I once attended a watercolor class in which a bewildered student asked the instructor, “Where do we start?” A bit dismayed, the teacher replied, “Start anywhere you feel sure of yourself.” After a moment, the student looked up again and said, “OK. . . I’ve signed my name. Now what?”
I hope this book will give you some answers to the question of where to start in painting watercolor portraits, and where to go from there.
Painting in watercolor is exciting because it can move on its own, and challenging because it does move, all too often, where you don’t want it. Once you begin to paint in watercolor it becomes addictive and you’re happily hooked into a lifetime of learning what makes watercolor tick. So assuming you are one of us who is lost to the medium, or someone who may soon be, how does this sound for a challenge — painting watercolor portraits that glow?
I know from experience you have probably already thumbed through these pages, and you may have noticed this looks like a “hands-on” workbook. That’s exactly what it’s intended to be. Before long, I hope these pages are spotted with the paint you’ve splashed on them from practicing every exercise.
Before we talk about how best to use this book, I think you should know something about my background, because my experiences are reflected in my approach to portraiture. I began my career as a commercial artist. There isn’t much glamour to commercial art; the prime objective is to sell the product. However, this experience taught me one valuable lesson. I learned to analyze the project at hand, and to
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work out obvious problems before they happen. This may explain why,when I decided to paint watercolor portraits, I looked for a simple method to plan a successful painting even before I started to put paint on paper. This method works for me, but I have never claimed that mine is the only approach. The goal is not what approach you take, the goal is painting fresh, glowing portraits!
The first section of this book is full of the basic information you need to draw the head in any position. Next you’ll see how to create the illusion of a solid form, and then, by following the 40 percent rule, which tells you that shadows are 40-percent darker than the areas in light. Then you’ll discover how to put the glow of warm sunlight into your portraits by learning the laws of light. A few simple principles will enable you to make portraits filled with radiant color. This information is important no matter what subject you paint.
The first demonstrations are in values of gray. This is for a good reason. You should concentrate all your attention on getting the darks properly placed. Remember, color expertise will come with practice, but all the color in the world will not help if the value relationships are incorrect.
Many of the demonstrations in this book are in the form of “paint- along exercises.” They are not intended to be works of art. It may be easier to follow the painting process if we both start from the same drawing. You’ll find some of my sketches at the back of the book, so you might consider copying these line drawings onto your watercolor paper and painting along with me.
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I will describe my entire painting process by showing you how I painted two portraits, one of my friend Pat, a vivacious young woman, and Jon-Marc, an energetic boy of four. How I posed my models, how I composed the paintings, how I did accurate preliminary drawings, and finally how I applied the paint are all described in Section Two.
In the next section, I show how the procedure detailed in the previous section is applied to four very different subjects. Also included are three more practice portraits that you can use to develop your own skill. A concise summary of my method with a series of key questions portrait artists should ask themselves as they work can be found on pages 126 and 127. You may want to place a copy of them in a prominent place in your studio so you can refer to them often until they are a permanent part of your methods.
In the final sections, I have a gallery of paintings by other artists with comments on why I like them. The book concludes with six of the drawings I used for the demonstrations reproduced full size that you can use to follow along with me, and a list of the books that I think are very useful for the portrait painter.
Even if you have never attempted a portrait before, I think you may be surprised at how well you do. The important thing is to enjoy yourself. And remember, the more you paint, the better painter you become. It may take talent or aptitude to get you started, but it takes practice and patience to get the rest of the way.Good luck!Jan Kunz |