your own pace and improve your watercolor skills. If this class is too challenging or too easy for you, I have a variety of classes available at different skill levels. I like to start off with a free expressive approach with no fear of making mistakes as we create exciting textures for the underlayer. As the painting progresses, we'll add more details to bring it to life and make it stand out. I strive to simplify complex subjects into easier shapes that encourage playfulness. Throughout this class, I'll be sharing plenty of tips and tricks. I'll show you how to turn mistakes into opportunities, taking the stress out of painting in order to have fun. I'll also provide you with my watercolor mixing charts, which are an invaluable tool when it comes to choosing and mixing colors. If you have any questions, you can post them in the discussion thread down below. I'll be sure to read and respond to everything you post. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button at the top. This means you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. You can also follow me on Instagram at Will Elliston to see my latest works. So let's get started and explore how to build a dynamic portrait with warmth, depth, and life. 2. Your Project: Thank you so much for joining this class. This project is a great opportunity to explore skin tones, facial expression, and hair in a loose and intuitive way. We'll talk about when to control the paint and when to let it go and how to suggest complexity without overworking the face. Even if her portrait feels intimidating, I'll break it down into approachable steps so you can focus on feeling and form, not just likeness. We'll start by building up tonal structure with transparent layers, then using bold contrasts, lost edges, and subtle shifts in temperature to bring it to life. In the resource section, I've added a high resolution image of my finished painting to help guide you. You're welcome to follow my painting exactly or experiment with your own composition. As we're going to be focusing on the painting aspect of watercolor, I've provided templates you can use to help transfer or trace the sketch before you paint. It's fine to trace when using it as a guide for learning how to paint. It's important to have the underdrawing correct so that you can relax and have fun learning the watercolor medium itself. Whichever direction you take this class, it would be great to see your results and the paintings you create through it. I love giving my students feedback, so please take a photo afterwards and share it in the student project gallery under the Project and resource tab. I'm always intrigued to see how many students have different approaches and how they progress with each class. I'd love to hear about your process and what you learned along the way, or if you had any difficulties. I strongly recommend that you take a look at each other's work in the student project gallery. It's so inspiring to see each other's work and extremely comforting to get the support of your fellow students. So don't forget to like and comment on each other's work. 3. Materials & Supplies: Before we get started with the painting, let's go over all the materials and supplies I'll use in this class. Having the right materials can greatly impact the outcome of your artwork. So I'll go over all the supplies I use for this class and beyond. They're very useful to have at your disposal and will make it easier for you to follow along. Let's start with the paints themselves. And like most of the materials we'll be using today, it's a lot to do with preference. I have 12 stable colors in my palette that I fill up from tubes. They are cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, Opramarne blue, cobalt blue, serlean blue, lavender, purple, ridian, black, and at the end of the painting, I often use white gouache for tiny highlights. I don't use any particular brand. These colors you can get from any brand, although I personally use Daniel Smith, Windsor and Newton for Holbein paints. So let's move on to brushes. The brush I use the most is a synthetic round brush like this Escoda Purl brush or this Van Gogh brush. They're very versatile because not only can you use them for detailed work with their fine tip, but as they can hold a lot of water, they are good for washers as well. They're also quite affordable, so I have quite a few in different sizes. Next are the mop brushes. Mop brushes are good for broad brush strokes, filling in large areas and creating smooth transitions or washes. They also have a nice tip that can be used for smaller details. But for really small details, highlights or anything that needs more precision, I use a synthetic size zero brush. All brands have them, and they're super cheap. Another useful brush to have is a Chinese calligraphy brush. They tend to have long bristles and a very pointy tip. They're perfect for adding texture or creating dynamic lines in your paintings. You can even fan them out like this to achieve fur or feather textures as well. And that's it for brushes. Onto paper. The better quality of your paper, the easier it will be to paint. Cheap paper qwinkles easily and is very unforgiving, not allowing you to rework mistakes. It's harder to create appealing effects and apply useful techniques like rubbing away pigment. Good quality paper, however, such as cotton based paper, not only allows you to rework mistakes multiple times, but because the pigment reacts much better on it, the chances of mistakes are a lot lower and you'll be more likely to create better paintings. I use archers paper because that's what's available in my local art shop. A water spray is absolutely essential. By using this, it gives you more time to paint the areas you want before it dries. It also allows you to reactivate the paint if you want to add a smooth line or remove some paint. I also have an old rag or t shirt which I use to clean my brush. Cleaning off the paint before dipping it in the water will make the water last a lot longer. It's always useful to have a tissue ate hand whilst painting to lift off excess paint. Also, you never know when an unwanted splash or drip might occur that needs wiping away quickly. I also have a water dropper to keep the paints wet. When you paint, it's important to have them a similar consistency to what they're like in the tubes. This way, it's easier to pick up sufficient pigment. A hair dryer is useful to have for speeding up the drying time and controlling the dampness of the paper. And lastly, masking tape. And this, of course, is just to hold the paper down still onto the surface to stop it sliding around whilst painting. Also, if you plan on painting to the edge, we'll allow you to create a very crisp, clean border. And that's everything you need to paint along. I encourage you to experiment and explore with whatever materials or techniques you want to practice in this class. Now let's get on and start the sketch for the painting. 