Using a grid or tracing can be a great way for artists just starting out in portrait painting to create a lifelike, accurate sketch. It also can help experienced painters either save time or get their proportions a bit more accurate so they can concentrate more on their painting process.
But sometimes, it’s fun to just “throw off the training wheels” and do your sketch freehand. In fact, drawing freehand will enhance your ability to see intricate spacial relationships, shapes and contours that are vital at any stage in your painting.
You’ll learn to capture those small nuances that will make a person look like them.
What is the best way to draw freehand?
I’m not going to say I have the best method, but it has served me well in over 20 years of doing portrait art. I’d like to share that with you today, using this 8″ x 10″ commissioned portrait as an example…
Tools needed:
Canvas Burnt Ochre Prismacolor colored pencil Electric pencil sharpener White smooth eraser
Here is the 15-minute video tutorial. The drawing took almost an hour.
The rest of this tutorial–showing the entire process, from sketch to finished acrylic portrait painting (about 7 hours of video instruction)–will soon be available as an online class. You can get access to it, and several other pre-recorded painting courses by becoming a member of Realistic Acrylic Portrait School.
And now, here are the steps, based on my video, broken down…
Step 1: Locking in the Composition
In this step, you want to plot out where your drawing is going. Here’s a few rules of thumb for a good composition and accurate initial proportions…
-Fill the image area as much as possible -If you were to draw an imaginary line 1/3 of the way down from the top of the canvas edge, that line should go right through the middle of the face. -Don’t let any major lines touch the edge of the “picture plane” (edges of the canvas) -Look for the overall shape of the head: Is it oval? Long? Short and wide? -Use light, short, choppy strokes to capture everything at first. It will be much easier to adjust and erase.
Step 2: Suggesting the Facial Features
After plotting out your composition, you want to start filling in the facial features. It’s good to draw lightly at first. We just want to get the basic location on the face and the overall impression of what they look like.
Start with the eyes. The eyes (and eyebrows) are THE most important feature to capture correctly on a face.
Ask yourself…
-Where are they located in relationship to the top and bottom of the head? Usually eyes are right in the middle, but that can vary from person to person. -Are they large or small? -Are they close together or far apart? Usually eyes are about one-eye-width apart from each other. -Are the eyebrows straight or curved? Angled up or down? Thin or thick? -How much of a distance is there between the eyebrows and eyes? -What’s the shape of the eyes? Narrow? Rounded? Angled? -How much of the top eyelid is showing? Some people have prominent upper eyelids. With others you can hardly see it. -Are the eyelashes thick or thin?
Now, these questions will come more into play later on as you refine the sketch, but for now at this stage, just get the general idea captured.
Next, you’ll move down to the nose. It’s important to see the distance between the eyes and the nose and draw that. The shape between the nose and eyes forms a triangle. If you can get a sense for that shape, it will really help you out. Is the triangle wide or long?
I am not saying to draw a triangle on your sketch. Just use the concept to see that spacial relationship between the eyes and the nose and draw it accurately.
Notice the particular shape of the nose and nostrils and draw it in. Are the nostrils prominent or obscured? Is the nose wide or skinny?
Then, move down to the mouth. You’ll want to just get the overall shape. Here’s some rules of thumb for drawing the mouth…
-The top lip is usually thinner than the bottom lip -When smiling, the edges of the mouth usually line up with the middle of the eyes
-Don’t draw the teeth in too prominently. Just suggest them. Remember that the two front teeth are larger than the rest. -The bottom teeth, if showing, are slightly more than 1/2 the width of the top.
Step 3: Redefining the Facial Features
In this step, you will want to go over everything–the eyes, nose, and mouth: making sure your shapes are accurate. The overall size and proportions should be mostly locked in by this point. So what you’ll want to do is make sure the shapes on all the features match what you see in your reference photo.
Continue to ask yourself some of the questions in the previous step as you refine. And look at your reference photo 50% of the time to make sure you’re drawing what you see, instead of what you think you see!
Step 4: Shading in
Maybe it seems redundant to shade in during a sketch, but I find it very helpful. We don’t see any resting objects in this three dimensional world as separated by line.
No.
It’s the contrast between value and color that tells us where an object begins or ends.
So, line is great for plotting composition and initial shape of features, but it is not useful for actually conveying a three-dimensional form on a two dimensional surface.
Which is why I like to shade in my sketches.
Shading will tell you how puffy a cheek is for example. Or how much a nose protrudes outward. Or how small a chin may be. And if you can capture that in the sketch stage (without too much fuss) it will really help you in the painting stage.
The heavy lifting will be done for you. All you’ll have to do in the painting stage is darken those shadows and add more nuances to tie them together. And of course, add color information!
I use the side of my pencil to block in the shadows in large areas. For smaller areas, I’ll use the tip of the pencil.
