Portraiture

Sometimes limiting your colour range helps a lot. Use three main colours. – Flesh tone – Purply brown – White

Finger-painting On an A3 sheet of brown paper use your fingers to paint the main blocks of colour on your chosen portrait.* Look carefully at your source and make sure you use darker flesh-tones for the darker bits and lighter ones for the lighter bits. Don’t just play with the paint, and be careful not to put on too much. *If this seems too difficult to do freehand you can do a very light sketch first.

Adding pencil Add all the tricky wee details using a range of coloured pencils. This is when you’d turn the eyes green, hair blonde etc. The colours will be that much more vibrant from the contrast to the wee bits of brown that are left.

Adding pencil

Rusty underpainting This picture uses pastel and poster paint. Start by roughly sketching the face using a rusty coloured chalk pastel.

Glue down the loose pastel with watery white paint and use strong white paint to add the highlights.

Add in shadows using a purply brown colour.

Finish background with a contrasting colour. If you’ve used poster paint you can now finish your picture using coloured pencil. If you’ve used acrylic, it’s time to use a smaller brush.

Mixing for portraits. It’s easiest to start with fleshy tones straight from the tube and add bits of other shades to them. It also saves a bit of money through wasted paint. Avoid using black! – Use browns (purply brown best) in shadows. If mixing from primaries…. – Lots of white, less yellow, a bit of red, tiny bit of blue Easiest mix… – Burnt sienna and white makes a pretty good flesh tone.

Underpainting When working on portraiture a trick for adding depth to your shadows is to first paint your underpainting in an olivey colour.