PAINT WITH ME | real time watercolor portrait tutorial

Hey everyone, welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to be doing a very simple watercolor portrait and I'm going to be showing it to you in real time so I would love it if you guys do it with me. You're only going to need three colors and the rest of the materials are going to be listed in the description. I will also have the colors and the color combinations towards the bottom left of the screen so you guys know which colors I'm using. I will also be providing a clean line work for you guys to download and to trace onto your paper or just sketch for yourself. And a reference photo is going to be on our Pinterest board as usual and the link to that will be in the description. But before we get into the painting, if you do end up liking this one, I do this every month on Patreon so if you'd like to check it out that will be in the description as well. So now we are ready for our painting and I am starting with my biggest flat brush and also my lightest color and I always like starting out with both because it makes the whole process less daunting when we're first starting out. And you can see I just have that lemon yellow over to his forehead where the highlights are the brightest and for now there's no pressure to paint inside the lines and keep the silhouette very clean. What we want to do is place our colors first so that yellow just saturated that part of our painting and now what we're going to do is take our burnt sienna and drop that onto where we had the lemon yellow and you'll see because those areas are wet that burnt sienna is just going to add a nice warmth to these areas where we dropped it on. I'm also going to spread out onto the paper as long as that paper is wet and so we'll be dragging that same color with the lemon yellow now onto the rest of his face. We're just mapping out where vaguely where the colors are going to be on him. We're starting off with the yellows first because the brighter colors we want to lay those down before we add in our darker ones. You can see I've left out his beard for now while I paint this side of the painting with big brush strokes and once it's down there we can move on to our paints gray and we're not waiting for anything to dry so you can see that paints gray is just gonna spread onto the rest of the painting. It might first look like a very daunting color next to our warmer highlights but these are just gonna spread out and again because it's the first layer and the whole painting is very saturated with water these colors are just gonna dry very beautifully much less intense than how they look while they're still wet. This is now also a great time while we have most of our first layer down to drop in some colors onto those wet areas because that water is gonna spread out those colors and just give us this nice hazy look for our first layer. And for the other side of his scarf right under his beard since this area wasn't wet before you can see how intense that paints gray looks by itself. At least before we spread it out to the rest of the painting look at how dark that color looks and how beautifully it looks next to the lighter highlights but I'm gonna be messing around with dropping this very dark color onto the wet areas of our painting as well. I could play around with the edges of his hair where it's wet so you can see the other side where it's touching the dry paper those edges are very raw and the other side where it does touch his hair it's just gonna spread out very beautifully and we're just gonna let instincts take over and play around with the colors on his scarf and with water as well. You can go back to his hair and add in these drops of burnt sienna and yellow to it maybe add it to his hairline so we can have that illusion of warmer color on this part of his head and his nose too while the highlights on the rest of the painting is cooler with our lemon yellow and our paints gray. And then what we're gonna do is mix our burnt sienna and our paints gray this time on our palette and you can see these two colors cancel each other out very beautifully and we're left with this more neutralized dark color and we're gonna use that color without waiting for that first layer to dry and we're gonna do the same thing that we did with our burnt sienna we're just going to use that more neutralized shadow color now to drop onto our still wet paper but this time we're focusing them on the areas that are in shadow so i did add it on to between his eyebrows right there but it's gonna settle lighter and where we're putting this down mostly it's gonna be on his beard and after that's there we're gonna take just our paints gray by itself to add to this part of his hair right here and once again we're gonna let that dark color spread by itself on the top of his head i'm gonna mix that again with a burnt sienna but we're still working on wet with wet on wet techniques and we're just gonna let these colors sort of add a darker value onto his hair to separate it from his forehead this part is just so fun just playing around with the finer tip of our our round brush where we can individually start to paint the hair while that area is still wet so it just gives this nice faded out effect still while this painting is still damp i do want to slowly go over the contours of his face we're basically painting around the highlights and we're using our a combination of all of our colors a tiny amount of paints gray so mostly burnt sienna and lemon yellow but we're just going to use that to paint around the highlighted areas of his face to add just a little bit more depth while we're still in this first layer and then we're gonna go back to our paints gray and we're gonna use that to his beard so the values there are evened out also gonna bring that over to his scarf and you can see on the areas where it's wet the colors just feathers out beautifully and on the dry paper you can get this really nice rough looking edges and