Creating the Foundation Image for a Portrait
Hi, I’m Alex Shundi and this is How To Paint A Portrait. In this clip, I’m gonna show you how to transfer her image on to a canvass. First thing I’m gonna do, is take some burnt sienna, which is a warm brown, and mixing it with a little bit or turpentine, and I’m gonna make a pool of very, very, very light transparent paint. So now, I’m gonna start to paint and I’m gonna basically put in just a few marks here and there. Just to see pretty much where I want her to exist on a canvass. I have to take advantage of her shoulder, I want her shoulder to hold a corner. I got a… I wanna give her a little bit more space towards where the face is looking. Then in the back, I now get the basic shape and basic proportions of her face. Now, I’m gonna measure her face and where the hair is meeting her forehead to the bottom of the chin, there should theoretically be a one third, one third, one third relationship. Now here’s a simple technique that you may wanna used to figure out what the right proportions of measurement of the face are. So, you take your brush, you always keep your arm locked, and I’m going down one third, which is the bottom of her eyebrow. I now come down one third and it goes right under her nose and come down one third and it goes right under her chin. What I discover by doing that to her, is that she has a high forehead. Therefore, rather than here, I’m gonna begin her hair here. On her, I can see that the angle of her nose is about like this, I can see therefore one eye coming in this way, one eye coming in this way. I can see that the eyebrows are going into her forehead where the eye socket comes in. And then, her face coops down and become the chin. The minute that I make this eyebrow, I wanna go to the opposite direction and make another eyebrow. Pretty much balancing the two in terms of size and being very careful as to the space in between them. Just give it a tiny bit of a shape underneath, and go back into the nose. Give it a kind of a volume. Make sure that it starts to approximate her fundamental shape. And then now, is the placement of the mouth. Now the placement of the mouth is extremely important, because what you’ve done to the whole face, theoretically, also gets done from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the chin. Which is to say I’m gonna now divide this area into three equidistant parts. And the mouth, the opening of the mouth that is, not the lips, but the opening of the mouth, usually touches this second line. So, I’m gonna look at her mouth, put in the opening of it. Automatically, therefore the bottom lip is gonna be here and the top lip is gonna be here, I’m just gonna put it in very, very, very lightly in check. I’m gonna check the width, making sure that if you divide the mouth in half, because she’s three quarters, and the mouth goes around the corner. This part of the mouth is actually longer than the back side, because it curves in as her face curves in. I wanna make sure that the distance between the actual mask of the face, which is to say from eye to eye, is in the right proportion in relationship to how much distance there is between her eye and the beginning of the ear. So I’m gonna measure that distance on her from the beginning of the ear to her eye. Again, using the same technique of the brush, and then I’m gonna move over once and go from the beginning of her eye over, and I see that it hits right about here on the nose. So that means that this distance transferred over to here, means that her ear is now born here. So therefore her ear is gonna take up about this much territory. Therefore her hair is gonna be behind it, and as I do this, you see that I… that I left a little bit of space here on the left hand side, so as to involve and invite the viewer into the painting. Quickly, quickly another thing is I’m gonna squint. By squinting, what happens is that you do away with detail and you retain the maximum information, as far as the dark and light is concerned. And I see that this part of her nose is in darkness. This part of her face is in darkness, in comparison to the rest. This part of her forehead is in darkness. Simultaneously, the same thing is gonna happen in her hair. So I’m gonna leave the light of the hair on the left hand side, which is where the light comes from, relatively light to the bottom. Now, I’m also gonna make the bottom part much darker the way that her body really is, so that I can get the sense of light and dark. Okay, now in the next clip, I’m gonna show you how to mix the colors.