4. Sketching it Out: So the sketch always starts with a circle and that's for the cranium. Notice how I'm using a soft lead pencil, not my sharp lead pencil that's on the table next to me. Once I do that, I add a vertical line for symmetry and angle it based on the tilt of the head. Then I draw a horizontal line that's halfway down the circle. Then I add a jaw line to that, and that comes down from the sides of the circle and meets where the chin is, and females tend to have a softer rounder jaw. I then divide the face into thirds. So I have the brow line where the eyebrows are, the base of the nose, and the chin. And these might vary, but as a general rule, they're thirds. Then I start placing the features on top of that. So I don't draw the final shapes yet. I just block in the proportions and the angles. So the eyes sit halfway down the head, and they're about one eye width apart from each other. The eyebrows rest above the eyes, of course, following that eyebrow line that we added. And the nose tip ends at the lower third. And the mouth sits roughly a third between the chin and the nose. And the corners of the mouth usually align with the inner corners of the eye. The ears are quite obstructed in this drawing, but usually they run from the eyeline to the nose line. 5. Left Background: I'm starting this painting with a background. So I've just brushed on some mortar onto that background, but it was a bit too much, so I use a tissue just to lift some of that off. And we're going to be using some skin tones for the background to help mirror the same pigments. So I'm using yellow ochre and burnt sienna for this background. I've created a pan for each of the colors, and then that third one on top is where I can mix both of them together. I'm also going to incorporate some serian blue because that's a lovely complimentary color to the one we're going to use with the brown. So I'm mixing that at the moment, or at least activating it on my palette, but I'm not going to put it on yet. I'm just going to prepare it when the moment comes. So I'm using a larger brush, a mop brush. It doesn't have to be any particular brush. Just something that hold enough pigment and water because the background is quite abstract, and you can see where I've wet the paper. It's created a nice soft edge and where I've left a hard edge to create some variety. So we're incorporating that yellow ochre and that burnt sienna, which are lovely earthy tones and also lovely skin tones. We're pretty much painting over the hair, not because we want to layer the hair, but the hair is going to be dark anyway. So it doesn't really matter if we go over the hair. As long as we don't go over the face at this stage, we can just create some nice expressive background strokes. 6. Right Background: Now let's add a bit of that blue where it connects from the left to right at the top. Be careful not to over mix this because blue and yellow do make green. Adding thicker pigment into that wet and wet and letting it just blend by itself. Of course, it doesn't really matter. If it does make a green, we can make that work by keeping it harmonized later in the painting. Maybe her earring can be green or her eye color. Maybe even we can add subtle influences where we don't normally think of green like her eyebrows. These are ways we can harmonize our palette and make use of color. Oh making use of wet and wet at this stage, making sure there's no harsh lines where we don't want them to be. Maybe creating some dry brush marks as well. Going right to the edge of the paper here on this side, so that when we take that tape off, there'll be a nice clean border, so it frames the painting. See how diluted also my pigment is at this stage. It's not that thick. That means we can keep on adding to it bit by bit. You don't have to do anything particular at this stage. It's just about feeling and expressing and doing whatever feels right. I'm not thinking about anything logical, trying to get in touch of my feelings because that's when intuition comes in, and that's what helps us make decisions once we have a feeling for something. It makes us reach for a certain color, reach for a certain texture. And starting off with an expressive stage like this helps our mind kind of get an idea about what this portraits about. Adding a few splats for playfulness. Because we want to get to a place where we're painting with intention, but through intuition, if that makes sense, get to a place where you've had enough practice and confidence in your medium that you kind of know what you want to paint with intention, but you don't have to consciously think about it. You just reach for certain colors that you want. 7. Pops of Blue: So using a nice clean brush, pure blue pigment, serlean blue, I'm just going to paint the blue fabric where her little shoulder strap of her dress or blouses, because we're going to use this blue, vivid contrast against the brown of her skin and her hair to make it really pop. So make sure your drawings clear enough to distinguish where this strap is. And I want to soften the edge on top of that I don't necessarily want to have I actually overlapped. I went past where the blue strap is, so I had to scrub it out. I'm going to use exactly the same blue for the earring, as well. And I always when I know I'm going to paint over it with a darker tone, I can overlap it a bit. Don't need to be so concerned about the border. So I can continue going back over this strap. Then once we've filled it out, we can start thinking about maybe adding a bit of variation in there. Maybe we can add a bit of thicker pigment in certain places to vary the depth and the tone. And then maybe we can add another color in there. Maybe we want to tilt it towards purple because purple's next to blue. But I think actually, I'm going to put a bit of green, which is on the other side of the color wheel next to blue and add a few subtle strokes of green. Nothing too harsh, still keeping with the wet on wet, but it just implies some creases in the fabric. 8. Finishing The Background: I think I want to be bolder with my background on the right hand side, because I'm going to paint her hair very dark, black, in fact. So I don't want there to be so much of a contrast in that area, and at least because it's black and get away with a darker background and a nice rich brown background as well. Cleaning that edge with pure water there because see how when I go over that blue paint, it actually starts to look green. But I'm not trying to be too precious with it. It's only a background, and it's more about trying to feel liberated than constrained at this point. It's not the major focus point. So even little errors like that, they're barely noticeable, and in fact, the inaccuracies in them help kind of focus on the things that we get right later on, like the details on the face. Dropping in more pigment the closer we get to the hair. This is pure burnt sienna. And it's fun to experiment with different pigments of burnt sienna. I just have the main burnt sienna from Daniel Smith and Windsor Newton. But I know if you look at the color charts, there's like ten different variations, and they all have different characters. So it's fun to experiment. With this particular burnt sienna or orangely brown pigment, it looks much more vibrant when it's wet to when it's dry. It's easy to think that it looks very vibrant and alive when it's wet. Then when you actually dry it, it goes more muted. I just mixed a pure orange, actually, then with cadmium yellow, and cadmium red, and it basically doesn't look too different from the burnt sienna, but when it dries, the orange will actually maintain its vibrancy. I just mix that on the bottom right. Now I'm mixing a more muted brown, and I'm painting the underlayer for where the hair will be. I'm just blocking it out. I'm not painting any individual strands. Because when it comes to painting the hair, we'll have the wavy little bits on the left that you can see, but