again while that's still wet i am going back with i'm going back to my burnt sienna and just dropping that color onto the areas of his face that were still wet and so we expect this again to feather out beautifully and blend out by itself but we do just want to add more color to the very center of his face to add to make it a point of interest and then i'm even going over to the very tip of his nose to shape it out more but the rest of it those colors are just gonna either spread out or settle down by themselves and if they don't you can take your clean brush and use that water on that brush to help the very edges out we don't want there to be too many hard edges for this very first layer so you can see i'm spreading those out to make the highlights look softer after that what i'm going to do is play around with his silhouette and i want to have i want to create more shape to his beard and his hair so what i'm going to do is mix my paint sienna and my paint gray and burnt sienna again and we're going to add these fine sharp shapes to his beard and his hair and we're those shapes are very sharp and where it touches the other wet colors they're just going to spread out by themselves so after all of that we're now going to do our second layer and we're going to wait for our first layer to completely dry before we do this so now what we're going to do is mostly go with wet on dry technique so this one since the first layer is completely dry what we're going to do is take our paint you can see i'm using a smaller round brush now this is my number six round brush and i'm taking advantage of the very fine very sharp details i can get with the very tip of this brush and then when i move on to to the shadows on his forehead i'm just gonna push this brush more onto my paper so we get bigger brush strokes versus the very fine ones we got with the shadows on his eyes and then what we're going to do is let these two very different colors meet each other on his eyebrows and those colors now are just going to mix on the paper versus on the palette i'm also going to be dragging that same mixture of colors down to the very contour of his cheekbones and when i get my pure paints gray by itself i'm being careful that it doesn't fully meet with that yet and i'm just starting out with painting his beard for now because if these two colors touch there's a chance that the very dark color that we have for his beard is going to spread out onto the one we have for his cheek which we don't want for now in this sharp second layer and you can see i'm just again taking advantage of the nice shape of our brush and we're using a combination of the very fine tip of it and also the rounder body of our brush to draw in his beard to get that hair strand illusion that we really need for even in this early layer for his beard and then we're going to go back to his nose and i want to add a little bit more dimension to the side of his nose first before we go on to clean up the shadows there before we take this brighter color and add dimension to the actual bridge of his nose you can see there's a lot more shape to his nose now and we're also leaving out some highlights on it so this part of the painting is already going to be very defined i'm also going to go back to this darker mixture of burnt sienna and paints gray and i'm just going to use that to paint his beard and you can see this and his nose now too is so much darker compared to that first layer we're really now starting to carve out the shapes in the painting and we're going to do the same thing here which the shadow is going to carve out on the shape of his neck and this one on his nape as well before we go up to his hair and again we're keeping in mind the brush strokes that we that we want to get to emulate the shapes of his hair and how it's wavy i'm mostly just using paints gray for this and again i just want to be careful when i touch his forehead that it doesn't fully spread out onto that shadow for his forehead i'm keeping track of it because while it's still wet we can just push it back but yeah just make sure that these colors aren't fully feathering each other out for the second layer we do want to add a little bit more structure to our painting and we want to have more defining shapes especially for his hair i want to get the same kind of movement that the reference photo has we really want to capture the personality of our photo if we're not going for very realistic and accurate proportions so you can see right here i'm paying a lot of attention to the movement on his hair i'm also again taking advantage of the shape of our brush and using that to get this nice variety in line weight with our brush strokes especially for his hair and because there's going to be there's only going to be a few layers in this painting every single one after that first layer is going to be very defined and so that's why i'm making sure that each layer is going to be good i'm also going to go back and add in the details to this ear we're using the same colors mostly burnt sienna and the paint's gray but we're just painting every nook and cranny while again using our brush for just to add some very dark details initially in the second layer i'm also going to play around with very fine lines with the fine lines i can get with my brush for the folds of his scarf it's a very dark colors but again these will dry lighter i'm just going to add dimension to his scarf for the second layer as well so i did randomly add in this very bright and punchy burnt sienna for this side of his scarf i just i guess i just wanted to spread the warmth that we see on his face down to other parts of the painting so you can see i've used some very big brush strokes initially and then i just took water in my brush and spread that out towards the edges so so there's still that focal point in the vibrancy in that area really quickly too i want to go i want to use this darker shadow color to add just a little bit of dimension to her neck where