How to Touch Up a Portrait

Video Transcript

"And for our last touch ups here you can add in some highlights in the hair area. These can be a variety of of colors to kind of make this wild. White, of course, is a great highlight. And you can see here I'm accomplishing this just by using a nice flat head brush with some white on it. And also mix my burl up with media to be able to get a nice long smooth stroke. So you can have this white area kind of explode into different areas of the hair. That's just one effect that you can try. There are a whole host of many ones. One of the things that I recommend that you do is just make sure that you're always kind of quickly starting where you want the hair thickest and then dragging upwards and it'll taper just like real hair actually does. You can also extend this effect down towards the temples or even along the bangs. Going from here to down to here. And for this the white can make a somewhat stunning boundary between the black of the hair. And also then the yellow of the skin. So it kind of nice like little highlights even let's say they don't have to be the color of the hair but more like if there's some light reflecting on it. Or more of a luminescent almost a glowing effect. So I'll call now our original photograph the one we have now created into an alternative portrait. You can see the basic shapes are all the same. We even have very similar hair, very similar poses, skin tones, but we have taken it in very different directions. We have darkened; we have changed the skin tone entirely on our first subject. We have added in some special effects on the clothing which was certainly not present in the original painting largely using just some detailed brush work and stroking things around. Likewise, we have aged the outfit on our second subject. And we have totally changed not only the skin tone; we've added extra details which aren't even there in the original photograph. Like the stitching. Thankfully those are not part of the photograph or the real person. So you can see here how just through literally creating the base painting that we had here today that just by staying with those normal elements almost to the point where we start putting down pigment on our canvas that you're going along in one direction and then you can easily diverge with several of the techniques that we've, that we've covered here today. Be that any type of theme you want, more of a movie theme, a fun theme. Any type of theme. Really, the sky's the limit. The only limit is your imagination."