8 x 10 Realistic Acrylic Portrait Timelapse

Just prior to Christmas, I finished this portrait of a local engineer.

I’d like to share the process with you in a time-lapse video. In this brief video, you’ll see very quickly how you can paint a realistic acrylic portrait using the glazing technique.

 

 

 

 

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Would you like to learn how to paint like this, with individual lessons broken down and explained?

Learn How to Paint Acrylic Portraits With My Free Mini-Video Course!

(The lessons show me painting a different picture, but the technique is the same. Enjoy! 🙂

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Let me know how this helps.

Yours for better portraits,

 

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

Why These Portraits Won the Contest

It is my privilege every week to judge entries for the Realistic Acrylic Portrait School Facebook Contest. 

The best 5-6 images get chosen to be included on the Header Image of our 6,000+ member group. But why do I choose the portraits that make it to the top?

In this brief video, I’ll go over the reasons why I awarded these portraits the prizes they received. I also discuss what could be done to improve them.

 

 

You can learn from these tips on what makes for a good portrait and how to improve your own.

Also, if you aren’t currently a member of the Realistic Acrylic Portrait School Facebook group (it’s free to join), you should be! Here’s why…

1. Get help on your portrait from myself and fellow artists when you feel stuck.
2. Share your artwork with others and get inspired to paint more, by seeing what your fellow artists are doing.
3. Enter a portrait into the weekly contest, get your work featured, and win a prize!

 

Join the Realistic Acrylic Portrait School Facebook Group

 

See you inside the group! Let me know how these tips help, and of course, if you have any questions.

 

Yours for better portraits,

 

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

How to Ship a Large Painting in a Tube

As an artist, I love the details of painting a portrait. But the details of shipping a portrait, not so much.

Logistics just isn’t my thing.

Nevertheless, when I finished this 48″ x 72″ portrait, for a client from Brunei (about as far as you can get from Wisconsin!) I knew the shipping could cost a pretty penny.

After calling several shipping companies, the cost was going to be in the thousands! Finally, after a lot of back-and-forth, my client suggested that I remove the painting off the stretcher frame and ship it. I have to admit, I never did this before. I have stretched a rolled canvas for someone, so I figured it was basically the same thing, but in reverse!

In this video, I’ll show you how I shipped this large painting, and how you can too, if the need should arise.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video was that I purchased plenty of insurance. I definitely recommend it.

Great news: I heard back from my client and the painting arrived safely! I guess that means all five pounds of packaging was worth it!

Let me know how these tips help, and have a blessed day!

 

 

How Do You Do Layers With the Glazing Technique?

The glazing technique can do some amazing things for you, but it can be a challenge to learn how to do it at first.

I have a student named Holly, who has just started painting portraits in acrylic. She is currently working on one of her brother, and she was unsure of how to continue after beginning the glazing process. With her permission, I’m going to share her portrait with you. We all know what it feels like to get stuck during painting, especially when starting out…

Hi Matt,

Thank you for your advice and the progress photos you sent of your artwork. That really helped. I’ve watched a lot of the student videos and I’m trying to apply everything to my painting. I feel like it looks kind of terrible so far so maybe I’m not doing it right. I’m worried about painting any more shadow in on his face because it looks bad – especially his eyes. I definitely feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Haha. I don’t know what to do about his hair or face. And the white shirt with the dark creases. And the brass jacket buttons. I’m following your list of paint colors to use for the skin tones off of your skin tone video and that is very helpful. But I just feel kind of lost as to the layering process. For instance, for the face, I don’t know how many layers of shadows I’m supposed to do before I move onto layers of midtones. And how many layers of midtones do I do before I move onto highlights? And when I’m painting the midtones, do I paint over the shadow areas as well? Or only paint on the midtone areas?

Thank you so much for your help!

Holly

 

How to Varnish Your Painting

I remember the first time I attempted to varnish one of my paintings.

It was a large portrait on hardboard, about 48″ tall. Having just done some mural work with a well known muralist, I attempted to copy his method of using a household paint roller and a clear coat.

It was a disaster.