before just looked to separate it from the rest of the painting okay so once that's there we're going to move on to our smallest detail brush because most of this painting is going to be very quick very big and expressive brush strokes in the focal point where his eyes are we're going to need to be very precise so these tiny details are going to bring the whole painting together so i've started from his irises and just as important as the irises and the eye bags is leaving out the highlights that they make so the highlights are really what shapes out his actual eyes so we want to make sure that we don't paint over them although we have our white gouache to do that later we want to use those very sparingly so really just want to be careful with how we leave out these highlights and then oppositely on this other eye we just want to make sure that we get just the right amount of shape to his lashes and his eyebrows to get that detail right but we also want to use very dark colors for that too and then we're going to take that same dark color and we're going to slowly start to paint in the strands of his beard and we want to focus them on towards the bottom so that we don't fully draw them out we just want to focus them on where they are the darkest and for our brush strokes to show enough of the movement in the hair in our painting we don't want to paint every individual hair strands because that amount of detail would just stand out too much in a painting like this so you can see towards the side of his jaw where I did start to do that I took some water and blended some of that brush strokes out just want to preserve the texture of his beard not fully individual hair strands if that makes sense we're going to do the same thing for his hair and this one doesn't show up too much while it's wet but you can see I'm still doing the same thing I'm choosing where to put these hair strands at so that they could add a little bit more detail to his hair but again not too much that it stands out and then I'm going to take my same brush and just border in his forehead right here very carefully not outlining the whole thing I'm also going to add more of the folds of his scarf right here before we move on to the details on his eyes so for this I am actually now going to go and use my white gouache but we're going to use this more opaque mixture now to add back some of the highlights that I painted over for his eyes and you can see it just fixed the angle of them right here and then I'm going to go back in with my with our darker colors to draw in his lashes and also his pupils these are very tiny details in the painting but they're focused just on the center of his face so we really have that focal point in the painting and the other parts of the painting isn't as detailed as his eyes right here I also want to draw in his eyebrows a little bit more and also punctuate the folds in his upper eyelid most of this is just me either correcting or reinforcing the lines that I already had in the painting so you want to make sure that you're and where the details are at because I'm basing this on where my painting was at at this point to finish his eyes off I've also just mixed my white in with my paint spray so we can add highlights to it so once that's there I am actually gonna go back to my number 10 brown brush and I'm just layering in more of his skin tone color back to where the highlights meet the shadows on his face and this is just going to give it a more glowing effect on his skin and I also want to do the same thing for his hair when I add these pops of vibrant color in his hair they're going to imitate the movement of his hair strands but using the same brush we're going to take our darkest colors and let those two blend together in our paper after that I am taking my watercolors and gouache mixture again and I'm actually adding texture to texture and brighter values to the painting so I am using it for his scarf using it to carve out his neck right here and overall just adding brighter elements where I think it would need it because I wouldn't be able to achieve this with watercolors and that's why I had gouache for this stage of the painting also wanted to give a little bit more attention to his ear I think just added in some orange warmth to it then after that I'm going to go back to my gouache and clean up his nose too and after that is done I can then take my very darkest color mixture this is paints gray and burnt sienna and you can see I'm using that to paint in the smallest details of his eyes so our eyes are really drawn to that part of the painting and I'm also taking what's left of my brush and drawing in drawing back some of the hair strands on his beard we're being very selective of where we add detail to his hair because we don't want to do that to the whole thing we want to preserve the rawness of the brushstrokes I think that we got from the very first layers of this painting too and then I'm going back to my white gouache and watercolors mixture and I'm just widening up his neck just where I thought the painting was too narrow and then I can go back in with my paints gray in its darkest form and bring back some of that dark values to his hair so that the ones on his eyes don't look too out of place it just brings more balance to the whole painting I also want to bring that technique into his beard but after that I'm going to take just white gouache and use that to paint the very final details of this painting we wanted the white gouache until the very end so we don't overdo it and also so that it really stands out in the painting where we've covered everything else in color these bright highlights it's just going to stand out so much more but that is really it for this painting I'm so happy with how it turned out I hope you guys liked it and again if you enjoyed this one please consider checking out my patreon the link will be in the description and thank you guys for watching and I will be seeing you guys again very soon