Portrait – Let’s Paint! Watercolour Walk Through

Hopefully you’re a little more excited about this than the sad bunnies on my note paper.

First up, sketch your basic outline.

Keep the details around the face fine.

While the hair out the back is long and flowing.

The most important part of paintings like this is the colouring. Think about colours that work well together. My favourite combination is bright blue/green/pink/purple.

I decided to go with the blue and green for the girl and then pink and purple for the sky. I like to start with the face details because if I don’t get that right then there’s no point doing the rest of the painting. Each line and area is a combination of the two colours.

The technique is simple, lay down a thick-ish line of water.

Drop on the two colours and move them with the paint brush until you’re happy.

While the face outlines dry I moved on to the fabric. I find it easier to do the outlines first then move on to the shadows etc once it’s dry using the lines as a guide.

Moving on, the hair is next. Large sections of hair first making sure to keep it so it looks flowing.

Swoosh!

Use your colours to indicate the texture and folds of the fabric. Keep an eye on where you’re placing each colour eg. use the darker blue for areas in shadow.

Overlapping the hair layers once they are dry creates even more layers.

The face and skin is shaded very minimally.

Now let it all dry.

Once it’s totally dry, erase any of the pencil which is still showing through.

Now to paint the background,we don’t want to get any of the pink/purple on the greens so cover the edges with masking fluid.

Cover the entire background with water.

And then drip the colour on.

More water and more colour.

You can see the water pooling and the paper beginning to buckle. So long as the water isn’t a danger to the other colours don’t worry about it. Water makes cool patterns as it dries.

Once it dries it will look something like this:

Now remove all of the resist from the edges.

All done!

I left a gap around the edges for aesthetic reasons but you can paint resist directly on top of the green/blue if you want to keep it nice and close.

So let’s have a look at all of the details!

With techniques like this, the paint and the water are really doing most of the work so all you need are basic drawing skills.

Textured paper really brings out water colour.

So there you have it! I hope you enjoyed this walk/paint through 😀 Let me know what you paint, I can’t wait to see!