The medium looked so milky white while it was drying, that I started to panic like Rowan Atkinson did in the movie “Bean” when he sneezed on Whistler’s Mother. I tried to clean off the half dried medium with a damp towel. To my dismay, the medium started globbing up and totally distorted the fine detail work on the surface. Some areas had no varnish. Other areas were covered with a streaky, bumpy film. My painting was a hideous mess.

I said I would never varnish a painting again.

Except that I did.

I knew I needed to learn how to do it correctly in order to protect my paintings from dust and debris, saturate the colors and dark values more, and give it a uniform finish.

What I’m going to teach you is the process I learned basically from trial and error over the years.

I’m not scared to varnish any more. But I like to say a quick prayer before I put brush to canvas, because if you don’t varnish correctly, you can mess up a good painting very quickly!

Here’s a video that will show you the correct way to do it…

 

Here are the steps, simplified.

1. Use acrylic matte varnish. Not matte medium. (unless you want a flat finish) Matte varnish dries to a satin sheen and looks fantastic. If you want a little more saturation on your dark values and colors, you can add some gloss medium to your matte varnish and mix them together very thoroughly.
2. Put your painting on a flat table, or slightly angled. Don’t varnish the painting on a vertical easel or you could get drips and it will look terrible.
3. Use a 1″ or larger flat brush that’s in good condition. Put your varnish in a cup or container than is wide enough to accommodate the brush.
4. Dip the brush into the varnish and apply from top down, left to right, overlapping slightly. Do not overbrush!
5. Continue the process all the way down and when you’re done, leave it alone for a couple hours. It should dry completely clear.

That’s all there is to it!

What do you think? What are YOUR experiences with varnishing? Do you have any stories–or tips–to share? Do you avoid varnishing completely?

Let me know how this tutorial helps.

All the best,

 

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

 

Easy, Inexpensive Artist’s Palette for Acrylic Painting

Let me help you get started on your new portrait today…

Learn How to Paint Acrylic Portraits With My Free Mini-Video Course!

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Question: What do you use for your palette…and why?

Enjoy your portrait painting and let me know if I can help you in any way.

All the best,

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

How Do You Illuminate Your Art Studio?

For acrylic portrait painters, and all artists, there is a truth we can’t hide from: we can only paint as well as we can see.

So, how well are we seeing in our art studios?

Here’s a question I got from one of my art students:

“I would like to paint in the evening but find out the next day my skin tones are off. I have the room overhead a one lamp with the daylight bulb but doesn’t seem to be enough. I do have cataracts which may be part of the problem but can’t have that fixed until next year. You said you currently have no windows in your studio so what do you use for good lighting? I’m sorry to bother you with a question like this but I was quite upset this morning to see what I did last night!”

Thanks so much and God Bless.

Sharon

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Here’s my answer:

Hi Sharon,

It’s annoying to not have enough light. I remember when I first started painting, I would work with those old yellowish incandescent bulbs. When I took my painting outside to photograph it I said, “That’s NOT how it looked in my studio!” The colors were off, and it looked grainy.

Now with LED bulbs being so inexpensive (to buy and to run) I have 10 lights in my studio with 100 watt-equivalent daylight spectrum bulbs. Best part is they only use 14 watts a piece, so it’s pretty energy efficient!

They are simple clamp-style lamps with metal reflectors that you can buy at your home improvement store for about $5-10 a piece. You don’t even have to buy them all at once. You can do it like I did. Every time I ran to Menards, I would buy another lamp. I spaced it out over the course of a couple years!

Here is a shot of my messy, well-used studio with the lights aimed at the ceiling. The reflected light works great to illuminate even a large painting. While I’m working there are virtually no shadows from my hands and arms to interfere with my painting.

I do have a window in my studio now, but it doesn’t do a lot. It’s mostly the light bubs that illuminate everything for me.

Question: How do you illuminate YOUR studio?

All the best,

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

12 Steps to Painting Realistic Skin Tones in Your Acrylic Portrait

“What do you MOST want to learn?”

This is a question I asked the artists in my Facebook group. The #1 answer was skin tones.

