These last few weeks have seen me spending loads of time figuring out how to get faces to how I want them.
Continuing from the last blog, I was enjoying sketching with pencil, which I find such a pleasure to use. In comparison to watercolour, it is so forgiving.
I didn’t want to go down the route of just painting pretty girls and beautiful women. I wanted to challenge myself. So as seen in the last blog, I wanted to try wrinkles. I continued with the wrinkle theme and loved every second. The thing that I found so helpful was that it helped with the values. I would think I had gotten the shading pretty much right, then would check and realise I had to double the strength of the pencil to really get the contract to make the difference.
What was lovely with this picture, was that when I posted it on Instagram, the original photographer really complimented me and said the person was very happy. It turned out the ‘person’ was in fact a European actor, so that was lovely.

Then I moved on to trying to do a characterful face in watercolour. Not easy. This definitely was a challenge and once finished, I wasn’t quite sure about it, however, again, the original photographer (a different one) got in touch, said the picture was his father, and could he buy the picture from me. You have no idea how thrilled that made me.

Then to completely try and get a handle on how to do human eyes in watercolour, I decided to do a really large one, so that I could study it in depth. I thought it was pants, until the very end when I stepped away and suddenly it came together, and I was really happy with it. To show the scale of the eye I have added a full picture with the brushes behind to show 😉

That’s it for today, I have a few more to post here and shall do very soon.