Portraits in aquarelle II

In our second session of the "portraits" project, we discussed the characteristics of light and shadow and creating skin colour.

After carefully writing down every colour I used to paint my hands, I discovered that "yellowish" combined with "pinkish" always give reasonable skin colour. You add more or less water to achieve lighter and darker colours and use payne's grey, other blueish tones or sepia for the shadow.

And as for shadow on a face in aquarelle: don't make it too light! Aquarelle paint becomes lighter when it dries, and the shadow part is 40% darker than the lightest colour. A good way to build up your portrait, is to start with the 'highlights', draw them with pencil if you like, or use masking fluid. Next, mix the lightest skincolour and paint the whole face with it, apart from the highlights of course.

When that's dried, add the shadow. And when that's dried, you add all the other colours for eyes, hair, lips, cheekbones, freckles etc...

Like Ann Edwards did with her portrait of Louise: 

This interesting information was used by the other participants, Renée, Cathie and Sandra on their work, of which I didn't take too many pictures! But here's the next stage of Sandra's fauvist puzzle-selfportrait.

Believe me, she looks much friendlier in real life!!

And Cathie had good fun with a fauvist experiment that turned out great if you ask me. Amazing how blue eyebrows, green skin and purple lips can look so acceptable! 

Although Cathie feels this guy has so much colours because of his very wet sneezy cold!