then we'll have the more mass blocked out section, and that's the bit that I'm doing the under layer for at the moment. And it's easy to think that your painting is very ugly when you just do the underlayer stages because they're just the abstract parts, you're blocking in without any detail or no anchor at this point. So it looks like it could be a mess, but we're just preparing the painting, so it's perfectly fine for your painting to be a mess at this stage. As long as you know where the structure of your painting is because of your drawing below, you know which bits you can be expressive and which bits you need more precision. And at the moment, we don't need much precision. So as long as we paint within those lines, we can be quite expressive. Adding a few expressive random brush marks at the bottom here. A 9. Starting The Face: Now I completely dried it with the hair dryer, and it left a few hard lines that I didn't want the harshness takes the attention away. So I want to smooth it out a bit. So using pure water, I just scrubbed it up where those hard lines are and softened it out as much as I can without wasting too much time. Now I can completely dry it again. It's sit bit of a hard line there, but better than before. And again, it doesn't matter so much because it's just the background. Now we can start painting the forehead. Working our way from the top to the bottom. The colors that I'm using for my skin tones are always the same. I use burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and a bit of red. And I use these in very different combinations depending on the skin tone or the color of the skin that I'm trying to convey. There's a lot of warmth in this skin tone. So basically, it's just burnt sienna. And all we'll need the red for is maybe the lips. We don't even need the red for most of this painting. There's a little sharp highlight that I'm trying to maintain the curve of the forehead there. And you can see how I'm subtly darker at the top, and then it goes lighter, and then I'm adding more pigment as it goes down again because I'm thinking about where light is being reflected. And when it comes to composing these paintings, I have lots of different reference photos. I have a folder with thousands of different faces that I've collected online from Google Images, Pinterest, magazine cuttings, scanning. But I also have mannequin model at home that, I can hold against the light in different light sources, and I've done practice sketches using that to kind of figure out the pose that I want and where the light is coming from. And I can use that as a reference, so I can see which bits are light and which bits are dark. But a lot of it is very subtle. And because it's subtle, it doesn't really need too much complexity. So far, we've painted the skin tone a kind of base mid tone color. There's not too much difference. Slightly darker at the top, like I said, but what's more important is saving some of the whites. So we've got that shiny highlight on that forehead, a tiny little highlight on the bridge of the nose. And we're painting the section here without going over the eye at all or the eyebrow. I purposely kept the eyebrow unpainted. 10. Facial Underlayer: And whilst it's still wet, we can start to influence it. So we don't need to get the tones right. As soon as we put it on the paper, we can use the brush to draw out pigment. And often, that is the way to do it. You can't affect the tones straightaway because they're going to change. You need to wait for it to dry a bit. So notice how I've gone back to that forehead now and I've used the brush to draw out pigment in the center to give it that feeling of curvature there. It's always a matter of give and take. And now I've used a very diluted wash to soften up the cheek. So from where the nose blends to the cheek, it's going to get lighter. Again, because if we imagine the curvature and where the light is coming from, it's going to reflect that light and be lighter. Now I can soften up that edge there because I don't want a hard edge there. Now, you can see I've created a hard edge with that brush where the corner of the lip is on the left, but I know I have to soften it up, so I clean my brush and go back and soften. Pure burnt sienna there. See how it's so much more vibrant on my paper than in my palette. Because we've got that nice clean white that's reflecting through that transparent medium. Whereas my pats a bit dirty. Carefully painting around. This is with yellow ochre, actually. I'm painting the golden necklace, the ring that goes around it with yellow ochre. But you can see how the cheek curves around into the jaw line that the jaw is going to be in shade because it's a different angle. It's not hitting the light the same way. And also notice where I've softened and pulled away the pigment around the mouth and the nose, the lip area. We'll come back to that. 11. Defining The Forehead: So we completed our first layer, our first parse of the face, and now we're going to go back and refined it and build that depth starting again with that burnt sienna, further emphasizing that the temple on her face, it's not completely accurate, but it doesn't need to be. It's a good example of where you can take your artistic license. There's a curvature there on the forehead where it captures the light. Choosing to keep the hard line on the right. And I'm looking ahead to where I'm going and considering how to tackle it. I've cleaned my brush there, pure water so that I can make a nice smooth transition rather than a hard line. Darkening it on that left hand sign. Again, so we've got dark that gradually turns to light and then back to dark again. Always cleaning my brush, going back and forth. So I've got a nice wet, clean brush. It's not overloaded. But to help keep it even, and then moving down to the bridge of the nose, squinting my eyes at my references and my sketch. H. I always do a sketch before a painting, a tonal sketch so that I can figure out the tones because going straight into a painting from a group of references and pictures, it's impossible to work out how you're going to do it there and then. You have to break it down into a simple sketch, a thumbnail sketch, just a sketch no bigger than the palm of your hand, just to get a rough idea about the tones, and then you can do another one a bit bigger to further emphasize and work out the details, and then you can go into a painting. I'm painting the bottom eyelid on the left right now, darker at the top, where you can imagine the eyelid is curving upwards, so it's again, facing away from the light. And as it gradually curves downwards into the cheek, the cheek is facing the light more. So of course, it's going to get lighter. Always thinking about the relationship of light and shade of the angles of the curvature. A 12. Bridge Of The Nose: Now we can start painting the nose, looking at the areas which are darkest and where to blend them with the top. I'm keeping that little highlight of the white. Of course, if you miss that, you can always go back with white guash at the end. On the tip of the nose I'll keep a little highlight, too. I'm trying to keep the colors simple. I'm using a burnt sienna, as I always have done. And that means we can just think about the tones rather than the mixes of color. Notice how I'm changing my brush depending on the size of the shape I'm painting. So when I was painting the background, I was using a big brush. When I was painting the forehead, I was using a medium brush, and now I've moved to a smaller brush when painting these intricate areas with the nose, the eyes, and the lips. But then I'll move again to a bigger brush when painting the jaw or the hair later. And you can ask me what size brush I'm using, but it all depends on the size of the paper you're using. If I was using If I was painting double the size of this, they're now double the size of the brush I'm using. And if you're painting a smaller painting on a smaller sheet, then you'd probably have to use a brush half the size that I'm using. Painting the eyelid on the other side, and I'm acknowledging the shadows of the eyelashes a bit. Cleaning my brush and blending it out so there's a nice soft transition. Again, I'm trying to think where I want those harsh lines and where I want those soft lines. 