How to Paint Portraits in Watercolor

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Sherie Tengbergen here at the Education Network in Palm Beach, County and we're here to learn about watercolor paintings. In this clip I'm going to show you how to paint a watercolor portrait. Now I have already mixed permanent rose and a little bit of cadmium red and a lot of water together to make your skin tone. Now as you can see I've got liquid maskoid down on my paper and because I like to have a little bit of a vision so think of this side as being my thought process as to how the face will look and this side is my rock canvas that I'm going to be painting on so I'm going to take my colors and I'm going to start laying them down here and I want to paint from the inside going out so that I get some nice shadows going on and with watercolor portraits you have to work kind of fast because of the fact that the paint tends to dry very quickly. So I'm very quickly putting down some of this flesh tone color and then I'm going to go ahead and work on the eye and the mouth and getting a little bit more colors going on here and of course the hair. Now to make hair if I want a dark colored hair, a black hair I'm going to take my blues, usually I use ultramarine blue. I use burnt sienna and I use red and I start mixing those together until I start actually creating a black. Do you see that, and now I start putting in the hair color, very quickly, very loosely and I try to change the color just a little bit so that I get some nice variation in the hair and to get different colors of hair I can put more brown in order to add some highlights. I'm going to also use my round brush now and the same color to start painting in the eyebrows. Now you see that my paint is a little bit wet here so I want to block that so that my eyebrows don't really go up too high into her face. I can always come back and fix that when it's a little bit drier. Now I'm going to go ahead and put the top line of the eye in and start bring in the eye color and I'm going to go very cautiously with that because the eyes are very important on any portrait that you do. So I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit of a darker skin color here and start adding some texture. Now what you paint on this side of the face you want to do the same thing on the other side of the face and when it comes to the lips I like to add a little bit of cadmium red and permanent rose to my skin color so that I get a nice lip tone for the lips of my young lady here. As you can see we've pretty much painted both side of the face and now it's time to remove some of the liquid meniscus which gives me some highlights in her hair. This is Sherie Tengbergen and thank you for watching."