Whimsical Watercolor Portraits

1. Introduction: welcome to whimsical watercolor portrait. I'm gonna show you my technique, my go to for how I make these magical portrait, starting with a basic pencil sketch of the base and then transferring that sketch onto watercolor paper using a light box. You can either do that with pencil or skip straight away to doing it with water color on the light box. Once that's done, will work on several light washes of watercolor to delicately pain in the faces and then on to some really loose and fun watercolor play, where we're laying down a colorful backgrounds that will pop off the doodles in our final stage. This part is really fun and really gets the creative juices flowing. Adding the doodles at the end is the icing on the cake. You can really make some beautiful portrait's in this style that are special, something different, something colorful and really full of a lot of love. I can't wait to see what you guys make in the class. Let's get started 2. Meet The Teacher: Hi, everyone. I'm 70 Korpi. I am an artist in the Philadelphia area. I work here in my home studio, which is pretty convenient because I have three little boys always running around that I can easily keep an eye on. I dabble in all sorts of creative things I love to, so I love to paint abstract acrylics on canvas. I like to teach art lessons to kids. I license my art for products like greeting cards and home to core and wall art. And I published books in the art instructional space on topics from doodling to fashion design to painting with your kids. If you would like to learn more about me and my work or hire me for a special project, please visit me online at Stephanie Korpi dot com. 3. Materials: Hey, guys. I wanted to show you the supplies that I have laid out for the win school Portrait workshop . Um, you need a fair amount of things, but they're all very basic. So first off have to start with your photos. So find your inspiration, photos something you want to paint from. And then I went ahead and enlarged mine to the size I'm gonna be painting. Got rid of the background. I just I like to keep it super simple and not have to worry about that. So I just cleaned up my background in voter shop and printed these out on plain old printer paper. I like making them as large as I'm gonna paint. Um because I think that especially for beginners, um, using a tiny little photo and trying to scale it up onto a large sheet and just kind of eyeball that can be challenging. Whereas if you have this, um, you know, really sized image right next to what you're painting. It's a lot easier to kind of judge scale and size and see if you're doing a good job. So I just have a stack of these source photos using for the class. And then when it's time to start sketching, just use plain old copy paper again. It's nice and thin, so when you get your good pencil sketch going, it'll be easy to put on a light box. Would you see back here I have my trusty light boxes, just a little portable lightbox, and you'll be able to transfer the sketch that you make to start your portrait onto your watercolor paper. And then, speaking of water color paper, um, I would highly suggest a cold pressed watercolor paper. Um, Cold pressed has this real toothy texture to it. See, that camera can pick that up. And I do think that it's a lot more forgiving, especially when you're working on faces. I think hot press gets a lot of bloom edges, and kind of the water can make some interesting marks, whereas the hot on the cold press paper helps things blend a little bit more. I would also suggest that if given the option in the craft store, you could buy the middle grade cold press paper that maybe they have on hand. Um, I like this Fabbiano, Um, I like, um, the Windsor Newton is pretty nice. This is artist paper, which is very expensive, but really nice. But the super super cheapest cold press papers, you might get a little bit frustrated. You can certainly still do it. But, um, watercolor paper is one of those things where the quality of the paper can kind of really help your end results. So maybe go middle of the road. Okay, so that's source photos and papers And what not When I do my sketches, I just use a regular old mechanical pencil. It doesn't really matter what you're sketching your initial sketch with. And when I transfer onto the watercolor paper, um, I just used that also, I just use a really light hands that there's not too much graphite lay down on the paper as faras on watercolor brushes. I love my Penta water brush on, and it's great for details, and it's a portable. However, when we get to the whimsical part of the portrait, the natural bristle brushes are really nice for like, puddling and flicking and really dripping color on making lots of messy marks. And then maybe a couple of super fine detail seal tiny that IHS um whips detail, brush is so you can do like details in the eyes in the mouth and the teeth in this stuff like that. There's brushes. It's obviously a little bowl of water and a paper towel for when you're using the traditional brushes for paints. I have a bunch of different ones on my workstation. You can use anything, really. I mean, you're not limited. These are just the ones I have. So tell you what they are. This is a mission Gold tube set. Um, this is a dry pan set by Angora, and these are my peerless water colors that are like the dried pigment on card stock and these air really bright but yet transparent. So I'd like them for portrait because you can really layer them up on Um, lastly, when we're done painting the portrait and it's times, just do some of those decorative embellishments. I have some of these signal for weeks that no stay below stay below the high, sure high pronounce. So I just got these at Michael's. Um, kind of colored finds it markers, and you can see I have an entire huge been of them in all different colors. But really, what I use the most is a white gel pens. This is I jumped ahead of myself. This is the signal. Get it zoomed in here. Unipol signal, Um, white gel pin. And this is awesome because it it makes really nice. Oh, peak kind of doodled markings on top of almost anything and especially it's a nice new opaque on top of the water color. It doesn't absorb too much, So that's the whole gist. Like I said, if you only have a basic set of water colors and a few pens, you can still do this project. I just wanted to share with you what I'm using because inevitably people ask and want to know what my materials are, and I'm ready to get started. 4. Sketching: Okay, so now we're ready for this Sketching part of our portrait session for me. I find that making a good road map sketch of my portrait actually satisfies the type a part of my brain and frees me up to let the water color be looser. So I'm gonna show you how I kind of grit out of face and, um, kind of use spatial relationships to make my sketch of the most important lines that will be used that way. I'm sure my proportions are good and ready for when it's time to add color. I'm gonna talk through my process in real time. Okay. So for the first step of doing or Portrait swe need to get a pencil sketch to work from. And I don't like to work right on the watercolor paper because I like my watercolor paper to be as pristine as possible when I start painting on it. I don't want have too many eraser marks, things like that. And with portrait sketching, I find that I do a lot of self correction. So I like to sketch on the plane printer paper first, get it to where I really like it and then put it on a lightbox and transfer just the best markings onto my watercolor paper before I start painting. So I'm gonna briefly show you how I do that. Um, since this class is about painting whimsical watercolor portrait. So I focused a lot more on the painting. Been on, like the structure and anatomy of drawing a portrait. Um, but I'll share some of my, um, kind of the basic ways that I kind of start Teoh structure a portrait. So I always kind of look for lines. And a lot of times when I do my sketches, I don't like to work too much and curves. I like Teoh. Hold back on the pencil a little bit so I can get a lot of kind of swinging action in motion in my pencil. I don't want to be too tight and controlled. Um, I just find that it almost always comes out with a better result when I'm a little bit looser in the sketch stage. So I will look at things in this, um photograph. Ah, her face is oriented. This line right here is almost perfectly vertical. And, um, like I was saying before, if you're