13. Around The Eyes: Watercolor painting relies on layers. And although there's other mediums that you can work with layers like acrylic or oil, maybe, they don't require layer quite as much as watercolor. So with an oil painting, although I'm not an expert, I imagine you can paint your darks at any time. But with watercolor, you can't paint your darks and then use the white of the paper after that. So because we're only starting with lights first and then medium tones and then eventually dark tones, it can look very odd when you're halfway through a painting. So at this stage, you can see looking at here and my painting. It looks very odd, actually. It's hard to judge whether it's going to work out or not because it just looks a bit strange. But through experience, you understand that that's just the way and the process of watercolor. So you have to have faith that it will work out and that your judgment is kind of skewed at the moment. As long as you're assessing your tones and your edges, and the seclon that you're painting is accurate, then it'll all come together as a complete package at the end. It's only at the end we can fully assess our painting as a cohesive piece. But we can have faith that it's going to come together because we're using the principles that always work where we've got our colors harmonized because it's very simplified. It's a limited color palette. We're using burnt sienna, basically, and Cerlean blue. That's the only color we've really used. We've used a bit of yellow ochre, just to influence the burnt sienna. But apart from that, it's quite controlled. So that means all we've got to think about is the tone and the edges. So when you're following along, I suggest you follow the video while you're painting rather than looking at the image of my final piece because you'll know the process and the step by step structure of how I'm painting it because it's a bit like a puzzle. You got to know the sequence of events. By just solely using my reference image, you may forget a few underlayers that can easily be done. But if you follow step by step, with the video, pausing it, and then going back as a kind of checkmark, you shouldn't miss any section. And you can pause the video at each stage to kind of match it to get it as close as you can to mine. 14. The Nose: And when I say close as you can to mine, I mean just the scaffolding, the structure. You can change things if you want. You can change the skin tone. You can change the hair. Maybe you don't want to use blue as the second color in this. Maybe you want to use purple or green. Just things like these highlights and the shading underneath the nose, you'll probably want to follow along because I don't think of it as a nose. I just look at this shape, and it's a kind of abstract shape, but it's a block in. I'm blocking it in. And then I'm softening certain edges of that shape, like right now. To where that nostril is. Again, it's curving where the light is. And then there's a little sharp shadow where that nostril corners. 15. The Cheek: So this is a nice little checkpoint. Now we finished the nose section because we're about to go very bold with the shadow on the jaw and the cheek. Starts off nice and simple. We're adding a nice little diluted line that follows that kind of diagonal line up from the lip to the bottom of the ear. And that initiates the wash because it'll start with a wet on wet kind of curve. It's not a hard angle where the cheek turns into the jaw. It's a nice soft gradient. So we added a nice diluted wash, and then we're going to add a heavy pigment now that will blend down. Still using that burnt sienna. Even though it's a smooth transition, there's still a sense of curvature that we have to be aware of. Make sure you don't paint over the lips as well because we're going to be using a red for that later. You can also take your time, actually, because we're going to be painting wet on wet. We can just keep on adding more and more pigment, and the hard line at the moment, is going to be painted over. So I'm bringing it down to where I'm actually going past the pencil line because I'm going to be painting darker over that pencil line. So we can go over it a bit. As long as we can still see that pencil line, we're safe. Cleaning my brush because there's going to be a little highlight on the chin where it curves up again. But as it curves down, that's the part that we'll bring into shadow. Some subtle tones going on there. Painting the ear, but not painting over the golden part of the earring. You can look at the finished painting as a reference to see what we paint over later. I'm also softening up the top of that jaw again. Using the white of the paper there to really make it shine. Cleaning my brush. And it's a back and forth. It's adding pigment and then using my brush to take it away. And during this wet and wet stage, we have the most control. Eventually, it will dry. But we could actually keep on going if we remember to soften the edges, and we add more water gradually, not a lot, but, like, bit by bit. It's the curvature of this cheek that I wanted to express most in this portrait because it's like a wet on wet curvature. Of course, with oil, we could go back and forth with different brushes to blend it out. But with watercolor, we have to do it with water. So it's a fun little challenge to do. Using very thick burnt sienna now. Still wet on wet. You can also have a little spray gun to give it a bit more life if it starts to dry. Because with a section like this, you can't really re wet it once it's dried. You have to maintain the wetness. 16. The Jawline: And that's why paper quality really helps because although it is expensive cotton base paper, it allows you so much more freedom and time and it's that much more forgiving when it comes to reworking and correcting areas. Because if we're using cheaper paper, paper that wasn't cotton based, it would start to crumble. Particles of the paper would break off, and I basically wouldn't be to do what I just did there if it wasn't cotton based paper, unfortunately. But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for cheaper paper. Sometimes practice is just practice. We're not trying to create a masterpiece. So I still use cheap paper outside of classes for my practice sketches, my practice paintings for this class. And yes, the end result isn't as nice, but it almost forces you to get it right the first time. And because you know it's cheap paper, you don't have as much pressure to get it right or you don't feel the fear, so it makes you a bit more creative, maybe. So in quite a large wet on wet area like this, it starts off, of course, very wet and it's in that time where we're doing the larger general shape of the shadow. But now as it's starting to evaporate and it's not wet anymore, it's more damp than moist or sodden. We have a bit more precision, so we can't do those broad shapes anymore. We have to move on to the next stage and just add a bit more refinement. So, as it's drying, I'm not walking away from the painting. I'm going to observe it, do little bits just to help refine it, bring that soak up a bit of that pigment as that jaw line from the chin goes up to the ear. Maybe define that curve from the corner of the mouth up to where the top of the ear would be. Of course, I did have pencil lines to help guide me. Drop a little bit of pigment in there. 