How to Paint Facial Hair in a Portrait: Subject 1

Video Transcript

"So, you can see I've extended the skin tone of the hand up here onto the face using the exact same paint shades and doing what we've already discussed with some of the deeper areas of red for kind of more of the recessed areas around the eyes and some of the lighter areas of white on the areas of the face that I want to kind of come out, towards the viewer more. So, like the tip of the nose and the like. Something else I've also done, like the hand again, is I've added in some of these extra kind of flame trails coming off of the scalp and then down out the side of the eye and even a little bit on the neck. To basic kind of give like more like again, a fiery, in this case a demonic, look to our main subject. So, we're going to start by adding in some facial hair now. And I like to do this with a smaller flat brush, flatter brush. And what I'm doing is I've mixed some black with a little bit of white to get this nice charcoal gray color. That is the color we're going to be going for. And soon as your brush runs out, and it will run out because this is a smaller brush, go back and grab some more. And soon, you're going to see this area's going to start to fill in and you're going to start to get that facial hair shape. Now, as you get closer down below, you might want to darken it a bit. Go a little more from the charcoal, more closely to the black. Facial hair is not monochrome. You're going to have different shades that are going to pop out there. Something else that I suggest you do is that up towards the top of the hair skin line, up around in here. So far, we've been kind of putting our brush down and going downwards on the canvas. Up here, you want to have the opposite effect, where the hair's going to kind of taper up. So, basically go down and then push up. You can see how it starts off fat at the bottom and then tapers to a point at the top. This is allowing for more of a nice gradual border, shifting from the skin into the facial hair and can be done in like all sorts of beards, mustaches, and the like. So, we're going to continue our brush work down over the chin and then up the other side where we're going to fill in the rest of this area. Now, other tips regarding hair is that for the eyebrows, I always like making the eyebrows a shade darker than any beard because that brings further emphasis to the eyes. Another thing to think about, is that after this layer is dried, you can always go back over, similar to what I'm doing now, to add in some of the darker highlights and the like to kind of bring more out the individual hairs. But you can also accomplish quite a bit even without the drying."