Step 5: Final Touches
The portrait sketch should be looking almost done at this point. Basically, you just want to go over everything, and make sure all minute proportions and shapes are accurate. The BIG proportions should be dialed in by now.
This step should take just a few minutes.
Keep in mind, you won’t get the sketch perfect. There may be a few areas that are getting hard to erase because you’ve drawn over the area so many times.
That’s OK.
Many small mistakes can be corrected in the painting stage. As long as you have everything close, you’ll be fine.
Once the drawing is done, you can step back and look at it from a distance just to make sure you have the likeness captured close enough. If so, you will have a good foundation to begin your portrait.
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!
To create a realistic portrait you need a lot of different elements all working together.
The main three elements are accurate form, value, and color.
All of these elements are tied together, and even overlap a bit. Today, I want to show how form and value work together, and how you need to represent value accurately to portray correct form.
One of my students recently asked to have his portrait critiqued, while in the sketch stage. As I was recording his critique, the idea of capturing value to portray a realistic likeness came up.
In other words, if you want the person you’re painting to look like them, you have to pay close attention to the shadows. It’s just as important to capture these shadows as it is to draw the features such as the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. with correct placement, proportions, and shape. The ability to see the shadows on a face is vitally important to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on the canvas. You need to be able to see the inherent shape of a shadow from your reference photo–its hard edge and soft edge.
On a photograph that can be hard to discern.
You have an almost unlimited array of values with micro-nuances that can make it very challenging to see the “big picture” of the main shapes of the shadows. But if you can train yourself to see those main, abstract shapes you will go a long way to being able to draw and paint realistically.
By the way, the edges are defined not only by shadows, but differences in value due to the actual value (light and dark) of the objects themselves. (For example, the contrast between the man’s flesh tone and white suit. Or, on a smaller level, the difference between his black beard on his dark brown skin.
There are borders to all the shadows and values Your job is to see the most obvious edge, pick a line, and define it.
Watch the video below and I’ll show you what I’m discussing here, using this student’s portrait sketch (supplied with his permission) as an example.
Mastering the ability to see shapes within the shadows takes practice. But it all starts with being aware of the need to do so. As you hone in this skill, you’ll see these shapes all over the place, learn how to paint what you see, and your portraits will come alive with realism!. Visit other free tutorial here.
Yours for realistic acrylic 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!
Here is the final painting of my children walking through the woods, “Come as Children,” 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, with a step-by-step breakdown of how I did it.
It will be used for a book cover illustration of Charles Spurgeon’s Devotionals for children. Below I want to do a recap of my previous posts from Facebook and Steemit, showing you the process of how I did this painting.
Reference Photo
In Progress Painting
Step 1: Blocking In the Forms
I start off very faint, just blocking in the colors with glazes. I mix about 90% clear acrylic medium to about 10% paint and just block in the composition, suggesting where the future colors will go. Here is my palette…
Normally, I use burnt sienna, but to challenge myself and also to enhance the color harmony within the painting, I omitted it.
The first layers consisted of raw sienna, yellow ochre, phthalo blue and indian yellow for the background, and then for the posts: raw umber dark, ultramarine blue and napthol crimson. I blocked in the blue jeans with phthalo blue, and my daughter’s pants with napthol crimson.
Step 2: Establishing Contrast
In this step, I added some phthalo blue, raw sienna and yellow ochre in a glaze to the background to suggest trees, and went over the trees with some raw umber dark, napthol crimson and ultramarine blue.
Step 3: Creating Nuances
In this step, I added in more layers of green to the background, and filled in the colors for both kids’ pants. I also added in some shadows as well below the fence posts and filled in the shadows a little deeper and more dramatically.
Step 4: Adding Detail to Background and Figures
I added some more detail to the background and shading to the children, especially my daughter’s hair. Overall, since I use the glazing technique, I incrementally darken the entire surface, bringing out more details and nuances by “pushing and pulling” the paint: darkening certain areas and lightening others.
With the winter weather we’ve been having in Wisconsin, a walk on a warm day like this picture looks pretty good.
Step 5: Refining With Highlights and Additional Detail
I’m almost done with this painting: I added some contrast to the posts, more nuances within the clothing, some fallen leaves, and some darker areas within the trees in the background to tie the values in with the posts. Still not quite there yet.
I’ll need to substantially darken the overall value of the background to match the much darker and more vivid foreground. Sometimes creating art can be a balancing act. But it’s much safer than being on the high beam!
Final Painting
In the final rendition, I darkened the values in the background, to tie them in with the very dark posts of the fence, and even the shadows on the children. I also added a few details to the children’s hair, and highlights to edges of the clothing to make them stand out more. Lastly, I put a few more glazes of raw umber dark, ultramarine blue, and titanium white for the trees.