working at the same size. You can kind of help yourself by making some, like, mapped out marking sleep. You can kind of come across and kind of mark the top of the head. The bottom of the chin makes it all make a little darker so you can see him. I like to sketch pretty light, but I understand that you guys might not be able to see it too well on camera and start. I start making like, a visual map of the face when I teach. I have a student that I teach once a week. She's 13 and I'm always telling her that. You know, I try not to draw what you think is there drop? We really see. So I have, like a perfectly vertical line for the side of her face. Here, here is about where the eye line is, and that right here is kind of like an imaginary line that would kind of cut through both of these lash lines, and you can see that it's a little bit of a U. I want to kind of move that over to this side. Um, and here's the little chin right there. um I want to Mark. So this is the one cider face that's perfectly vertical. And then, like in my mind, I look at the center line, the line that would dissect her face in left and right halves. It kind of comes through here, and then I want to move that onto this side. Once you make yourself kind of this grid, which is the same way I approach my little character sketches, it just kind of, um makes everything else kind of fall into place. I think this is too high. So her cheeks come up and from her notes. So this midline right here, I'm kind of trying to see a visual. You can see that from the center of her face to this side is a little smaller than from here to here. It's a little bit of an angle. You can see the eyes a little closer to the edge. It is here, too, because you're seeing it on an angle. So, um, you just a lot of times I kind of it's like muscle memory. I'll go like this and then kind of figure out where the other side is to. You don't have to be perfect. That's the one beauty of working on, um, the sketch or the cheapo paper is that, um you know, you can really make a lot of lines we can a race later if we need to and make corrections. The quicker you do this, even though I'm going a little bit slower than I normally do, so I can kind of explain my process. The faster you do this, I swear the results are better. So don't be afraid. Some kind of looking at again. If I want to draw it right on the picture of the center line there, what's the distance for between here and here? So her eye starts and I'm like, right about there, right about there and then Anyway, I think it's a little bit, um, sometimes it can just be a little bit freeing Teoh. Let yourself focus on kind of like an overall more. I mean, it's not abstracted because her eyes were closed, but it's less of a portrait and more of like a little little moment little capture. So I'm just moving right along, kind of trying to see where the distance between this lash line and her knows how long is that space. And then again, how long is the space between this bottom of her nose and her lip? So I'm just constantly trying to make little visual references, and I've just constantly looking back and forth between the photo and my sketch. If you linger too long staring at the sketch, you'll start to just kind of, I don't know, fill in, fill in spaces the way your mind's eye wants it to look, and you're not actually referencing the photo enough and you'll be able to tell, because then you'll get frustrated. She'll go back in the late shift to raise a lot, so just keep trying to go back and forth between her eyebrow on her headband. You try to see that space between this eyebrow where the boat comes in. Just basic shapes. Don't try to get the textures and details right. Pretend that you're making your portrait almost out of like you have the Legos to build it out of. You don't have any curves. You have very basic shapes, and you're trying to kind of get your point across. So obviously she has curly hair, but I'm just kind of trying to get the overall shape worked in, and obviously, with any portrait, the hardest part is getting a likeness. One thing I would encourage you guys to do in this class is because, really, this class is focusing on trying to get this whimsical kind of look going. It's not really you don't even have toe paint a real person. You can use a photo reference, Um, really, just to kind of get oppose. And don't even worry about getting a likeness. Just work on the different techniques. How do I lay, or how do I shade? How do I get all these fun? Like little details worked in? How do I get a skin tone that is like whimsical meaning? It's, you know, colorful and maybe not well, obviously not realistic, but still have it not looked cherished. For example, you know you could paint a portrait with all green tones if you wanted Teoh Um, and that would look. It would be hard to make it not look too garish, but it can be done, Um, but when you're using colors like blue and purple and yellow and orange in a portrait, there's always like a balance to having it look fun and not, you know, kind of garish. So focus on those things and, you know, who cares at the eyeballs or whatever are exactly right? Of course, if you're trying to do this of one of your kids or something, by all means go for the likeness. But I think the whole purpose of this class is more the whimsy and the fund, not the, um, kind of exact replica or exact likeness of your source photo. All right, so I don't want to get too many details, because the whole point of this sketch is to transfer over to the watercolor paper, the bare minimum markings, like a little bit of a road map so that you know where to place things. You don't have to worry about the painting being wonky. At least you know it'll be following in the framework that you've drawn that you've kind of worked out the kinks. But you don't want overdraw because you're not gonna overdraw the markings you transfer to the paper. So try and try and refrain. I am the worst culprit. I, um I will always have a tendency, like I love sketching. So much that I tend to keep going past when I should. For the for the purposes of this, for example, I'll end up with a completely finished sketch and go Oh, yeah, I really didn't need that completely fish sketch for what I'm doing. Hands air hard. I picked this, um, particular image because it's a very special little baby to me. Um, however, I wouldn't necessarily suggest you picked one with hands, because hands are super challenging. And hey, why, why frustrate yourself out the gate? Right. But, um, I picked this because this little baby dolls special to me and I want to give it to her mama. And whenever I do a class, I try and reach out to maybe some customers or, um, some friends or people who I think might enjoy the end result, because what's the point in, you know, making the portrait's just to stick him in a drawer. So I like them to, like, go to people if I can. And I also I kind of figured, since this is whimsical, she has her hand in this position in her eyes lowered. Maybe I would have her holding a flower or something. and that's one of the things will go over in the in the workshop is how you can kind of add these whimsical details add butterflies, add flowers, bees, leaves, that sort of thing. So anyway, I think that's good for my sketch. And, um, close enough is good enough, I always say, and I'm gonna leave you with one more example in quick time so you can kind of just observe the process once more before we move on to the lightbox stage. 