So I decided to put together a 5-week live video class, showing the whole process of painting an acrylic portrait, step-by-step, concentrating on flesh tones.

 

 

Most people know me as the guy that does slow, methodical glazes. But in this series, I wanted to meet artists where they’re at and do the portrait in more of an opaque technique. We had a great response to the class, with about eighty students on board right away during the first lesson!

I decided to create a printable guide that shows what we covered during the classes, although obviously not in as much depth as you’d get out of watching 5 hours of video! I think you’ll find this guide helpful. This online tutorial is an adaptation of the guide, showing a portrait from a photo I painted of my wife. If you take the video course (now open for enrollment) it will complement it well, and give you something to keep next to your easel as you paint. It can stand on its own, too. If you put the techniques to practice, you’ll see improvement in your portrait painting, for sure.

Either way, enjoy this tutorial, and I look forward to teaching you more!

 

Step 1: Create a Basic Sketch

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Step 2: Block in the Hair Color and Value

Although we are concentrating on skin tones, quickly blocking in the hair color and value frames the face. It will help us determine what colors to use for the skin tone, and make sure it is accurate. When you paint on top of plain white, you will think your skin tone is too dark, when in reality it’s not. We look for the predominant color in the hair. In this example, I’m using raw umber dark, and applying with a 3/4” -1” flat brush.

 

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Step 3: Fill in the Skin Tone Base

 

 

In this step, I’m using a mixture of titanium white, burnt sienna, and organic red orange for the first, foundational skin tone layer. Make the paint as fluid as you can, by adding a little matte medium (10%) and brush quickly, just filling the whole area in.

 

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Print off Your Own Guide to Paint Realistic Skin Tones in Acrylic

I created a handy reference guide that covers all the steps in this article in a 7 page PDF. You can download it right now, print it, and set it next to your easel, so you know exactly what colors, what techniques and what steps to take when you paint skin tones on your portrait. Download it below…

Download and Print the Skin Tones Guide

 

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Step 4: Suggest the Features

Now it’s time to get the fun part: actually painting in the facial features–the eyes, nose and mouth. But we don’t want to paint them too dark right away. Lightly “suggest” them in using a mixture of the skin tone base from the previous layer and burnt sienna. Painting the features this way at first will allow you to adjust them if necessary.

 

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Step 5: Darken and Refine the Features

After the facial features dry, you can go over them with a darker color. Just add a little more burnt sienna for the eyebrows and nose. For the eyes, a bit of raw umber will cool down the color enough so that if the eyes are a different color than brown, you can easily adjust it. We’re not trying to dial in the exact eye color; rather, we’re just trying to ger the main shape and value established. For the lips, in this case, I’m using napthol red and burnt sienna, diluted a bit by the main flesh tone color.

 

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Step 6: Block in the Mid-tone Shadows

 

Unless we add in shadows on the face, it will look flat. That is obvious. The trick is to use the right color and value. And then to place that tone in the right places to give the illusion of three dimensionality, In my example, I use a similar color to what I used for the previous step, and lightened it up just a bit with the main skin tone color, so it’s easy to control and doesn’t get too dark.

 

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Step 7: Refine the Eyebrows

The eyebows up to this point look too thin. So what I’m doing here is creating a mixture of raw umber dark, alizarine crimson, raw sienna, and a touch of burnt sienna. Then, I carefully go over the eyebrow areas, and also thicken them up a bit too. You have to think of the eyebrows not just as hairs but also the shadow under the eye socket. What we’re doing is actually painting the base tone for the eyebrows. Then we go over with a darker color to suggest the hairs.

 

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Tired of Muddy Colors? 

 

Get my complete guide on painting skin tones, for free, and start mixing and blending realistic skin tones right away…

Download and Print the Skin Tones Guide

 

 

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Step 8: Darken and Refine the Eyes

 

The eyes also need to get darker. So I take some raw umber dark, alizarine crimson and mix it into some of the skin tone base. Next, I paint that slowly with a small round brush, suggesting her eyelashes, eyeliner, and even the thickness of her eyelids.

