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Please help - watercolour portrait!
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Message
Posted
Hi, I am hoping you lovely folks on here can help me. I have started this watercolour portrait of my youngest and the shadows on his forehead look more like bruises to me. Is there anyway I can rescue this painting? I have tried lifting out the colour, but I think the paper is damaged now.
Many thanks, in advance
Dawn
Posted
Don't panic Dawn, you can always use gouache if you have some, if not try adding the watercolour thicker, if all else fails use acrylic and make it a mixed media portrait, Don't forget to kill that white background as soon as possible, only then will you see the true relative colour values against the background, very important.
Posted
Alan to the rescue, I think: I'd have said just the same thing.
It may be a little late to correct this in pure watercolour now (but as Alan has indicated, that doesn't mean disaster) but for future reference when painting flesh tones, the shadows can be accomplished in various ways - one way is just to go in with a strong dark, even a violet, and lay it in boldly, What you really want to avoid is black, or Payne's Grey - that WILL make the flesh look as if it's bruised. Another way is to think about the complementary colour - to get a more naturalistic look if really bold shadow colours are a bit frightening (they frighten me, certainly...). Caucasian, "white" flesh is basically a pale orange (not a pink), and the complementary colour to orange is blue - say, cerulean blue for these purposes perhaps, ultramarine might be a touch too purple, pthalo blue far too strong.
By mixing a blue with your flesh colour, you should get a quite acceptable shadow tone; and you can vary this considerably, to give different intensities in different parts of the face.
Others will approach this differently - using a stronger mix of the basic flesh colour; adding red or burnt sienna, or just dropping the complementary colour into a wet wash - which is wonderful when it works, and a ghastly disaster of overwhelming proportions when it doesn't...
Try these things out on a spare bit of paper before tackling your next portrait - make notes if you don't think you'll remember what you did - and you'll have a battery of techniques to hand for your next masterpiece.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
Once all the darkest areas are in, (line where the lips meet, nostrils, eyelashes) as well as the background colour, you will be able to make a better judgement about shadows. And Robert is right about using blues for shadows (See Cesare Romero's work in the Gallery). I would not have said that it looks like bruises anyway.
Posted
Thanks everyone. I think I will crack on with the background , eyes and darker colours and re assess. I am very pleased with the expression as I think I have captured my son's slightly self conscious smile and so does he!
I have used acrylic and pastel to correct paintings in the past, but perhaps I need to stop getting hung up one aspect of my painting. This sure is a learning curve and one I am enjoying.
AG Holder,I experimented with a dry brush for the hair and I think it has worked quite well.
Posted
I think you've learned something else, apart from the advice you've received; you've learned that it's often a good idea to just leave the painting for a little while, which you did in this case by asking for help on here, and coming back to it with a fresh eye: and you're more pleased with it now.
T'is often the way!
By the way, you're right about not getting hung up on one bit - it's useful to know you CAN correct a watercolour with a bit of gouache (probably the most natural way of doing it, if lifting out isn't going to work) but it is better if you don't have to. Glad that you're more relaxed about it now - or anyway, you seem to be. Looking forward to seeing the completed painting.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
Gouache is just opaque watercolour - you can thin it with water, and work it into previous layers of transparent watercolour or overlay them; you can add white to produce a much thicker paint if you want to: a painting done this way has a very characteristic creamy appearance. Another name for it is 'body colour', and you can achieve that by adding a little white to your usual watercolours - preferably a watercolour Titanium White rather than Chinese/Zinc White, because the latter is quite thin and very inclined to produce a chalky, greyish look.
I was given some gouache recently - I'd rarely used it before - and the only thing you need to watch is that some of the colours aren't lightfast: far more are than used to be - it was the usual medium of illustrators, for magazines and fashion houses, until the internet came along and changed the whole profession. Because gouache didn't need to be permanent - designs would be printed from an original illustration - it often wasn't. But companies are producing more lightfast colours now.
Did you ever use poster paint at school? It was all most schools could afford - either in pots if you were lucky, or tins of powdered pigment if you weren't. That's basically a form of gouache: a cheap and rather nasty form, but if you've used that and got results you'll have no trouble with the better quality gouaches now available.
You can also buy a product called acrylic gouache - I've not used it - which may look superficially like regular gouache but is insoluble when dry. I'd have thought anyone would be just as well off using Chromacolour acrylic as that - it works well with watercolour, especially when bought in pots rather than the tubes, and it's actually difficult to tell the difference between a Chromacolour painted on watercolour paper and watercolour: it can be used transparently and opaquely, so is worth thinking about.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
That point about the eyes is a very useful one - the white dot, of course, is a sort of code: a mark made to help indicate the direction in which the subject is looking; we see that painting the eye as a dark circle gives a deeply sinister, dead look, and sometimes in something of a panic, bung a highlight in in order to humanize the subject and stop him or her frightening us into fits.
(I once had this experience: my portrait turned into an horrific vision of sinister malevolence in front of me; I'm not entirely sure I hadn't caught the character of the subject in that particular case, but there we are..... wouldn't have done to offer the family a vision of their father as the living dead...).
People have got used to looking at photographed portraits too, and expect the eyes to be positively a-sparkle with glinting highlights ..... but that's not how they look in reality..
If in doubt, look closely at the subject; and also at pre-camera portraits in paint to see how the experts did it.
PS - there's also an important difference between figure/portrait studies, such as the one shown, and close-up head and shoulder portraiture - there does need to be a highlight of some sort, just not the big white dot right in the middle of the pupil.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Edited
by RobertJones
Posted
I've taken two portrait watercolours from the internet - one by a Chinese artist, Yia Xian Min, the other by the watercolourist Julie Cohen. Don't be put off by the huge skill in these portraits, it's always helpful to learn from the best - (that's why I didn't show you one of mine!). You have above an example of how to paint the full figure with eyes that look convincing, and here are two head and shoulder studies, from which I think we could all benefit.
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