5. Transfer: in this video, I'm gonna show you two ways that I transfer my sketches onto my watercolor paper. Okay, so now we lived on. We have our little rough pencil sketch on typing paper, and we have our nice little piece of cut to size watercolor paper called Press. And I'm gonna put these on my little desktop light box. You can see it's just had, like, a little plug in a little switch here if you don't have a light box. But you have a glass table somewhere in your house, you could kind of, like, shine a light under it or you could take keep your drawing and your paper to a sunny window and, um, just use that anything that will help the drawing show through to the surface of your watercolor paper is fine and then get it centered the way you want on the page. One thing I would say when I do, the whimsical watercolor portrait is almost kind of, um, plan in like a little section that will have splashes and, like more doodles, a doodle area. So I don't always face right in the center. So for this one, I kind of jog it like this and have her a little bit more to the side. Then, um, I can do a lot of liquid physical splashing and colors and like little doodles in this area , so think about that when you're laying it out. So this is gonna be kind of self explanatory, so I'll probably do this in fast motion for you, but essentially, you want to use a sleight of hand as you possibly can. Teoh transfer the bare minimum markings from this. You basically want to have a road map that Onley you can see for when you start your watercolor. So truly, though, is light as you can before you really can't see it, really? Just trying to give yourself a little bit of a framework for the paint to go in so that you don't struggle and, you know, kind of overwork your paper. And even though it's hard to see, which is kind of the point, you can see my drawing very lightly and minimally transferred onto my watercolor paper Really light lines. The ideas for it to be light enough that you won't see it once you paint, you just want to give yourself a road map and a framework to add the water color so you can paint a little bit more confidently without figuring it out as you go along and you'll be able to refine what you're doing. Um, as you paint as well, so you don't have to be super precise and exact, really just trying to get the spatial relationships, um, marked in so you can leave all the nitty gritty details to the paint, but you'll have this, like, really strong foundation. Now, if you want to skip the pencil, you can jump straight to water color on the light box. So here I'm just showing you how I have my pencil sketch underneath my watercolor paper justice before, but I'm using my pen. Tell water brush the OC wash brush. Teoh. Transfer all the lines for my sketch, using really pale washes of watercolor instead of pencil so you can see I With this technique, I can establish kind of a color scheme. Figure out where I want the different rainbow colors for my whimsical portrait and simultaneously be kind of transferring all the markings for my drawing. So kind of serves double duty, and, um, you can kind of skip that whole step with the pencil and skip right to your paint. Uh, and this one, I actually even added a little bit of the splashy little bits around the edges to whatever the spirit moves you. And remember that when you are transferring the facial features that you should be using really light washes in colors that are generally the color family that you're going to want in your final painting and then you'll end up with an image like this. It's sort of a pale, ghosted image, but you'll be able to darken that up with more and more layers of water colors as you go along. 6. FacialFeatures: in this video, I'm going to share some demonstrations on painting eyes, noses, lips in real time. So they're a little bit long. If you'd rather just watch the demos in sped up motion without sound, go ahead and turn up your sound and speed up the video. Ah, in the left hand bottom part of your video browser. And if you think you would benefit from the more detailed, slow going instructions, then go ahead and watch it regular speed. So before we get into doing the entire face, E wanted to show you guys some basics of different eye shapes or, um, expressions and what I look for in the photo to reference in my painting. So I printed out a bunch of these eyes that I found just on pin dressed just to kind of give you an example, and I'm gonna show you some of the basics. E have to closed eyes, and you can tell that this one's kind of squinting because she's laughing and you can see that in the crease line over the eyelash. That and then this little pucker of skin underneath the eye. Those things both indicate that kind of squinty smiling I whereas this eyes closed, its more calm. So you don't see that crease line a top and you don't see that kind of pocket of skin full that kind of pushes up under. That only happens when you're smiling kind of with your cheeks. So those are two of the closed eyes. And I would suggest that if you're a beginner and you think eyes might be challenging for you, you might pick a photograph. Is your reference for doing the wind school portrait that has a closed I? Because it's pretty easy to paint the curvature and eyelashes, Um, and not have to get into the entire eyeball. I don't mind the paint on my hands. This is a life of the painter rates, um, and then here somewhere, I So the difference between these two I wanted to kind of point out to you. And so in this one you can see at the bottom of the iris is kind of crapped off. That's the colored part of the eye. You don't see the full circle. It's kind of crops the bottom, but you see full clearance of white at the top, so obviously you can tell that that's a wide eyed expression In this picture, you can see that you can see the clearance of the bottom of the iris. Here you can see the entire thing, but the top is crapped off, so you don't see that full circle. These are some of the most important things I look for when I'm painting eyes to get them accurate, because where the eyelids cut into the iris kind of dictates the expression on the person's face. Whether they look a little bit sleepy eyed, calm, lazy eyed almost whether they looked really shocked and surprised. And it's all gonna be about how much of the iris that you see whether you see White of the eye isn't at the top with bottom, and you know how that lash line cuts through. So those are things I definitely look fourth. Here's another smiling I, and you can see that this skin fold at the bottom is really pushed up into the eye. And here you have the top lash line cutting through the iris and the bottom lash line is kind of cutting through because this is a really kind of squinty happy, smiley shiny. I And then the last thing I want to talk about is the last two things is the crease of the eyelid. So a nice deep set. I is going to have this line right here kind of pronounced, and it'll be further away from the eye with a deep set. I on then down below as well. You see the shading. It makes a huge difference. If you skip this, you'll be wondering why your eye doesn't look quite like the photo. And that's why you're missing that, Um, in this one, you can see it doesn't have much at the bottom. There's a little bit of shading, but there's a really deep, dark, black and decrease because it's super, um, kind of heavy at the top. So that's gonna make a big difference in getting this I toe look the right way. So I'm just going to show you a little bit of like, quick sketching off how I would work with an eye keeping mind All those things I just said , I'm gonna use this one as the example, so I just have my little water brush because the fine tip in the water reservoir that you can just kind of squeeze out. It's really good for sketching. I kind of used this just like a pencil. And what I do is I use a wash of paint. It was my very messy kind of dried up pain. Try, but I'll just come into any color. You can come into a neutral find a skin, Tony kind of color and just you can see it's super watery. You're barely trying to get any color on there because all you want to do is kind of map out the shape of the I. And then this very pale outline that you paint well, kind of go away when you add the darkness in the contrast in the and the kind of fully saturated areas in your painting. