After doing a few portraits in pencil, I was excited to try some with color. The first medium I decided to try was watercolor. Now, if you don’t know, watercolor is extremely hard to do portraits in, which, of course, I had no clue about.
It actually turned out pretty well. I struggled a little with the transparency of the paint, but did pretty well until the hair. I was disappointed with the lack of texture, but couldn’t figure out how to layer the paint to achieve curls. After I had finished painting, I decided to go around with some line art to make the shapes more concrete. I have no idea what I was thinking with all the splotches of paint in the background, but it turned out fine.
After this, I switched mediums, going to acrylics which remains my favorite paint to work with. This next one is my favorite of all the portraits I have done (so far!) I honestly don’t know what I would do differently. I do wish I had done it paper other than our normal printer paper!
This started a spur of portraits that all probably took me less than two weeks.
In this haste, there are small things that I now wish I’d fixed. Oh, well, live and learn! As you’ll probably notice, all of the portraits have very extreme lighting scenarios, with pinks and blues highlighting parts of the skin. I later did try a more normal color skin but never finished it and I have no idea where it went.
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