Painting 33

Ref. 1121.- Pencil watercolor, An easy way to paint a portrait

We all know painting a portrait is a challenge, and the idea of painting in watercolor can be downrigth intimidating, because watercolor is notorious for been unforgiving, I feel more confident myself with another médiums, but this time I wanted to do it through pencil watercolor.-- the following method works fine that´s why I wanted to share with all of you

This is the result of this work

I use to work with different papers, but an easy way to take advantage of the background major color is to work with a colored paper like Stardream of a weight of 105lb (this is not a paper specified properly for watercolor but works pretty good and you can find many colors available) so I chose a "peach colored paper"  to work with

If you´re quite skillful you can do the "portrait main features" through freehand
if not, just transfer main features contourn like head, face, eyes, nose and mouth location, there are many ways to do this, I did with 4H pencil  reiforcing some lines with dark Brown watercolor pencil, we are going to work from general to specific, and details will come later

I enlarge the eyes model because this is the main key that will resemble the result, so I really take care to define as much as possible, also I start to make and fill with watercolor pencil like sketching

After watercolor pencil addition, I use a wet round brush to dissolve colors accordingly, base in direction leaving the lightest áreas untouched, avoiding oversaturated colors by using plenty of wáter in my washes.- you can "pull up" any áreas that may have gotten too dark by using a clean wet brush, dab the brush against the dark área once it has dried to push and pick up any excess pigment or to blend a new line with a previous one, without leaving a line or "tide mark"

After laying down your ligther washes, it´s easier to see where your first washes can be darker, then go back and re-stablish the darkest defined values, pay attention where the highligths are located
For the red shirt I did use watercolor with a flat brush

Then all details with darker colors,  I did use a semi-wet paper in my left hand while in my right hand I apply color with my watercolor pencil to integrate darker values

The portrait resemblance is closer to the reference photograph, but the eyes are the main key-work, so this is another spot where I feel more confident with brush to work details and ligths reflections, all the rest except the shirt were made with watercolor pencils through this example

 

Some watercolor pencil tips;

 - Apply the watercolor pencil dry.

 - Wet the paper first to produce a bleeding type effect or to create soft lines.
 - After your watercolor pencil wash has dried, apply dry layers of watercolor
     pencil for detail.
 - Create glazed watercolor pencil washes (transparent layers of color over
     another) by using either water or solvents.
 - You can use a colorless blender marker, to blend the colors
 -  To create detail using watercolor pencils, try using a small wet paint brush
 - Try a backwash technique by wetting your paper first then apply one color at 
       one end, and then another color at the other end, watch the colors blend
       and bleed together