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna mark the tear duct kind of here and then what you want to look at is this arch right here. If you pick the middle point where the pupil is, and then kind of the outer corner of the eye, which is way up here, which is higher than the middle corner, then you can kind of connect the dots. There's kind of a gentle incline here, and then it's flattened out and rounder toward the outer corner. Hopefully, you can see that. You know, I'll paint a little bit darker than I normally would, so you guys can see a little bit better. Normally, I would be making such a faint line that it would easily disappear when I do the rest of my painting. So then now what I'm painting right now is this top lash line. I'm not painting this entire crease at the top. I'm focusing in on this shape right here. You can see that this outer corner or tendency is to want to just draw like a football shape. But really, on this side, it's almost rounded. You can see kind of the point of my brush and how I'm tracing that out. It's kind of rounded, and it dips down lower here than it is here. See, it will come down and up, so we'll take the tear duct over a little, and then we'll go down and up to connect. So that's the basic shape. Then I kind of give myself reference points for this crease. It starts pretty close here. The deepest part of the creases right here, Mark, That kind of stays a little even teeth out here, and then it kind of trails off. So then he was kind of like, connect the dots and then you might want to look at the negative space. Do you have this little the tear duct area? But aside from that from here to here and from here to here, the whites, the eye, it's pretty Even so, I'm gonna kind of try and make that so this side might be a little bit bigger, but it's OK that that's there because it will go away. You'll see, um, as you paint to don't worry with this pale wash that you're doing the first time through, there's a little bit of room for mistakes because it really is like pencil sketching so I can see that the iris just barely touches the bottom lid on that. It's cropped off kind of before the curve comes back inward on the I. So that's the basic shape and structure for this I and everything you do from this point on is like a coloring book. Um, you're gonna deep in the contrast, and you're gonna add some color so, um, you can kind of market where the pupil is. A lot of times, the pupil also might be cut off by the by the lash line. In this case, it's not so kind of mapping in for yourself where it is is not a bad idea. And with watercolor kind of doesn't matter what color your color and your painting with, um, in areas that are going to be your darkest darks because you're gonna end up layering other colors on top. And by the time I layer a dark color on top of this flesh tone, you won't see the flesh tone all anymore anyway. So once I got that all kind of done, this is where you kind of take a little artistic license. You could be super realistic and try and paint in all the details of the iris, all the shading. See how the white of the eye is actually grey in here and you have a little bit of a a shadow under the lash line right here. It's a little purple e blue section. All this stuff you can kind of build and add and build on at. But since you're the artist. You get to decide how much detail you want to include and how much you want to kind of leave to the interpretation of the person viewing your art. So but what I will generally do is I'll start with the lightest color in the iris, so it's kind of like a a light washy sky blue and with watercolor. Remember the it drives later number one, and the more water use the later the pigment will will. Look, you don't kind of you don't add white like you do with Krilic. You just add water to get later colors. There's no need to really leave the pupil section a blank here. Normally, I would just paint right over it, Um, where you can paint right over it. But showing up on camera, I think you'd lose where my people waas. So I'm just gonna kind of leave it for now. And then I guess the main thing to remember when you're building a players and watercolor is he kind of have to wait for one layer to dry completely before you add the next. Because color will lift when you add more water to it. And that's already laid down and you can kind of I mean, I could get a little more pigment in here, and this is another way to play, too, so you can kind of let the water do its thing. The color of the iris is always the darkest right under the lash line, because there's a natural sheeting and shadow there. So even though this eyes greenish and bluish, this is where the whimsical watercolor part comes into play. You can pick purple. You can drop other colors in there that aren't really there. It's more about getting that feeling of shadow included. So you can just kind of ad pigment and let the water drag it around, puddling around as you as you like. I think the prettiest part of what I mean I like to do, um, controlled work. But with watercolor, letting the water kind of do its thing is have fun. You have yellow on my brush now, and I'm adding some of that just right here in the middle, just for fun. This is where the whimsical watercolor kind of comes into play. It's not meant to be an exact rendition of the photo. I always say like what some people paint super realistically. And there's, you know, there's definitely it's kind of a cool thing to look at, but for me, I like the painting to be more expressive, because I can always look at a photograph like an actual photograph if I want to see, you know, hyper reality. When I when I do a painting, I wanted to offer something else and be a little bit more, um, interpreted. So all right, so well, that's drawing because any Hillary touch to it is gonna leak into that wet area. You can work on a different spot, so I'm going to go to this outer lid over here. I'm going to add in a little bit of color. I do find it a little bit better, and then I'm going. Teoh, add this shading that's right here above this crease line. You can be a little bit older with your paint. Then you think you can, because everything dries later with water color. See how there's a dark color under the crease here. Up until the last line, I want to fill that in again. The whimsical part is you don't necessarily have to use the colors that you see. You just have to try and match the tone. So this is like a mid tone in here. Any mid tone I use would probably be fine. I just kind of feathered it out. And you can see I have a little, um, bleeding into the wet area. It's okay. I kind of don't mind that because of the way that I paint. Um, if you have more patients than I have on this video, you can wait a little longer before you add the next section. So I tend not to in the whimsical watercolors, use Black ever. So for the darkest darks, like the pupil, I will use, like a navy blue. And I also use a lot less water. So I'm gonna come in here without touching my other colored areas. I really don't want it to leak again. A real world would probably just have some patience and move on to another area of the base rather than you know. I wouldn't wait. I wouldn't walk away from it. I would just work somewhere else in my painting and then come back to this one was dry. It's kind of a dance with watercolor. Um, if you want areas to be well defined, you need to be painting, um, over a dry surface. And so when you're doing an entire face, you can move to the hair. You can move to the nose, you move to the mouth or the chin or whatever, since I'm just showing you and I I know there's not many places to go. So you just bear with me and I trust that you guys get the just gonna continue to add a little more to the shading over here and then in here, there's this kind of shadowy section of the eye. It's not Wait an art teacher. Once you told me You know what is never really white. There's always some sort of reflected color or shadow or something. So examine your source photo and think about it. Is that really white? Just cause it's the white of someone's eye doesn't mean that what we're observing looks truly wait. Same thing over here there's a little bit of shadow under this top lash line. And then because we have the magic video, I probably will hit pause right now and come back when this is dry, it's that you can see what I would do next. So when I translate this toe watercolor for me, I kind of sometimes dot in the color where I just see ends of lashes and then paint like a decline where I see that that heaviest curvature of lashes coming through. I think lashes can be tricky because people have a tendency to want to draw like spider legs all in a row, and it's easy to get into a rhythm of drawing one after the other after the other. And then it starts to look kind of fake. So I like to dio IHS, pick a couple key anger lashes like Here's one kind of comes right from where the irises and like out over that crease and then maybe pick some of the really curly ones out here. Kirby once and pita. And then where does it stop? So I think this is kind of the last long lash that you see on it comes right above the pupil and with a really delicate hand. So it's nice and sharp and doesn't look, um, it tapers and doesn't look like a big chunk, and then I'll kind of randomly fill some in and bob around because they're never side by side in parallel lashes. They're always kind of some might come from the same base area. So my there's one here that kind of breaks the plan. You can see the curve. Um, here's a couple in a row, and if you kind of bounce around while you're doing it and kind of allow yourself to step back and say OK, is that enough yet? No, not yet. And then