17. The Eyebrows: It's completely dry. I used hair dryer and we can move on to the next stage. I'm starting to incorporate a bit of black. And I'm painting the eyebrows, starting from the left. The eyebrows aren't too difficult to do if you've drawn them out correctly. We're just filling in that area. Using the tip of the brush to make sure we're accurately filling in where the lines are. But you'll see on this right one, I left the white of the paper. And that's because I want to yes. Add another color in there, just to make it a bit more exciting. I'm choosing to put some green in there, actually, just because it's what I'm feeling. There's no rule as to why I'm choosing green. You can put blue, purple, or you can just leave it pure black. It kind of matches that green kind of stroke we added in the background at the top, slightly to the right. It helps make it uniform. So even the eyebrows, they're not a solid black. They're not a solid tone. They've got some variety in there. And when painting a female, it's generally better to have thinner eyebrows than bushy ones. But even still, we're creating a bit of variety it's not just a solid stroke. We've got some texture at the ends. Oh 18. The Eyes: Now with painting the eye, I'm using the black again. Maybe it's picking up some of that brown that we've got on our palette, but it's fairly thick. It's still very pliable. It's coming off the brush very easily, but it's not very diluted. We don't want it to dry gray, and using the very tip of my brush. I want to maintain and preserve some of the whites, especially on that lower eyelid, the tiny little bit, where the eyelashes are coming out, I want to keep white. And then the eyelid on top. I want there to be shadow there. Of course, in real life, they're not lines. They're just very small shapes, but we as artists simplify and turn them into lines. Painting the pupil and the outline of the iris and some of the eye lashes. Again, having your drawing as accurate as possible helps immensely. If you don't have the pencil drawing to guide you, it's going to be very difficult to do it with the paint. Same thing on the other side. Notice how I'm not using the absolute smallest brush in the world. It's still got the thickness to it, and it doesn't matter if it's not the smallest brush as long as it has that fine tip. Trying to get the eyes to match their positioning. So they're slightly turned around. They're facing the corner slightly. Or at least the irises are in the corner, and the pupils are looking straight ahead and then using a little bit of brown to blend out that iris. Though it's so dark, it could be black, but there is a subtle brownness in there. And now we can start softening. 19. Adding Highlights: Using the tiff of the brush to imply some eyelashes. You don't need to paint every single eyelash, but slightly varying the thickness. They're all very thin, of course, but from super thin to a bit thin. I've cleaned my brush now, and I'm just softening some areas because the whites of the eye aren't actually white. So I'm bringing some of that grayness and brownness into there. Make sure you don't touch the iris or the pupil of the eye. If you're a bit cautious, you should dry it completely before blending out the whites of the white of the eye. Starting to define that shadow a bit. Sometimes if the details look a bit wrong, you can smudge them and rather than actually putting in the detail, you can convey the detail with a general tone. That's what I'm doing here in the corner of the eye. I don't need to paint out all the details like the tear duct, generalize it. And now that it's completely dry, I'm using a bit of gouache. I'm not actually using white guash this time. You'll see just below the white on my palette, there's a kind of yellow ochre mixed with white guash. I'm just two tiny dots there. You could put one dot, but just for interest, I'm putting two dots there, one slightly larger than the other, but they're both matching on each eye to give it that glossy feel, the wetness of the eye. And now we can start the next stage. 20. Defining The Nose: Mixing some yellow ochre in there. We can start moving down to the nose with a bit more detail. So there's lots of complexity in the face. But we try to break each step down into manageable parts. Even if each manageable part is quite detailed and takes a lot of concentration, we're trying to make it approachable, so you can pause the video, and it may take a long time initially trying to match each little section. But after a few attempts, you'll kind of get a feel for it and it'll speed things up and you won't necessarily have to follow me step by step, or at least you can have longer gaps between pausing the video, or you can add your own personal interpretation to it. Mixing a dark brown here, again using the tip of my brush. Just the bottom corner of that nostril, not even the nostril, outside of the nose where there's a sharp, little shadow that looks like a line and it softens out and spreads out above the nostril. A lot of these things are common with all portraits. Doesn't matter the ethnicity or the angle of the face or whether it's a male or a female or a child or a elderly person, there's always going to be a little sharp corner on the nose, where the nostril meets the cheek because the light just doesn't reach that part in a sharp way, and it always blends upwards. Of course, noses have lots of different shapes. So you have to adapt that kind of shadow and light to the various different types of noses, but the fundamentals of the shape is still the same. So it's once we get comfortable with painting and drawing multiple different types of noses, we can start to adapt it much more easily. So it's a practice thing, really. And that's the same with eyes and the mouth and ears. Even though they all vary, once we've practice painting many different types, we kind of get a feeling an intuition of how to paint it because we just know where the commonalities appear. And that's how we simplify a lot of these complex scenes, it can be very overwhelming to see a human face and know how to break it down. But once we memorize the key parts, we can only add those key parts, and it anchors it altogether. It just does take a lot of time to practice and remember these key landmarks on the face. Uh, 21. The Lips: Now we can start painting the mouth area, starting with the lips. I'm going to use sarin crimson and even mixing that in with the burnt sienna slightly. Again, having it sketched out, so I know exactly which area to block in. I start off with a thick kind of pigment, and then I can use water to use that pigment that's already on the paper to fill out the rest of it. So I'm not always going back and forth from the paper to the palette. Kind of through practice and intuition, I kind of have a feeling for how much pigment I need, and I just add it all in one go and just move it around on the paper. And like with every element of the face, I'm thinking about the curveture and where the light is reflecting and where the light isn't reaching. So as the lip curves down into the middle, there's less light. So that's why it's darker there, especially in the corners of the lips. Rather than red, I'm using brown for the shadows. Then we can do the same thing on the bottom lip. And when we think of the top lip, it's actually depending on the person, of course. It's facing down. So the top lip is generally darker than the bottom lip because the bottom lip is curving upwards, facing towards the light. So it's naturally going to reflect more of that light and be lighter. H. Connecting it with that shadow. Dropping in a bit more pigment to emphasize that depth. Scrubbing it a bit cause often on the bottom lip, where it reaches the corner, it blends. There's not a hard line, there's not a hard separation. 