Stylized Watercolor Portraits

Here's a little taste of what we'll be doing in this course. Oh, I can't wait!

Hello! I'm Bebe Keith and I'm very happy to welcome you to this fun course! People have been asking me for this class, so here it is, happily made by yours truly. I hope you have a great time taking it! I've really enjoyed making it for you!

As we go through this course together, one thing to always do in art is to take risks and give yourself permission to fail. It's only through failing that you learn and improve. And when you try new things, chances are that at some point you will fail. But be brave and wear those failures as badges of honor!

There are lots of materials out there and I can't resist mixing some of them into my portraits! Here is the list of materials I use, but you can decide what works best for you: a good surface, good lighting, paper (see previous lesson), inspiration (see below), a pencil and eraser for drawing, Micron Ink Pens, a china pencil, a variety of brushes, watercolor paints and a tray for them and for mixing, a cup of water and a paper towel, Prismacolor Pencils, Dr. Ph. Martin Pen White Ink, a nib and nib holder.

For your inspiration, I'll introduce you to the app called Sktchy. There are lots of people ready for their portraits on the app. Draw one of them instead of someone dear to you. That will keep you free to take risks and not worry about "ruining" the portrait. And don't spend days on it. See what you can do in a few hours. Then be done and move on to the next one!

There are so many kinds of paper! Here I introduce just a few, including cold-press watercolor paper and toned mixed media paper. You can use any of these papers for this course.

I'll be using toned mixed media paper for the main portrait instead of white watercolor paper. If you use watercolors, this may be new to you. We get to add highlights! In the additional faces I show you, there is one on white watercolor paper, too.

Most of my portraits are 9" x 6". I cut a 9"x12" paper in half to get it to this very reasonable and manageable size.

Does drawing make you nervous? Never fear, there are alternatives. In this video I show you an easy way to trace and doing a flipping page. Of course there is the grid system, too, that I do not show in this video. It's a free preview video in my cat portrait class, though, so you can watch it there. That said, I'd love for you to join me in my own pursuit to improve my drawing skills by drawing every day. Push yourself to be uncomfortable, to be vulnerable. You will never get better at or more confident in your drawing if you don't try, right? ;)

Oh, here we go!!! I'll guide you through a portrait from start to finish in real time. Remeber, Udemy has this nice feature that can speed up the video a little. Feel free to use that if you wish. I assure you that I will not be offended.

In this lesson we'll get started with the glasses, then the eyes and some stylized brows. If you can get the eyes right, you've got it made!

You noticed how I had to use my eraser a few times in that last video? I don't think I'm done yet. Some days the drawing almost seems to fall out of my pencil nearly effortlessly, and other days it's more of a struggle. Oh well, such is life!

Surprisingly, the shape of the face is one of the hardest things for me to draw. It seems to make such a big difference! Keep that eraser close. We're almost there!

We did it! We have a finished pencil drawing! High fives. Now let's get out those Micron Pens and start tracing.

This is fun. I adore making hatch marks. And filling in the extra details just makes it even better!

Nearly there! Let's finish up the inking in this lesson. When you are finished and you are sure that the ink has dried, you can gently erase your pencil lines.

Let's paint!! Such a joy. Remember when you were a kid coloring in a coloring book? This isn't too far off. I encourage you to be daring! Who cares if you mess up! Be brave and learn from your mistakes - and successes!

In this video we'll start with midtones. However, if you are working on white paper, remember to leave the areas that you want to be white unpainted! You won't need to add highlights since they are already built in to your white paper!

Time for some shadows and more concentrated pigmented colors. Any color can be a shadow if you keep the paint heavily concentrated (the ratio of paint to water is higher). Have fun!

We're going to add some white highlights in this lesson. If you are using white paper, you don't need to do this because you have left the white areas unpainted.

Sometimes I don't even paint the hair. Sometimes I'll paint the hair but not the background. You are the artist. You get to decide how to finish off your portrait!

Oh my gosh. I can't get enough of my Prismacolor Pencils! I usually use about 5 pencils per piece. A couple for highlights, a couple bright medium colors and a dark one or two. I like to pull colors that are already there, like the color of the background, the color of a shirt, or face colors I have used. (Pink, anyone?) But sometimes I'll grab a random color and let that lead me.

I wanted to give you more. After all of that real time work, I figured it would be very satisfying to watch a video of the painting/colored pencil work that is sped up, with commentary. I was right, at least for my own satisfaction!

Here is one on white paper. The process is about the same except I don't have to add the highlights because I just left some of the paper unpainted. This style feels a little looser than my usual work. It was fun!

Here's another one! This time on toned paper.

NOTE: After I applied the red on the eyelids, the camera turned itself off (thank you, camera) so I had to step away to get that restarted after I blended the red a little and then it dried and faded some by the time I started up again.

I thought my course was done but then I had to do one more face for you! I'm so happy with how this one turned out.

My portraits generally take about one hour for the draw and ink, then an hour for the painting. I usually do them just before lunch. Then later in the day I have to sneak back in to look at it again, just for the pleasure of it. Do you ever do that?

I recorded the process again today and thought I'd put it up as another video for you. Face is drawn on toned paper and everything is included except the magic pop of white ink in the eyes and on the lips at the end. There is no fancy editing on this one, just the silent movie. Enjoy!

Another fun inspiration besides the Sktchy app is the show "Portrait Artist of the Week" (and "Portrait Artist of the Year"). You can (hopefully) watch the episode with this particular sitter here: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=531349457835229&id=107862852600046&anchor_composer=false

Take a screen shot and try drawing him, then look on Instagram for #MyPAOTW. You can see many, many versions of him there (depending when you take this course, you may have scroll down a LOOOOOONG way! This was shown on February 28, 2021).

I have gathered up some of my favorites from the last two months here. You can see lots of examples that might inspire you!