you just kind of keep going because if you kind of put your head down and get real close to it and just keep flooding way and paint, paint, paint, paint, paint, you'll kind of step back and it'll look unnatural. You won't like it. You get the gist. You can always add more later. So if you feel like you got into a point where you need to just kind of take a break, come back to it in a couple minutes and reassess and do that because it always add more. But you can't take away. I always tell people, like editing with watercolors, not really a thing. You can make changes in corrections to some degree, but editing? Yeah, it just makes your painting look overworked. So now my pupils dry. I'm like I told you before, when you want a dark area and the pupil should definitely be the high contrast area in most eyes, you go back in once the first layer is dry, dry, dry and add in another layer and try not to press or drag your brush through too much through that first layer because what will happen is the water reactivates the dried paint on the paper and will start to pull it up. So basically, the key cardinal rule is not to overwork it again. Um, so with the I again, I put a little bit of that yellow in there. Um and it does. You can kind of see it, but I'm gonna add a little bit more putting a little orange Intuit, which this is all artistic license guys, and it doesn't need to be exact. I'm just kind of dotting it in and like, kind of like making a little bit of a mess because the way that dries is gonna be so pretty and letting the watercolor do what it wants is key. I don't Pete in water color so that it can look like acrylic or you know, so that I can replicate the painting. Exactly. I do it so that it has a bit of charm to it and and whimsy, which is what this class is all about. So now, adding this rim iris has like a darker kind of ram around the perimeter and adding that in is usually pretty crucial. And then I want to take a color and add the contrast in this crease again. I'm not picking that brownish black color that's in the photo. I'm just picking any dark, and once you start doing this a bit like my in my paintings, I tend to use blues, purples, dark magenta. As for my darks, we're from doing a really sunlit kind of picture. It's all quarrels and yellows, maybe even a dark gold or mustard. Really saturated polar, I always say to watercolors, not about lines. It's about shapes and volume, but this crease really is kind of a line. So then I just squeezed out all the color for my rush and with it just damp, starting not on the colored part. You just painted, but in the dry area come toward it, and that will help it bleed. You come toward it and just let it touch. And then whatever you touch, that color will start to bleed into the dry area, and it will soften the line that you just painted based. The next up is the crash course in Watercolor Noses noses. They're probably the most challenging thing on the face to paint for most people, because, unlike with eyes, where you kind of have a defined outline for the shape of someone's I and a lot of high contrast and same thing with lips, there's a fairly defined outline, usually and shape, that you can kind of work within. And there's a lot of contrast between the skin of the face and the color of the lips. There's like a definition there, but with noses. It's all done with shading in with shadow, um, to get the form because the nose is just a continuation of the skin on your face. There's not, ah, hard outline. No. Two noses are the same, whereas eyes are you know, there's not two mouths or two sets of eyes that are identical either. But there are some kind of basic shapes that if you stay within them, you're going to get pretty close. Noses are so different. So I printed out a variety that I just found online to kind of put them side by sides that you can see the contrast and what you need to do to convey the different shapes. So I like to think of noses as, um, kind of flat surfaces. If you had to build them with pieces of a building knows with straight pieces of wood, what would the planes the surfaces be? So there's always the bridge of the nose. This part that comes down the with on this particular noses you know about here race that little line of shadow to here, and it's like, kind of a long rectangle. I'm taking liberty with rectangle. It stops around here. There's ah, highlighted bull, this part on the end. That's kind of like the furthest in the foreground, and then it retreats back into the face. You start to see shadow. Presumably the light's hitting from above, and so as soon as the nose starts to curve under again, you start to see Shadow and it gets darker until the point where the nose it's the face. So with this knows, everything we're seeing is defined by the shadow under the tip. This triangular shape, whether you can or cannot see the nostrils see in this knows right here, you barely see the Nationals. You don't see that hole as it were the nostril. You're really just It's all on the underside of this nose. So you're just kind of seeing a shadow and a flat kind of, um, Kurt, this one. It's almost like you could see up into the nose. There's a little bit more reveal for the nostril. Um, this one is kind of a mixture of the two. You can kind of see a little more black area there, this one. You can totally see the nationals as well. So there's a variance as whether you see that kind of black circle or not. And if you do too much nostril on any given knows, guess what. It starts to look like a little pig snout, and that's never a good thing. So when I paint the nationals, I try and build up the color and build up the size always start smaller, and you can always add a little bit more. But again, you can't take away. Um, the width of the nose is also important. So from where the side of its nostril touches the face, um, it should be pretty equidistant from the centre. But those lines right there are usually creases, and they're usually defining features of the nose. When people will teach you how to draw noticed, they almost always say to define the tip or the part of the nose. That attach is right above the bow of the lips and then the two nostril sides. And then sometimes wherever this bridge, this kind of pull this part of the front of the nose is to find. If you just draw those three lines, you can kind of get pretty close. Since we're painting, we need to do all shading. So when this nose you can see, it's very pointing in the center, a really kind of curvy shape. Here, you see more national here than you see here. These are the things I want to look at in every photo when you're deciding whether or not it would be a good candidate for a portrait. I was trying pick a flattering nose angle because people will hate it if they don't like their nose. So those are just some things to consider. So let's choose one of these, and I'll show you how to paint it. Let's see. Should we pick? I feel like these would be the two most challenging because this one shows no nostril, and this one shows so much, so maybe we'll do them both. Okay, they're actually kind of similar and with and skin tone. Um, so if I'm going to paint, this knows I want to kind of, like, choose the darkest area and start there. When you're doing a face usually and you'll see this a little bit later, we'll have you do what kind of a grid map on the face to mark out where the news mouth and eyes are? Um, and that's helpful. But for here, I'll just pick a dark spot. I'm gonna pick this small curvature under the nose. Maybe if I do them side by side, it'll be helpful. This one. It's almost like a little dot there's very little there. So there's where the nose touches kind of the bow of the lip, that little channel into the lip. So from this centre point, this one, sometimes I kind of do this air tracing. So I'll be like, OK, okay. I can see that angle. Visualize that angle and then kind of translate it. Okay. And then over here, you've got almost nothing. So we just kind of we want to judge the distance correctly. Okay, On this knows these kind of upward. If you're looking at this kind of like a letter B, these upward lines beneath, um, have the nostril, and I'll fill it in with the flesh color because, you know, you always dark in it, but it's better to have a kind of call it like when I paint. When I sketch with the overly watery watercolor, I call it my ghost image. It's really just a sketch, but it's so pale that it does. Sometimes I really like the ghost image a lot. So on this side, I've got more of a rounded