Five steps to make a beautiful portrait out of watercolors

Portrait painting is one of the toughest challenges which every artist faces. Using watercolors for the job is even tougher. You need to know the right technique to give justice to your next watercolor art project. You need to be patient enough to achieve the desired result with watercolors. Before you start a portrait, analyze a real-life photograph, and break the painting steps.

Here are some of the steps that you must follow for painting a portrait using watercolors.

1. Draw the Subject in a grid

Study the photograph of the person you are willing to make a portrait of and sketch it out on grid boxes. Use a light pencil mostly 4H for drawing the outlines. Look for the darker regions and the lighter ones. You need to detail them later.

2. Stroke the dark regions first

Prefer giving initial strokes to the dark regions but avoid using black color. Mix dark blue and burnt umber for coloring the dark areas. You can detail them during final strokes. Let the initial layer dry properly and then add more colors as giving strokes over a wet layer might disrupt the pigments.

3. Now stroke the lighter regions

Now put your focus on the lighter regions of the face and give initial strokes on them. Avoid using much water as it might damage the paper. Give light strokes on those regions but avoid coloring the lightest areas.

4. Detail the dark regions

After the first strokes of lighter regions, you can now see the need for detailing the dark areas. Take utmost care for hair detailing. You do not need to detail all the dark regions but only the essential ones such as hairs and the eyes.

5. Give a light color to the background

Give light watercolor strokes to the background so that the highlights of the portrait will be seen better.

These are the steps to follow while using the watercolor painting for a portrait. If you are not an artist and have an art project, then you can go online to buy customized paintings. You can also gift one to your family and friends as it is an everlasting memory.