Perfect Portraits: Painting Faces and Skin Tones in Watercolor with Ease

***The First 100 Students to Join this Course Will Be Entered into a Giveaway for a Custom Portrait by Me!***

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn how to paint a portrait of anyone with ease. Whether you are starting out painting watercolor portraits, or you are already creating life-like paintings like a PRO, I’ll show you my secret tricks that will take your portrait painting to the next level!

We will start with the very most important part of any portrait painting, and move on to tips and techniques that will make it easy to get beautiful and accurate skin tones. Whether you are painting light-skinned people, dark-skinned people, or any kind of skin tone in between, by the end of this course you will have new skills that will help you to portray their likeness just right!

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

Portraits are probably one of the most impressive things to paint, but there are several problems that many people run into. How do you mix a skin tone that seems as real as a person standing in front of you? I will show you all of my favorite watercolors, mixtures, and techniques so that you don’t have to struggle with that ever again.

• Discover the Most Important Part of Any Portrait
• Pinpoint Where Highlights and Shadows Fall on the Face
• Create Resources that Will Make Your Painting Process Easier
• Uncover the Hidden Secret to Painting Realistic Faces
• Combine Colors to Make Vibrant, Lively Skin Tones Using Simple Color Theory
• Isolate Colors in an Image or in Real Life in Order to Accurately Identify Them
• Put All of This Information Together to Create A Beautiful Painting!

This course is meant to give you all of the knowledge that you need to start painting any person that you could ever see. You will be able to mix your own colors to match absolutely any skin tone and make your portraits come alive!

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

These are the tools that I recommend you use for this course. It's not necessary to get the exact same brands, or the exact same colors, but these are the ones that I have had the most success with.

• Watercolor Paper : I recommend a hot pressed paper because it is easier to get smooth color and details on this type of paper. My favorite is Fabriano Artistico 300gsm
• Watercolor Paint : I recommend a single pigment combination of warm and cool blue, warm and cool red, and warm and cool yellow to start with. I also have some favorite colors.  See the document linked below for my recommended colors.
• Watercolor Brushes: I recommend a synthetic or natural round brush. My favorites are the DaVinci Cosmotop line and the DaVinci Maestro line.

ARE YOU READY? LET'S GO!

I am so excited to get started, and I can't wait to see the beautiful things you will make in your class project!

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RESOURCE LINKS

Reference Images

Course Information and Workbook (Includes watercolor information)

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Want to Learn More? Here are My Other Courses!

Mix Vibrant Watercolors : How to Mix Color Easily

Mix Vibrant Watercolors 2.0: Perfect Color Mixing and Matching

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The music in this course is Lee Rosevere's "Tech Toys," through Creative Commons license.

• Introduction and Overview
• Materials : What You Need for This Course
• Just Breathe: Some Things to Keep In Mind
• Values: The Most Important Part of a Portrait
• References: How to Create Reference Photos that are Easy to Use
• Black and White: How to Paint a Value Portrait
• Let’s talk about skin tone: The Truth about Pre-mixed Colors
• My Favorite Colors for Painting Portraits
• Simple Mixes: The Basics of Mixing Skin Tones
• Let’s Make Mud : Using the Primary and Complimentary Colors
• The Sphere Exercise: A Simple Portrait Warm-up
• Getting it on Paper: How to Transfer Your Image
• First Steps: Painting a Simple Portrait
• Purple: My Portrait Painting Secret Weapon
• The Magic of the Purple Underpainting
• Layering: The Key to Living Skin
• Undertones: Why all Skin is Not the Same
• Painting a Very Pale Portrait
• Painting a Pale Portrait
• Painting a Medium Portrait
• Painting a Dark Portrait
• Painting a Very Dark Portrait
• Extra Credit: How to Add Blush
• Wrap Up : What Did We Learn?
• Class Project and Thank You!