Adding Details and Finishing a Portrait
Hi, I’m Alex Shundi, and this is How To Paint A Portrait. In this clip, I’m gonna be showing you the last finishing touches to your portrait. What I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna start painting using only paint and oil, no more turpentine. I start to put in individual little spots of color here and there as I see them. I have to exaggerate the dark and the light to a point the eye that looks at it will believe that this is something that is real and actual, and that it is illuminated on one side and therefore darker on the other. Whenever you use a hard edge, the hard edge make it look like something is an actual angle. An absolute border, but flash, those are really have absolute borders. There’s a kind of a smooth continuum of flash. And so I’m gonna try to get that in order to get the softness of the human being. Start thinking in terms of what the eyes are gonna do. Now we tend to think of the white of the eye as being pure white, actually there is no pure white there. If I hold up a white piece of paper next to her eye, nothing in her eyes is gonna be as white as that piece of paper. So what color is the white of her eye? I see it as being a kind of a beigey bone tone. If I get rid of that white, it’s gonna make her a lot calmer, and it’s gonna make the center of the eye a lot more relax. Eyes are the window of the soul, they’re extremely important. So, it’s crucial that both eyes look in the same direction. There is a little trick involve in doing it, it’s very simple thing. If I close one eye and look at the model and then I cover one eye of the portrait and I cover one eye of the model, and I look to see both eyes are the same shape and if looking they’re looking at the same direction. I switch, and check the other eye out and make sure that the other eye is looking the same direction too. And inevitably, if one is a little bit wrong, it means that the space of the white on each side of the pupil is a little bit off. In other words, theoretically if I look this way, let’s say, there’s very little white on this side, but there’s a lot of white on this side. So there’s a balance of white. When you paint the mouth, try to remember, the most important thing about a mouth is not so much the shape of the lips, but it’s the length, the line, what the line does in the actual opening of the mouth. So if you do a bit of hard edge you are doing it a disservice to the softness of the mouth. Sometimes, when you paint and you wanna do a little detail, it’s interesting to make your arms stop shaking. In order to do so, you can take your finger and rest it and then just move your fingers now that your whole hand is at rest on this finger, rather than having to shake because of the stress. Try to pick up enough paint with your brush, so that you can push it around and create the image that you want. A common mistake is to be afraid of what the paint will do. To be afraid of making mud, and therefore a lot of people tend to just pick up… they’re very cautious about it. They tend to pick up very, very, very little paint and sort to stretch it out. What happens there is that the painting almost inevitably looks unfinished. A little thing, it’s important no matter what color hair it is, it’s important to put a little bit of the color of the flash in the reflections of the hair to unify it to the rest of the portrait. So that it looks like it comes out of the same person and it’s not a wig or something that’s been pasted on. At this point, I’ve been so involved in making details, that I ran the risk of losing the big picture. Sometimes in a portrait you lose a sense of what, some big mistakes could be, just because you’re so involve with the specifics of the little things. So, it’s good to step away from it, look at it almost as if you seen it for the first time. Almost as if somebody else has painted it. It’s difficult to do, but it’s important to do it. As I look at this color, and I see that it’s so light, I’m going to… with the same sensitivity… see where else in the face do I, in her face, do I find the exact same color and then see if I can put it in. So, if I see that there’s a little bit of it in here, so I’m gonna put it in. There’s a tiny bit of it in here. There is just a slight, slight, slight reflection on the bottom of the nose, coz she’s a little pivot in there. And then finally a little bit more in the eye in here, doing this. I think it looks like her. I’m Alexander Shundi, this is How To Paint A Portrait. Thank you.