 

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Step 9: Turn the Form

 

“Turning the form” means we bring out the three-dimensionality of the facial structure by placing shading and gradation in just the right spots. In this step, I use a color just slightly darker than the main skin tone and add more depth to her chin. In addition, I deepen some of the shadows alongside her nose, and under her eyes, to make the cheeks appear as if they are projecting forward in space a little bit.

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Step 10: Refine the Teeth Details

Establishing the shadows on the sides of the teeth gives the jaw three-dimensionality. That’s what we want. I use raw umber, titanium white, and a bit of alizarine crimson. For the highlights, I use titanium white and a bit of raw sienna. You can use a size 10 round brush if you twist the end to a point with paint that is fluid enough. Spray your paint with a mist of water, if necessary, to achieve that.

 

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Step 11: Add Highlights and Final Touches

 

We also added highlights in some of the previous steps too, but toward the end of the painting is where you can really make it shine with great use of high- lights. The colors will vary depending on what part of the face they are applied to. The forehead high- lights have some titanium white and alizarine crimson mixed in, to suggest the cool color of window light shining, in addition to incandescent lamps.

 

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Step 12: Finished–Enjoy Your Painting!

Now, it’s your turn! Paint with this guide and let me know how it’s helped you!

I enjoyed creating this helpful reference on painting realistic skin tones in acrylic. I know that if you put the steps into practice, you will see a dramatic improvement on your portrait painting, especially if you’re just starting out. If you found this helpful, would you send me an email and let me know? I can be reached at [email protected].

Make you print off the skin tones guide so you can paint a lifelike portrait you can be proud to show. Click the button below to download it.

Download and Print the Skin Tones Guide

 

 

Can I help you further?…

I have a video course available which shows each step I covered in this guide in greater detail. The course is about 5 hours long, and it’s a total package of five workshops that you can watch, step-by-step, at your own convenience. To learn more visit: Courses.realisticacrylic.com Even if you aren’t able take the course, be sure to get the free printable reference guide on painting skin tones in acrylic. Email me if you have a question or need a quick tip. I’ll be happy to help.

 

 

Share with your friends!

Let your fellow artists know about Realistic Acrylic Portrait School. My desire is to help artists learn how to paint an acrylic portrait they can be proud of. As I do for all my students, I pray that God would bless you with His peace in your painting process, direct your brush-strokes, that your paintings would encourage those who seem them, and that you would have all the provision you need, as your heart is drawn to Him, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Blessings to you!

 

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

 

Step-by-Step Process of a Memoriam Portrait (Video Lesson)

Sometimes as portrait artists, we are called to capture the memory of a lost loved one. It’s a very special thing, a privilege that we given, to be able to do that for someone.

I don’t take it lightly.

Recently, I just finished up a commissioned portrait for a friend, whose pastor has recently passed away. This is an 11″ x 14″ acrylic on canvas. I want to show you the entire process, but I’m going to start in this post with just the sketch and first couple layers. Then, we’ll just add on with more steps to this same post.

Many of my blog readers prefer more video content rather than written, so that’s how I’m going to do it here.

 

Step 1: Blocking in the First Shadows and Tones

 

 

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Step 2: Filling in the Initial Skin Tone Glaze

 

 

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Step 3: Integrating the Background and Hair Color

 

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Step 4: How to Paint the Hair

 

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Step 5: How to Paint Nuances in the Skin Tones

 

 

Would you like to know when I post another video lesson on this portrait? Click the button below to get my art tips and keep learning!

 

Learn How to Paint Acrylic Portraits With My Free Mini-Video Course!

 

Hope you enjoyed this acrylic portrait painting tutorial. As always, let me know how I can help you with your portraits or if you have a question. Leave me a comment below!

Be blessed in your painting,

 

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!

 

How Freehand Sketching Can Improve Your Painting

P.S. Did you find this post helpful or encouraging? If so, send it on ahead! Let others know with the share buttons below. I’d love to hear your comments. Thank you so much! Also, do you have a question on acrylic portrait painting you’d like answered? Let me know, and I’d be happy to help!