22. Mouth Shadows: Her lips are slightly open, so I did just imply teeth there, but it looked too sharp and strong, so I just smudged it out and toned it down, so it's slightly gray in there. But I might come back to that later. So now the bottom of the lip curves upward, like I say, but below the lip as it reaches the chin. It's in shadow. It's in shade because the lip kind of comes out and it kind of blocks that light from underneath. It's actually very zigzag. If you look at the profile of a face from the nose, it just goes out, then in, then out in, and then out and in. So you can just put these fairly simple shapes like this underneath the lip to define where the chin is. And, of course, on the tip of the chin, there's a highlight there as well. Mixing in a kind of muted brown and just dropping it right underneath the lip there to make the lips really pop. I don't really want smooth lines where that shadow is touching that lip or the chin. So I dry that out completely with the hair dryer. So now we can go back and emphasize some details without it having the wet on wet effect. Because in the corners of the mouth, I want it to be really quite dark. Very small area, but having those little dark points adds to that feeling of depth and tonal contrast. Again, trying to figure out what to do with the teeth there. It's just something I didn't figure out in my sketch, so just kind of getting a feel for it here. I think I will darken it, actually. Sometimes the answers don't come quickly. You have to carry on with the painting and come back to them. That's a sarin crimson again. Increasing the feeling of curvature on that top lip. Slightly smoothening it. 23. Darkest Darks: So I decided to smudge out and darken the teeth, so it's completely in shade and it's less distracting now. I've mixed a very dark brown. It's basically black, but there is actually burnt seen in there. I'm going back to my pencil line and painting where the end of the neck end of the chin is. In preparation to paint the hair. But before we can paint the hair, I need to make sure we paint the outline of the face using negative painting technique. And, of course, with such a dark, bold pigment, there's only one attempt at this, so be very careful. Make sure your pencil line is clear. You can always re draw on it at this stage before you commit to this dark pigment. And technically, you can also at the end, if you do go over, use white squash, but that's just a safety net that we shouldn't really rely on. Now using that black to kind of soften that neck line because even though in reality, it's a hard line. I don't want to create attention to that area. I don't want hard edges everywhere. So I'm using my artistic license to kind of soften where that shadow is underneath the chin and jaw. Now I'm just about to paint the earring using negative painting, and I'm continuing this wash with black and burnt sienna. Unfortunately, my camera cuts off after 30 minutes, and I didn't notice, so I didn't turn it back on whilst painting this section. But if you pause the video, you can refer back to it to make sure you've caught up. Again, I've just used the same colors just to fill out this area, the little bottom of the ear and the earring. 24. The Shoulder: Now we can start to paint the shoulder. And I'm mixing a bit more yellow ochre into this skin tone because I want the face to feel warmer. If you think about it, it makes sense because there's more capillaries and blood vessels in the face drawing blood and it makes it warmer than the yellow that you might have on a shoulder. I'm very careful also to leave a little white highlight there, just where the reflection of light might be going there. I mean, there's no reference for this in my photos, but I'm just adding that little white bit of paper to help give the illusion of form. Trying to be careful not to paint over into that blue shoulder strap, although it's not too important. As long as you don't completely paint over it, it should be okay. Now I can drop in some darker brown pigment. Not that vibrant, quite muted. Again, building on that feeling of form. It doesn't need to be detailed because it's not the area of focus. It's not the focal point. And whilst it's wet on wet, it'll all blend nicely and be quite ambiguous shading. Now we can start to do the same above, matching the colors, basically. So this will really make that blue pop. Using a nice mid tone to fill it out, and then we can go back over and kind of add variety to the wash. M making it a bit darker so that we can really make that blue pop. Mixing a very muted brown now. And I've allowed it to dry. So this is just a pure sharp shadow where the arm creases with the armpit, basically. Then I can use a tittue just to soften that edge at the top. 25. Starting The Hair: Now the skin is completely painted, and we can move on to the hair, basically, and the outline of the face. So I've mixed ultra marine blue with the black because I don't want it to be a solid black. I want to give it some color in there, just in case it gets diluted. And I'm just using the tip of my brush to very carefully paint the outline of the face like we did before at the bottom, where the chin and the cheek is. We're just moving up where the eyebrow is. Again, I made sure I could see where the pencil line is so that I know it's accurate. All I have to do is use the brush to paint up to that line. And a millimeters difference is fine. You can feel quite nerve racking with such a bold, dark pigment in such a delicate area. But as long as you take your time, make sure your hand is comfortable and you don't go over that pencil line, you'll be fine. This is when the face really pops out now. Starts to anchor it and hold it in place. At the moment, well, before we had those black lines, the tones were too similar with the background, and it didn't really stick out. Now we're using the hair to kind of add to the depth. Considering what to do next, always having it in your mind where you're going to go before you act because you don't want to start painting and realizing you're loss. So you have to play it out in your mind before each stroke. So using the tip of my brush, just to add a few of these wavy streaks of hair, gradually adding more pressure as we go closer to make the line thicker. You don't want to do this with a very thin brush because you won't be able to achieve the thickness. And