How To Paint Portraits

I'm going to show you how to paint portrait from a model. I've spent just a few minutes sketching out, in a very light pencil, the basic shapes of the face and then I want to place a basic wash of burnt sienna, a quite light tone, over the whole of the skin, the basic colour of most cultures. In paint, in pastels, it's this lovely warm burnt sienna.

My model has a touch of cadmium red, a little bit of burnt amber here and there, and the joy of watercolour is it's so easily changeable and movable. So, placing the peaches on the paint to start with and then just a very pale base coat to start the colouring process and when she has little bit of burnt amber, just a touch around the eyes, my model's got deep set eyes, lots of shadows especially around the top of the nose, so let's give quite an emphasis to that area. And as always, you can keep working in darkening up and lifting up to lighten up.

Don't be tempted to put a line on the side of the nose. There is no line, it's a shadow and that shadow can be blended in to the rest of the face. As you can see, I'm working in a fairly wet way.

Wetting wet creates some shapes but unfortunately, it might bleed a little bit so it has to be kept in just how wet the paper is. If the model smiles or moves at all, the joy working from life is that you can incorporate all these changes into your painting and adapt accordingly. So if there's any slight change at all, don't let that put you off painting from life.

It's a lovely method and in some ways, easier than working from a photograph, because there is depth here that you can do. Put a dark bit underneath the nostrils, a little bit of paint of gray, just to place them and then I can revisit them when all this area is dried up a little bit. Okay, let's go back to those eyes.

My model's got some very dark brown irises, the coloured part of the eye. Let's put them in not a complete circle but partial circle. The top of the circle disappears under the top eyelid.

Fabulous shapes, whether it's the iris, the pupil which is the black part in the middle that's actually a hole to let the light come through, so when I drew it in pencil, I can still just about see the pencil enough to guide me and to guide the brush in the correct direction. Don't worry too much about drawing every eyelash. This is not what portrait is about.

It should be getting a representative of the person, a representation. We can leave the white of the eye if you want to. My feeling is that there's actually a tint of blue there so I might put some soon when it's dried up a little bit.

Let's just put bags under the eyes a little bit. Then because these eyes are quite deeply set, there's quite a lot of character there, okay. Let's work down now to the lips, a mixture of crimson and Indian red, very dark top lip because it's in shadow.

I'm trying painting the shape to start with and then filling. For the lower lip, the same colour but much lighter, so I'm actually going to take off some of the colour onto her eye and just very gently stroke the colour across and come up towards that top lip leaving some white paper showing to give the idea of light hitting the lip. I'm also going to deepen it up slightly as it comes around because there's more shadow at this side of the model's face, so let's just deepen it up and also underneath the lip but just a bit and that helps to create a bit of depth, okay.

Touching the side of the mouth here, there's a shadow - it's not as strong as that so we take off some - and around underneath the chin, quite a dark area, under this lower lip. So, what I'm trying to do is emphasize it first and then lift it off so it's not so heavy and dark. We put it in to start with and lift it off slightly and feather the edge.

So as you can see, the face is beginning to take shape. I'm working into the colours as I go along adding colour, emphasizing shapes as it dries in, adding a bit more colour there. It's quite a dar