nostril that I have on this side. Okay. And then right here, you could see this kind of inverted letter. C comes about to the midpoint under the nostril wraps itself around and kind of trying not to do lines wherever possible. There's whole shading in here, so I'm gonna try and convey that a little bit of shading here and then. Same thing over here. It's not quite the center it's about. Here comes around, gives this distance, and then you want to kind of come up to about the same height of the other side to make it symmetrical. No one's perfectly symmetrical, but in your painting, Um, unless it's a real standout feature of the person. Shoot first, relative symmetry because it'll just look more pleasing to the eye and you get artistic license. There's a little shading here. It's almost always like a little triangle that kind of rides the shape of the nostrils. And then when I actually do the painting, this will get blended into the rest of the face because obviously the nose is gonna go upward. So a lot of times with a clean, clean water in my brush on Lee, what kind of pull some of that upward? So I don't get a hard line anywhere where I can have a shape instead of a line. That's the goal, and then of course, we would come back in when it's drier and start to darken up the nostrils. But you can do it little by little so that they don't look overly black. A lot of times, I'll fill them in with more of like a dark rust color or, um, not really read cause that can look like a nosebleed. But you know, anything that's not black, a warmer version of a dark tone. Okay, and then on this one same thing. So I have, like, this slightly darker color cause there's gonna be shadow here. Just a wet brush. No color on it. Bring it up till it touches that. Here's my black. What would be the nostril? Bit clean my rush. Touch the edge. Just try to blend it out. Um, and a little more shadow under here. Build that up a little bit. This one's hard because there's not a lot of defining features to it, but in the context of the entire face. Like I said, um, it will serve the purpose and you'll know if you've got it right or not. I am constantly in this ghost painting kind of stage before you get to have the real fun checking and double checking my reference because you're I will know if you rest too long. When you're painting and staring at that, you kind of you're overworking it. You're thinking too hard about it. And then when you look back at the real painting, you're like, Oh, I totally missed that. This should be more curved here or that I have. My nose is completely too narrow. I don't I don't have the proportions right? If you're constantly doing a visual check to your reference point at this very pale stage will be much easier to kind of get it right and, um, ultimately with Portrait's, what makes them look like the person is having the proportions right? So you can have this shape in the shadows and all that stuff perfect for someone's nose. But if it's not wide enough relative to their mouth or, you know, if it's not high enough on their face relative to where their eyes and lips are, it's not gonna look right. And that's where that grid I was telling you about before kind of comes in. I would also say that with noses, less is more, um, paint a few indications and move on to the rest of your painting. And then, um, you move on your merry way. You might get done and realize I don't really need to add anything else there. People's I will fill in, um, kind of the gaps. Our work is amazing because stuff that's even really Impressionist and isn't like an exact you know, representation of the reference photo. There's a lot of weight space left and that sort of thing. Um, your eye fills in the gaps, so I would say Do less is more only add more if you need more. Probably these nationals would need to be dark. End up a couple more times. You'll know that based on how dark you make the eyes or the mouth, I mean, you can have an entire image that's kind of finished in very pale colors, and maybe this is as dark as you'd ever need to go. But the contrast is going to be mostly dictated by how much contrast you have in the rest of your painting as well. So anyway, that's the quick, less no noses laissus more look at those bottom shadows. The different planes of the nose, and then these kind of defining kind of we'll call them parentheses, right that define where the nose touches face on either sides. You can get the with correct. All right, moving on to the next. We'll do mountains in a minute. Okay? So our last little crash course is gonna be on mouths, and I have a variety of shapes here and really the main purpose between showing these varieties in all the facial features so that you can see that there really is a huge difference. I think the tendency for people who are beginning to paint portrait is to kind of homogenize all the noses, all eyes, all the mouths and kind of pain from the same way regardless. And that's why you kind of can't get a good likeness. You have to really try and recognize how different the facial features can be, and then capitalized on the differences to make your portrait's look more accurate. So here, ever variety of mouth. And we have, um, this one where the upper lip is dominant for sure is the, um, the larger area of volume. And we have kind of a straight midline. There's a little bit of, ah, inverted arc, this one, which is almost like a letter V. This little child is giving a smirk. Of course, we'll sound necessarily their natural mouth sheet, but, um, you barely see any lower lip at all. It's completely like they're biting their lower lip. So you're seeing all middle lip and a really pronounced sharp V. And in the overall shape of the mouth is a D, so there's not a lot of lip volume here. It's mostly that you're seeing shadow because they're kind of pinching their lips. This is all something to note. It almost looks like a black lion, whereas this one looks like two areas of volume and color. Um, this is like my favorite mouth shape ever. Lots of little kids have this where it's like an inverted arc that kind of has, like, almost like a frown. It's just a wresting face, but it's when babies have those real heavy cheeks. This is kind of what happens to the midline of their mouth, and I just love it, and then you can see that the top lip it's almost like Betty Boop. It seems like it starts just in the centre with its volume right here and that from this point onward, you're not really seeing lip. I'm at least not the you know, the different, um, differently colored section of lip. I mean, this is upper lip, but it's just like skin tone. That kind of comes into this crease, and you kind of see these paddy cabbage patch creative cheek creases as well. And there's a marked kind of inverted arc on the bottom lip to this is like the little pouty mouth. It's my favorite one to paint. I love it. Then you have this kind of wide grin and the it's very even. The midline kind of go side to side. It's much wider than the nose, and you kind of haven't even the bottom lip is bigger, but you kind of have a pretty good even distribution of being able to see both upper and lower lip. And there's not a ton of fullness like here. You see this really dark crease under the lower lip because these are very full pouty lips and they kind of over hang the chins. You get a shadow, whereas this one you don't get any of that at all. Lastly, we have this kind of bow shaped mouth, and I picked this one for the kind of grouping because you can see these spaces which are very important. It's if you're painting this mouth and you skip these little spaces right here where the lips are kind of coming apart a little you miss such an opportunity. But I also want to show that if you work tracing out the midline of this mouth, it kind of goes up back down, up, back down. It's kind of like a letter M but like a Kirby one. And I always kind of identify that midline first and draw it when I'm painting and then kind of build the bottom and lower lip on on that midline. One thing you won't see in the sampling is teeth. So teeth can be really tricky to pain, especially with little kids and presumably a lot of you guys taking fast compound Children . Um, because teeth can very easily make your pain look jackal. Antony and I've got, like, a system up going now where I'm getting, we go to doing teeth, but, um, in a painting like this by zoom in on it. You can see that she has a gap. How much delineation between the teeth to show? Should you just show a mass with white without