Facing More Faces

I’ve read that when you are learning to do portraiture you shouldn’t try painting people you know. Well, I’ve obviously thrown that tip out the window! As soon as I saw my sister post this photo of her husband on social media, I felt it could make a great reference in my quest to do watercolor portraits. I was especially drawn to the casual pose, the side lighting and the beard. The sunglasses would be another ‘first’ for me to depict, since the lens are both transparent and reflective. I shouldn’t leave out that Wade is a wonderful, wild-and-crazy guy, and it would be fun to surprise him if I could do a successful portrait. After letting this sit in my reference file for months, I decided it was time for me to do another face.

I’m still working small, 10″ x 7″, and getting more comfortable using a color palette of 3 warm primary colors and 3 cool primary colors (also called split-primary colors). Understand that every hue can have warmer and cooler versions. Warm colors are generally those which have red tones in them, but the ‘temperature’ of a color also depends on the colors which surround it. At first I struggled with the concept of using the cools for highlighted areas and warms for shadows; it didn’t seem to mesh with my knowledge that warm colors advance in space and cools recede. I think the warm shadow idea in a portrait has to do with the theory that if cool light falls on a subject, its shadow will be warm. Sometimes I let my brain get too much in the way, so I’m just going to go with it, since it seems to be working.

Technically speaking, another aspect of paint which I consider is how easy is it to lift the color off the paper. Some pigments are more like dyes and stain the paper, making it difficult to re-wet them and blot the area to remove or make the color lighter. Other pigments sort of sit on the paper surface versus being absorbed into the fibers and are therefore more easily removable; ‘lifting’ varies, with some pigments coming off very readily while others might need a little scrubbing. Lift-ability is not a factor which the paint manufacturers rate or label, so I do my own testing. In my color swatches shown here, I ran a line of clean water across the primaries, then tried blotting each square with absorbent paper towel. You can see how the cool Winsor Blue Green Shade lifted more than the warm Winsor Blue Red Shade while Scarlet Lake lifted better than Permanent Rose. (NOTE: The paper is a factor too, some being more absorbent than others). The lifting factor can be a consideration when you glaze colors over each other, since painting over a staining color will give more predictable results than painting over a color which lifts and possibly mixes with the new color you attempt to paint over it.

My childhood Crayola crayons had a color named “flesh” (it says on the Crayola website that they renamed it ‘peach’ in 1962), but my flesh colors in a watercolor painting don’t come out of a tube with that name! In comparing this portrait to my last blog post about my painting “When He Was Six” of young Liam, my approach to painting the skin tones differed. For Wade’s skin tones I premixed more of the colors on my palette then applied them to the paper; for Liam’s I let the pure colors blend on the paper more, with a resulting effect that was somewhat more colorful. This is all part of my experimenting and learning to paint faces, remember! I also decided to suggest the waterfront setting in the background of Wade, rather than the random color mixes used for the background of Liam.

I was happy with my final painting of Wade, so I was anxious to share it with him and my sister Jean, who live far from me. I set up a facetime session to show them my surprise and get their immediate reaction. They immediately exclaimed “Oh my God” in stereo, then Wade said “Holy Mackerel!” Lots of thanks and praise followed, so I knew I had pleased them both. Wade summed it up with “This blows me away!”

The bottom line: I am finally beginning to get comfortable with human portraits. I have others in my practice file, so stay tuned for more.