This painting took about 20 hours to do. It was my pleasure going on this journey with you, showing the process, and maybe even help you to think about warmer weather at a time when many of us are ready for spring!
A Video Demonstration Showing Part of the Process
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!
I’d like to show you, step-by-step, how I painted a portrait of a beautiful baby.
This was a commissioned portrait, a 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and it took me about 25 hours to do. Follow along in the process, and I believe you will learn a new approach to painting portraits in acrylic that will pleasantly surprise you!
Or, if you’ve tried my techniques before, this will be a good review for you.
Acrylic Painting
The client wanted a painting that was in an oval vignette style, to match some existing portraits in her home. Here is the photo she supplied me with, to paint from. She wanted me to make his hair combed off to the side, unlike what you see in the photo. That’s an easy enough change to make.
The sketch is the most important part of any portrait painting–whether in acrylic, oil or watercolor. The sketch is the foundation. Just like any house builder won’t build without a blueprint–unless they want a lopsided house–an artist shouldn’t plan do a lifelike portrait without an accurate sketch.
Some artists can work without one, starting very loosely, by just blocking in colors and value roughly, and work their way into detail–but it takes a lot of experience to pull that off. Many of those artists who can do that cut their teeth in learning how to draw, with hours of practice.
So for most artists–I recommend starting your painting with a sketch. You can use a grid or a projector to help if you haven’t done a lot of freehand drawing.
I have found that colored pencil is an amazing way to sketch on canvas. It works so much better than graphite pencil.
Why?
Well, first of all, you can choose a sepia or earth tone that really matches your skin tones within the portrait. Secondly, it is surprisingly easy to erase on a properly prepared canvas. Just go over your canvas with a mixture of 50%/50% gesso and matte medium.
Let it dry. And you’re set. You’ll be able to sketch and erase like a dream.
By the way, I use Prismacolor dark brown or terra cotta for sketching.
In the sketch, I make sure I’ve not only captured the shapes and lines of the baby’s face accurately, but I also want to get the shading in. Shading is what makes the difference on a portrait. So if you can get it in there during the sketch stage, it’s a lot less work figuring out where to go in the painting stage. Basically, all you’re doing is enhancing what you’ve put down in pencil.
Step 2: Sealing in Your Sketch
After you’re confident the sketch is looking accurate, the next step is to seal it in. What I mean by that is this: you’ll take some matte medium (that’s the clear acrylic without pigment and dries to a flat finish–get it at your local art store) and you brush it on the sketch to create a barrier between the sketch and your painting.
The last thing you want to have happen is your sketch to get all messed up as you apply the brush in the painting process!
So, what I did was put the medium in a little condiment container (like what you put your ketchup in at a fast food restaurant, and you can buy these inexpensively at Walmart in the food storage section) and then start covering over your sketch. You’ll need to be careful, though, not to smear your sketch work!
Actually, you can make it work for you. I found that the medium started mixing with colored pencil pigment and turned into a glaze, or faint paint layer. I brushed it on in the direction of the contours of the face, and it enriched the color and contrast of the sketch. You can see the difference between the sketch before and after it was sealed in.
If it makes for less work in the painting stage…why not try something new?
Step 3: Blocking in the Initial Color and Value
Now, in this stage, it’s important to cut yourself a little slack.
Because when you start establishing the colors and value, your sketch is getting covered up a little, and you lose some of the overall cohesion of the values that you drew.
What I mean is that, you’re kind of in an in-between stage, and like any in-between stage in life, it can look a little awkward. If you have children, think of how they looked when they first started to walk. The could crawl like an expert, but once they started to walk, they waddled, wobbled, fell, maybe even cried, and got back up again.
So, in this stage, as you put down a few layers, things may look a little messed up.
No worries.
Just keep going.
Look at your reference photo and keep in mind, you have a blueprint to follow. Sooner or later, your painting will look very similar to what you see in the reference photo.
I used raw umber dark for the shadows, raw sienna, and alizarine crimson for the lighter areas. The crimson works well for establishing the pinkish tones in the baby’s cheeks and lips. Everything is very faint. I use matte medium to thin out the paint, and glaze it in with very minute layers. I love this technique. You can easily adjust the direction of your painting on the fly, and you can build up a lot of shading, even though acrylic dries so fast.
Finally, because the layers are translucent, the light shines through the surface, giving you a richness and a depth that will have people often mistaking your acrylic paintings for oils!
Step 4: Bringing out the Dark Values
At this step, I wanted to make sure the baby’s eyes would be dark enough. I also wanted to darken certain spots of the painting so it more closely matched the values of the reference photo: areas like the hair under the ears, the shadow to the left of his neck, and the crevices in the mouth on either side of the teeth.
When you get the darkest values established, then you know what you’re up against. It makes it easier to know how dark to take the rest of the painting. Because with values and colors, everything is relative. Once you darken a certain area, it will look out of place until you darken everything else accordingly.
