Painting realistic portraits in watercolor can be a challenge, but also super fun! In this class, we’re going to practice layering and blending our paint to paint lifelike faces from a photo/reference. This is an advanced class, but no matter your skill level, even if you’re a beginner, I encourage you to join me for this class and take on this ‘challenge’.

This is the 5th class in my watercolor portrait series. If you’d like more in depth classes on sketching portraits, mixing skin tones in watercolor or painting realistic eyes, you can check out some of the other classes in this series.

In this class, similarly to the class on painting eyes, we’re going to build up layers to add beautiful depth to our portraits. We’re going to skip over the sketching (As we’ve been over that in a previous class) and get right to the painting *yay*!

I’ve provided my sketches for the exercise and final portrait, but you can also use your own sketch or trace the references (it’s completely up to you).

Of course we’re also going to recap a few of the basic watercolor techniques, practice using these to build up the shading/values on a face, as well as practice using the 3 P’s (sounds fancy, right?, haha); Plan, prep, paint.

And even though we’re not going to go in depth with color theory, we’re also going to quickly go over basic color mixing.

Yes, portraits can be a challenge, and they may require practice. But I’m hoping this class will help you break down the process of slowly allowing a face to emerge from a blank piece of paper, and hopefully you’ll feel more confident when approaching this subject in the future.