So we did the initial curl. Then we did a secondary curl that connected it to the hair above, and we can start working on that. Of course, I've already again, used the pencil lines to map out where I want these streaky hair lines to go. It's just deciding what tone to paint them in and which order to paint them in, and how thick to paint them in. We could start blending into that black now. Mm hmm. 26. Connecting The Strands: There's only going to be eight or so little strands like this. We've added four of them so far connecting some of them, letting them cross over a bit. This creates the illusion of hair because the rest of it's basically blocked out. As we get closer to the skin, they can be a bit more concentrated, making sure we don't paint onto the face. Then we can start blending it in there. We want to allow some streaks of the background to come through. Notice how all the hair is connected, none of it is isolated. And the tones are very similar as well at the time being. I mean, it helps that she's got dark hair. If she had blonde hair or lighter hair, it might be a different story, and we'd have to use a different technique, but we've got a lot of freedom tonally when she has dark hair like this because it's all connected and within the lines, they're quite soft. Notice how even though all these strands of hair are separate, they follow the same kind of curvature to begin with. They kind of go outwards and then inwards, and then they straighten up as they get closer to their hair. And then once they get to the top, I use the thicker side of my brush to connect them all like I am now. Connect them almost like roots, basically, or a tree branch. They join and get thicker. 27. Hair Shadows: So that was a bit more controlled, even though we're trying to make it feel organic. We took our time and kind of planned out where we wanted to add those strokes. The next stage of the hair is to be a bit more spontaneous to contrast that to make it feel more alive. So keeping the same brush, let's mix more of that color. This time, a bit of cobalt blue, I think, rather than ultra marine blue. And we can start being a bit broader connecting that dark shadow, the darkest part of the painting. Alright. Even though it's blue, you can see the background is brown. So this blue on the brown actually makes it quite monotone anyway. You don't really see the blue directly on the painting. And by blocking it out like this, it still feels like hair. We just simplify it. We paint hairs in blocks rather than individual strands, allowing some of the paper to come through, some of the background to come through. Now I can start mixing a richer brown to blend into that, starting from the bottom. Notice how I'm applying slightly different pressure to affect the thickness of this hair. It's following the general direction. But the waviness helps the hair overlap. Blending some sections, avoiding some sections, creating a bit of variety, adding some strokes onto the shoulder, more like shadows from the hair rather than the hair itself, so keeping it warm. Remember blocking out hair shapes. Because even though hair is made up from hundreds and thousands of strands, they do tend to clump together or they follow a kind of common curvature. And that curvature is the same way as the other facial features, some of it is facing towards the light and some of it's in shadow. So with whatever we're painting, we're using light and shadow to kind of determine how we paint it, how to block it in, how to convey the tones and the curvature. We're not thinking of the independent strands or the countless pores on the skin. We're generalizing it. We're making it easier to read. I'm just adding a bit more pigment to these dark areas because as it's drying, it looks a bit too light. And these strands aren't blending in the way they're meant to, so I'm just helping it out with a bit more pigment. 28. Rightside Hair: Of course, if you look at this area isolated, it's very abstract and it's impossible to tell what it is. But within the context of the painting, we understand it as hair. Starting to move on to the right hand side of the hair now and using that curved nature. I'm not being very specific at all. I can see the pencil line here. I want to allow some of the skin to show behind this strap. And then I can fill out the rest with hair. It's just burnt sienna and black. 90% of this painting is burnt sienna. We've just used yellow ochre to help make certain subtle variations, and we've only used black to increase the contrast. We've used the Cerlean blue to make a dark contrast to that brown because there's so much brown. We've made use of its complimentary color blue to really make it pop, likewise, in the earring there. And we've used a subtle bit of red on the lip, of course, because that's what we understand as red, our mutual visual language. And also, it adds a bit of variety. We don't want it to be all stagnant, burnt sienna, or pure one color monotone. We want to create a little bit of subtle variation. Likewise, with the hair, we've added a little bit of blue into the hair. You can't even see it as blue once it's on the paper, but it influences the color in a harmonious way. So zig zagging these hair strokes as it curves up, trying to think in three D, how the hair is resting on the shoulder, curving around and then folding up behind the ear. Not so much thinking about where I'm applying the strokes, but what paper I'm leaving underneath it, the little gaps. So I'm thinking in an inverted way, negatively painting the hair. Because it's always easier to add more and more pigment, but once you go over, you can't take it back. Of course, we can use gouache, but gouache always takes away some of the spirit. It's vital for little highlights. Areas that need expression. We don't want to sacrifice little gaps in the paper. But when we can allow the lightness of the paper to come through, we should try and take advantage of those parts. 29. Blocking in Hair: Now we've got the general form of the hair. We can start building on it with extra tone and choosing which bits of the paper to get rid of and which bits to preserve a bit more. So I've mixed a very thick black. But again, it's not a pure black. I still used some brown that's in my palette, possibly blue to harmonize it a bit better. And there's a lot of wet and wet going onto mixing some blue right now. Thinking about how I want to connect it. Using broad strokes, using wet on wet to create clean transitions. I want it to be a bit darker. Make this earring pop, so make it a bit darker there. Start working from the top, trying to convey the general form and direction of the hair. Always, not just randomly scribbling it in because then we won't allow the white of the paper to fall in line with the direction of the hair. We can still be expressive within the confines of the area we're painting. Actually mixing a bit of purple in there. Completing the silhouette of the figure now. It takes a lot of faith this stage, because unlike when we're painting the facial details, where we're taking our time to make sure it's right. To capture the expressive feeling of hair, we can't really take our time with it. We have to kind of take a leap of faith and hope that our brush work looks pretty. And that is just something that takes time and practice, muscle memory, and pure intuition. And intuition comes from confidence and knowledge through repeated practice. And that's why sometimes cheap paper can have its advantage. If you want to do a final finished masterpiece, then cotton paper is ultimately better. But for practicing and building your muscle memory, there's no harm in using cheap paper, or even I have something called a buddha board, which you can see in my materials and supplies video where I'm testing my brushes on. It uses absolutely no pigment. It's a gray slate. And when you using pure water, it goes dark, and you can practice all kinds of brush strokes just to build up that confidence with your brush strokes. Likewise, maybe you're just getting very cheap paper, using your cheapest pigments and just practicing these hair strokes before you actually apply it to this. It doesn't matter what tone you're using when you're practicing. You can just use a monotone, and then when you come to paint your actual portrait, you can start integrating more tones. I've included a bit of purple on the top of the head there, but that wasn't essential. That was a personal choice. Maybe I could have kept it brown. Or made it a bit blue. It really doesn't matter. 