In addition, I added more color to the face and hair, using a mixture of raw sienna and alizarine crimson. But for the hair, I used mostly raw sienna. The trick with blond hair is to not make it look too yellowish. Many beginning portrait painters do that. It’s easy to do, because we’re conditioned to think of blond hair as yellow from the cartoons we’ve seen as children, and the way we’ve been taught to use yellow crayons to color it in coloring books.
But blond hair is actually a pale golden brown. And there’s other nuances of color in it too, depending on the lighting and even what colored objects are around that could reflect onto it.
Step 5: Blending the Skin Tones and Adding Nuances
Now the portrait is starting to look realistic. But there’s still a lot of work to do. 50% of your time will be spent getting the portrait to a stage where it looks passable. The other half is spent on smoothing things out and refining details. If you want your portrait painting to go to the next level, and have a portrait you can be proud to show others, you can’t miss the final steps. It takes some patience, but it’s worth it.
In this step, I added the reflections in the baby’s eyes. They’re not finished yet, but I started them. I added two light blue dots in the correct places within the pupil. That way, in the next step, I can add a smaller white dot in the middle of them and then they will look like there’s truly light reflecting off of them.
For the mouth, it’s important to make sure the coloring of the lips is correct, and that the teeth are not too white.
Again, because of our symbolic association of teeth being white, we often paint them with…white. But in actuality, most’ people’s teeth are not white even with a bright light shining on them. And then the shadows from the mouth itself causes them to appear even darker.
So what I did was mix raw umber dark and a little titanium white and then went over the teeth with that. I developed some shadows just around the edges with a few more layers, so they don’t look paper-flat. I pay attention to the shadows on the corners of the mouth, and that’s where it creates depth. Teeth should be lighter towards the center–the front teeth–because that’s where the light is hitting them.
For the background, I’ve been adding several layers of ultramarine blue, with a little raw umber dark, and alizarine crimson. This will create the oval vignette look that the client requested, and also some differentiation between the foreground and background. With this, the warmer colors of the face will come forward in space against the cooler tones of the background.
And that’s exactly what we want: to create depth.
Step 6: Smoothing Out the Roughness
One of the downsides of the glazing technique is that it creates a lot of unwanted texture. That’s because the semi-transparent glazes pool up in the pits of the canvas surface and creates an uneven look, when you view it closely.
To compensate for that, we have smooth it out.
I used the same colors I had throughout the painting, but then add a little titanium white to make the layers more opaque. You only want enough to partially cover over the previous layers. You still want all the other layer-work to shine through. It’s something you have to play with to get the correct amount. Also, keep in mind that when you add white to the layers, you cool them down color-wise, and so you have to add some warmer colors to compensate.
Unless you’re trying to cool the skin tones down on purpose. Then the white can help you with that!
I found that my skin tones overall were just a bit too warm, so I used the white–again, mixed in with other colors, and still thinned out with a glaze–to cool them down. You can’t do that so much on top of the darker values, however, or you’ll muddy up the color. There you’ll have to use raw sienna (which is very opaque) and mix a bit of alizarine crimson and ultramarine blue to offset the yellow.
Step 7: The Final Details and Finishing it Up
At this step, you feel pretty good about the painting. It looks just about done, and because you’ve layered everything, you don’t have any white space left on the canvas, that would indicate the painting is not done.
And that’s a good thing.
But it’s good just to take it a bit further.
I went over everything: enhancing the contrast, putting in some final details within the eyelashes, the teeth, the shiny reflection on the lower lip to make it look moist (as you can imagine a baby’s mouth usually is.)
The hair needed a little more realism, so I added some highlights with raw sienna, indian yellow, and titanium white.
Also, I darkened the background with a few more layers to really heighten the contrast. And then I used some glazes of titanium white the smooth out the edges of the vignette oval and give it a cloudy look.
Although I could continue working on the painting for hours more, there is a point where the law of diminishing returns comes into play. At a certain point, you’re just pushing paint. You’re not really making a significant difference in the overall impact of the painting. And you are even starting to undo the good things you’ve accomplished!
That’s when you know it’s time to call it done. And so I did.
Finally, I signed it. That was the most fun step of all!
When you sign your painting, I recommend making your signature legible, but not too prominent, that it overshadows your work. It’s also good to use a color that’s similar to what’s already in the painting so it matches. In this case, I used ultramarine blue, and raw umber dark mixed with white.
After the painting was finished I emailed an image to the client for approval. When you’re happy and your client is happy, then your job is done.
Time to go out to dinner and celebrate!
An Extra Bonus:
Here’s a time-lapse video showing the whole progression of the portrait as I painted it. The video is about 5 minutes long. Enjoy!
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!
