Portraits With Watercolours

Starting from photographs, we will learn how to use greytone photographs to make an accurate tracing template of a person’s face. Sabine will explain in which way photographs need to be suitable for portraiture painting and what needs considering when taking your own pictures and choosing them for painting. We will use these line-drawings made from the photographs as a sketch into which we will work the watercolours. 

As a first step towards our portrait picture, we will apply subtle hatching with pencil to develop a first understanding of light and dark. These hatched areas can stay in the picture when we then apply the watercolour paints with the wet-in-wet technique. Wet-in-wet is a very practical way to work considering the different skin tones in a person’s face…the wet-in-wet technique helps to blend and disperse the tones well. 

Working with portraits is a very rewarding way to engage with art – and with the people whom you paint. It takes some practice and it is advisable to critically manage one’s own expectations about achieving high level of likeness.