30. Tinting The Head: Now, whilst it's still wet, we can add more and more strokes. As it starts to dry, these strokes will hold their shape a bit more. So we're creating a nice range of wet on wet to eventually wet on dry. And that creates the depth, improves that illusion. Darkening it at the top here where the light is hidden underneath the hair. But the light's not reaching it, so it needs to be darker. I'm going to further enhance the outline of the hair as it comes down across the face. I have preserved quite a lot of the paper, so that gives me a bit of choice. I don't want to keep all of them, so I've got to choose which areas I want to keep and which areas to paint over. Where are the most important parts that help convey the message, the feeling I want to express. I think the paper that's coming through the hair underneath the chin and on the shoulder is too light. So I'm just going to do a bit of glazing. I'm going to mix some brown, burnt sienna and just very quickly and lightly go over it. I'm not trying to smudge anything here. I'm not trying to affect the lines that are underneath. Just trying to tone it down a bit. There's too much contrast there, so glazing is a very useful technique, but you have to do it very quickly so you don't agitate what's underneath. Now, painting the hair on top of the shadows that we painted before on the shoulder. Now I can start smudging maybe some of the shadow areas here, purposely agitating some of it. Softening out because when we first blocked in, there's lots of hard lines going on there. So we're going over with a second take softening out some areas. So it's not all uniform. It's not rigid. Mixing some serlean blue. We've got little touches of Cerlean blue scattered around. And although on the shoulder, the earring and above the head, it's very obvious. We still want there to be a more kind of harmonious transition. Not transition, but we've got pure blue, and we've got brown, and we need some areas in between. So adding little touches of the blue help balance it out a bit more. 31. Powerful Details: A few touches to this strap. It's almost a solid blue. So I want to vary it a bit. Add a bit of subtle shading. We're just bringing the painting together now. A very fine sharp line sharp shadow that might indicate a single strand of hair. It's just a few of these tiny little details. A little bit of finesse gives the illusion that there's more detail than there actually is filling out or just implying the shadow of the ear lobe. Assessing what really needs to be done and what can be left out on purpose. Trying to restrain myself from overdoing it, overworking it. You could easily say that this paintings done, but there's actually a few things you can do to really make it pop those few simple little lines that add that further definition and create feeling. Because there's not apart from the details on the face, the rest is actually quite abstract, not very I was going to say sophisticated, but I guess I mean precision. It's quite loose and abstract. So just bringing it together with a few well placed lines to anchor it, to give it the illusion that there's more detail than there is. And again, I'm not using white paint for this. I'm using that yellow ochre gouache that I've got below the white on my palette because it has a bit more warmth to it. White is actually a very cool color. And this gives a feeling of golden warmth. You can just imagine the sun glistening off these little strands of hair. I'm also using a dry brush kind of technique to add to that texture that natural texture. See, with lines like this that we're painting, it would be impossible to just have so much precision on the neck to preserve the paper. So it's in areas like this that we have to rely on highlights using quash. Some people might say you could use masking fluid, but that really damages the brush. And the painting evolves as you paint it. So if you use masking fluid, you're often stuck with that and you have to work around that. But just by adding this guash at the end, you're free to do where you want to. You know how much to put, how much to leave out. Also, you can be much more precise because you've got the tip of your brush here, but you can't be so fine with masking fluid. 32. Final Thoughts: Welcome back and congratulations on completing this portrait class. I hope you enjoyed exploring how warmth, contrast, and transparency can all work together to create a portrait full of mood and emotion. Every portrait tells a different visual story, and the more we practice adapting our palette and brushwork to suit each other, the more confident and expressive our paintings become. Remember, watercolor painting is not just about technical skills, but also about expressing your creativity and personal style. I encourage you to continue exploring, experimenting and pushing your boundaries to create your own unique watercolor masterpieces. As we come to the end of this class, I hope you feel more confident and comfortable with your watercolor painting abilities. Practice is key when it comes to improving your skills, so keep on painting and experimenting. I want to express my gratitude for each and every one of you. Your passion for watercolor painting is so inspiring and I'm honored to be your teacher. If you would like feedback on your painting, I'd love to give it. So please share your painting in the student projects gallery down below, and I'll be sure to respond. If you prefer, you can share it on Instagram, tagging me at Will Elliston, as I would love to see it. Skillshare also loves seeing my students work, so tag them as well at Skillshare. After putting so much effort into it, why not share your creation? If you have any questions or comments about today's class or want any specific advice related to watercolor, please reach out to me in the discussion section. You can also let me know about any subject wildlife or scene you'd like me to do a class on. If you found this class useful, I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. Reading your reviews fills my heart with joy and helps me create the best experience for my students. Lastly, please click the follow button Utop so you can follow me on Skillshare. This means that you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. Thank you again for painting with me today. I hope to see you all again in another class very soon until then Happy painting.