Painting Path - Perfect Portraits (Patreon)

1. Sargent Shapes

This is a great first portrait lesson because it’s main focus is to help you look at portraits differently. The goal is to shift your mind and eye to see simple shapes and not detail.

Key Ideas

. Work big to small, dark to light, and easy to hard.

. Don’t be afraid to go back a step and alter the color/value of a shape.

. Don’t go too bright too fast

. Value is more important than color here.

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2. Walter White

This is a fun portrait that shouldn’t be too difficult because it has very clear light and shadow shapes. I will also show you how I get an accurate drawing using a proportional divider.

Key Ideas

. Only draw out the big simple shapes.

. When Blocking out the light side of the face don’t go too bright.

. Use the bright spot on the head as a key for the other values in the painting.

. Get a little of the background in early to help key in the portrait.

. You don’t have to paint every wrinkle you see.

. Take your time to get the outside contour of the top of the head right.

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3. Hailee Planes

This is one of my most popular portrait lessons. Being able to identify the planes of the face will make portrait painting a lot easier. In this tutorial I have altered the photo into simple planes so they are super clear. Like the Sargent Shapes tutorial, we will be be working big to small in terms of these plane shapes.

Key Ideas

. It’s okay to constantly adjust the color/value of planes as you go.

. When mixing color always be thinking in terms of value and saturation.

. If you struggle with value, take a photo of your painting as you are working and put it in black and white along with the reference photo.

. You will need to progressively use thicker paint as you start painting shapes on top of other shapes.

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4. Sargent “Head of an Arab”

This master copy of a John Signer Sargent portrait is a great example of how simple a portrait can be. This will show you that detail is not the answer to making your portraits better.

Key Ideas

. When drawing the head look to match the angles of lines.

. When making a mark, try to keep your brush on the canvas as long as you can.

. Don’t go to pure white for the cloth. If it is not looking bright enough, try to darkent the background next to it.

. Pay close attention to where Sargent lost edges and let colors and values blend together.

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5. Kent

This lesson has been very popular with students. In this tutorial I work from a photo that I put the “cutout” filter on in photoshop. This will help you see the face in terms of simple value shapes.

Key Ideas

. Get the darkest value of the hair in early so you can use it to compare the rest of the values to it.

. Get the structure of the face painted with simple shapes before going into details with the eyes.

. As always, value is more important than color here. More specifically the value relationships.

. When bringing the portrait to completion looks to soften the edges between shapes.

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