any delineation between the teeth, it should definitely be a very pill wash. Sometimes the drawing or painting won't look like the person if you haven't got the teeth right. And so if you're a beginner, I'd say, just choose a picture. If you if you can. That doesn't show teeth because they will just take one of the challenges away and let you focus more on the whole purpose of this particular class which is painting the whimsical parts of a portrait. It should be easy enough to find a picture that doesn't have teeth showing. And if it does and you want to take on that challenge, that's great. But maybe tackled the basics first, which would be kind of a closed mouth power. So anyway, I'm gonna pick two of these to paint right now is a demo, and I'm gonna pick my favorite. I love it. And I think I'm gonna pick this one just to show you the difference when we incorporate these little separated bits of lips go back to my page. Had the eye on it. Look that over. Okay, so we've got these two mouths. So the way that I would approach this the same thing as I was showing you with the other facial features is to grab a very watery bit of kind of fleshy colored paint on your brush and kind of identify this midline Sometimes. Like I said, I kind of in my mind, kind of trace it the arc of it. Try to just isolate that arc that midline of the two lips a few times and then kind of confidently painted. Then I would mark kind of the midline. That's this are the I'm sorry remain like the center line. This is where, like, the bow of the lip would be. And then again, I'm kind of going like this. My eye is jumping from mid line to How tall is that top lip When I feel confident that I have it right market in. It's kind of like a you ever see in the Olympics. Gymnasts kind of like go over the routine and you just see these tiny little movements that they're making in their body as they kind of like visualize it kind of what I do with painting. So over here we have this gentle slope, it hits the mid line and then it kind of just follows over. So that's what I'm doing here. And then it goes over over here. E kind of tapers a little bit later. Okay, so that's my upper lip and the lower lip this distance. How is it compared to the top lip distance? It's a little bigger. Mark that. And then you can see this line right here before the lip starts to turn upward Splats section. It kind of matches up to where the lip hits the the upper lip hits the midline. So here's one kind of see that. So there's a cabbage Patch kid kind of power on that side That's added on this side. I m all right, so that's my basic mouth. You mean you make that little darker for the camera, and then the bottom mouths do the beginning stages of that one. So this one, whenever you do anything that's kind of symmetrical, Like I said, this was kind of like a letter m find that middle and then I'll come up, which is this? Come up for this. And since I know it's an M back down again, the site back down again, back down again. And then it kind of comes up again like this settle. That's the midline where the tulips come together. So that again, I'm kind of seeing What's this space? What's this space? And then it kind of comes up. And then down here, it's just a gentle slope to the outer corner, so make it a little darker, so you can see it better. Normally, this would be so light that it would be easy to blend it into volume. Let's do the bottom. This is much bigger almost twice the size of the top lip So and then find where there's a flat section kind of the bottom part of this M flat section, and then it comes up. So it's basically like all along I'm plotting out the points where, um yeah, if I plotted this photograph, I'd be saying this is the, you know, the bottom two points where there's a pivot, and then the important thing here. So I usually fill in the top lip and make sure you go over your tracing. I try to work fast enough that I don't ever get a hard line for the purposes of the class. Obviously, I'm going a little slower. I don't ever want a hard line to show. You drop a little more color and up there to kind of naturally fade out your outline, and then while that dries, I'll move up to the top. In most cases, the top lip is a shader to darker than the lower lip, because the top lip is usually receding in toward that crease, which means it's in a shadow. Very subtle shadow. But usually it is in shadow. Where is the bottom lip is catching the light that shines down onto it? Um, so up here we have this little it's a much darker black line, so she What that would indicate is that the lips are very pouty in full when so it's kind of like a deep crease between the two lips. The deeper that kind of creases between the two lips, the darker will be thicker. It will be, and then I will fill it in. And here's where um, like subtle changes could come into play I didn't really give much of a boat to the lip before, so I'm gonna kind of ignore that flat line at the top and kind of re create with the darker color. And trust me, tha 7. PaintingFaces: in this video, I'm going to show you the basics of painting faces, the realistic part of the portrait where you're trying to get a likeness. This first example is showing you a little bit of a looser style where I use a bigger brush and more gestural kind of placement of the paint. It's kind of chunkier, and, um, not as tight kind of a style, and you can see that I'm making some color choices. I've use purple and pink in the hair. I'm using skin tones generally for the face, with some of the dark shown in purple. This is all part of the whimsical kind of style. You have to make some color choices that aren't literal to the image that you're looking at . You can see that for her curly hair. I decided to dio some kind of droplets of color to give it some movement, and I start with the light washes and as they dry, start building up to the more shadowy color. You can also see that I took artistic liberty with her beau instead of making it white. I made it this kind of sky blue color, and I thought that that would just lend a lot to the whims of a kind of look of my painting . When you get to the point where you have several layers of the skin tones kind of dry, then you can go back in and start really adding those contrast E shadows. Look for those because they're gonna be what makes your painting pop. In this next example, it's a little bit of a tighter style where I'm using the aqua, brush the water brush with the water in the handle because it acts a little bit more controlled and almost like using a water pen. And I'm doing her face in a more tight controlled style and starting in on all the main features and then working outward to the shading on her face and in her hair. You can see that I did the eyes, nose and lips first, and I switched to this joy. Enormous brush. Nice, uh, big natural bristle brush to do her very fun. Wavy hair texture. The natural bristle brush that's hold a lot of water allows you to kind of press down for thick strokes and lift up to use the point of the brush and you can get a lot of line variation, which works really well for wavy hair. I chose some hot pinks and oranges for her hair again, no pink in her hair. But for this women school style, any mid tone color that you want to choose, whether it's bright and fun or more realistic, will work. You're working, um, in values at this point, so any mid tone will work in the mid tone areas. Any dark will work in the dark areas, and I start to just build up, and I'm letting the water play a little bit in her hair because those are areas that we're going to be doodling over and the next step. And we know that we can be a little bit more playful there. Where has her face kind of stays? Titan refined. So I switched to smaller brushes to do the details around her eyes, and I start layering in those really light washes of shading to make her forehead shadows to make the kind of sculptural quality of her nose. And the best advice I can give you is to just work later. A watery wash of color will dry very light, and then you can just layer on top. When you look at your source image, find all the areas of shadow and then apply that area of shadow onto your painting. Let it dry. See if you need to add a little more. See if you need to dark in other areas. If you work in like, kind of gentle washes like this and have patience, you'll build up a nice kind of foundation of light and shadow, and I think you'll be real happy with it. If you try and do it all in one step, it just isn't going to turn out. So then I move into kind of choosing a color for her shirt. I think blue just cause it popped off of the pink and orange hair so nicely and this is where your creativity comes into play. And then once you have that part done with all of those kind of middle tones, some really important things, especially for brunettes come along. For any painting, you're gonna need to add contrast. But for a person who has darker hair, it is really important that you add in those dark areas so that they don't look blond. You don't have to add brown or chestnut for me. I chose purple because it's a contrast in color that will kind of, um, you know, really show off the difference in tone between your skin and her hair and make her look like she has darker hair. And not later. The last thing to do is to just reevaluate the face. Once it's dry and go back in and add any important crucial areas of contrast, you can see the hot spots that I picked, and then you'll have a finished portrait painting that you can decorate in our last stage and really bring toe life with spattered paint and lots of fun doodles. 8. Watercolor Whimsy: in this video, I'm gonna show you how you add all of the background splashes and fun textures in watercolor That will be the background for our doodled illustrations at the end. So I'm just gonna show you a bunch of examples and me painting and kind of quick time so you can see how I add the texture. Some areas you might want to add, a little bits of floral gestures in her hair. Right now, I'm adding a lot of contrast in dark colors of the white doodles will pop off later. Um, a little bit of flimsy in this, uh, painting is that I added a little daisy in her hand that wasn't there in the actual portrait. Little stems and vines around the edges. Here's another one. I got the face painted in, and now I'm just adding dots, lines, leaves, flowers, very loose watercolor shapes and saturated color and kind of almost like a halo effect of drips and spatter and shapes all around the face and hair, so that you have kind of a colorful ground that has a lot of interest in texture that we can then doodle on leader. You can even add some doodles in the water color paint as you go. So I have serious of little leaves and sprigs and little kind of doodled arches up there near her sunglasses, dots on the strap of her little satchel she's carrying. This is the time when you kind of go completely off script. Put aside the photo that you were referencing and just kind of use your imagination and these whimsical ones. I use a lot of little sparkly details, dots and little kind of daisy patterns all around, especially on the ones of little girls, because that kind of gives this whimsical very quality that is pretty indicative of my work in general. Um, try to keep a fund balance of colors. Um, you want to have some warms and some cools so that you'll have some nice contrast. I also like to employ a lot of water color play, so use a big, thick, juicy brush and let puddling happen. Let colors mingled together, like in this one where, um, I'm going in very loosely in the subjects hair and kind of painting it almost like a little kind of sprite, a little woodland sprayed or a fairy and I'm letting all the water do a lot with work. When two wet watercolors kind of meat, there's this magical blending that happens, and it's always unpredictable. But that's half the fun. You can also see with my color choices that I am choosing darker colors around the face to help pop it off and, you know, doing more layers. So there's contrast and then allowing some of, like, kind of the periphery, the elements that kind of reach outward from the face to be a little lighter and kind of fade out. And if you're wondering how I got some of those linear splashes, its by making a puddle of color and then blowing right on the bottle with a straw or just getting close to the paper and blowing in the direction that you want the splashes to go. If you're familiar with my work, you know that it is usually pretty feminine. So here's an example where used tons of flowers leaves vines. It's very garden kind of feeling. There's some butterflies, um, that I'm doing right there up near the top and kind of a really feminine fairy garden kind of a vibe. But people ask me all the time what I would do if I was doing a portrait of a boy. So I'll tell you something like this. Um, I use a flat or square tipped flat watercolor brush and do some more geometrics so you can pull some like rectangular shapes, things with a little bit more angles, um, and kind of movement. Something that looks a little dynamic will tend to feel a little bit more masculine, even though it is still pretty whimsical. And finally, I'm just gonna leave you with a few more examples so you can see the different shapes, color, combination, splashes and textures that I use in a variety of my finished portrait's so you can get your creativity and, um, ideas blowing. 9. Doodles!: we're here. We're at the last video, and I'm gonna show you how you add the whimsical doodles on top of your watercolor textures to finish out your paintings. So I'm just going to show you some examples in quick time and narrate what I'm doing for you so you can see what's going on. So in this picture, I'm using white gel pin like I described in the material section to draw some delicate kind of almost doily like ah lacey flowers over top of some of the areas that are the most saturated in color. You'll find that the white 10 is the most visible and looks the most sparkly when you use it over areas of more saturated color so you can draw doodles that weren't already there or you can embellish. It's of painting that you've already painted so I can add some kind of line work to the roses. But then we could also add some leaves with some banning that weren't there to begin with. So you kind of have, um, the choice between enhancing some of the water color textures that you already have present , or creating completely new designs over top of some of the broad, kind of more filled watercolor areas. And in addition to using the white gel pen, you can come back in with colored pencil or some colorful fine point pens. And at a few more details and color, it just adds a little more variety. Here's another example. So I'm taking that large circular area to do one kind of Maine doodle on the left, and then I move over onto the right. I want to balance that out with something that's maybe it's related, but a smaller in scale. So I'm always kind of looking left to right top to bottom and trying to get a little bit of balance without being really kind of a measured, symmetrical kind of layout in her hair. I chose to do little swirls and curlicues because that kind of enhances and embellishes the idea of curly hair. So you can kind of let your artwork dictate the shapes of the doodles that you draw Alphen like the overlap, the little lacy doodles on the face and areas that where it won't really obscure any of the major features, because I think that just looks really creative and artsy and you can really get the layering effect that way. Here's one last one. This is kind of the main one I did for this class. So you can see I did a large flower and white up to the left and then balance that with a smaller flower down to the right. So it keeps the eye moving around the artwork. When you see kind of relatable elements kind of diagonal from each other or, um, kind of across from each other, I am adding some line work to the roses. I'm adding some sparkles on those saturated areas, maybe some geometrics. I like to enhance the curves of the hair with little dotted lines and um, maybe add leaves to the flowers in just white gel pin A lot of times on the clothing, I'll just use that as an opportunity to add texture. Doodles. They don't have to be floral. They don't have to be geometric. They could just kind of be a decorative pattern. After I feel pretty satisfied with white Leinart, I will often go in with just some kind of colored embellishments in doodles with the colored pens. I feel like it just adds one extra layer and makes things kind of extra special. And in this case, I added a little more water color inside that flower, and the layering gives it kind of a different tone and helps it to pop off. There it is, all finished, and here are a few more examples of my finished, whimsical watercolor portrait. I hope that you've enjoyed following along with me in this class, and I can't wait to see what you guys make, so I hope you'll post in the project section. Have fun.