How to Paint a Cute Fall Portrait the Easy Way

Name: How to Paint a Cute Fall Portrait the Easy Way
Uploaded: 2026-10-07T15:46:17.362Z
Duration: 4 min 8 s
Channel: G-Art
Description: In today’s beginner-friendly tutorial, we’re creating a cute fall portrait with a giant cozy mug. We’ll start with simple watercolor shapes for the face, sweater, hair, hands, and mug, then add the smaller details with colored pencil, including facial features, sweater texture, hair marks, shading, and a sweet checkered tablecloth.

G-Art

1 Video View·Oct 7, 2026

In today’s beginner-friendly tutorial, we’re creating a cute fall portrait with a giant cozy mug. We’ll start with simple watercolor shapes for the face, sweater, hair, hands, and mug, then add the smaller details with colored pencil, including facial features, sweater texture, hair marks, shading, and a sweet checkered tablecloth.

In today's video, I'll show you how easy it can be to make a cute fall portrait. We begin with an oval, simple as that, and you're going to place an ear on the left and the right in the very center of the head. Drop down and work out a little neck shape at the base of the oval, and that's how we begin. Now, I decided to lift just a little of that color where I'm going to place hair, especially if you're doing blonde hair, it's a good idea to lift with paper towel. Let's add a mug for our fall portrait. Start with an oval and then work out the shape of the mug, it's kind of like a semi-oval. Give it a handle on the right hand side and then we will let it dry before we add the tea or coffee. Next step, we're going to give this person a body, but all that really means is painting a bit of purple in behind the mug and below the neck. Now, I've mixed white with a bit of magenta and ultramarine, a whole lot of white, and as I said, we go around that neck line, we paint behind the mug, and we bring the two arms out. I sort of think of painting a lumpy triangle, one point being the neck and the other two points being the elbows here. Patrons get access to the reference image, head over there now, it's just three bucks a month to join. Okay, let's add some hair to our gal. This is a mix of burnt umber and light red, so kind of a reddish brown. I love this color and all I'm really doing is mark making, so just hitting the brush against the paper to give us the area of hair, and I'm using my round brush with its fine point to my advantage to go around the ears and do little wisps. Now, we can do a little wet into wet, allowing the watercolor to do the work for us. I just added a few dabs of darker color for some variation. We'll put some burnt umber in a shallow oval here to give us the look of tea or coffee, maybe leave a little highlight on that, and then this is important, you're going to mix a slightly darker color for the skin and do a line across the chin, helping differentiate between what is chin and what is neck. Add a touch of pink or red to the pigment you're using and you'll get a nice color to use on the cheeks, and then we are going to paint the hands, and guess what, the hands are just mitt shapes, okay? We'll finish those up and then we're going to let the watercolor portion dry completely because it's time to move on to our pencils. Like painting people and enjoy my teaching style, this is exactly the type of art you'll find in my new book, Whimsical Watercolor Doodles, available for pre-order right now. When I do a portrait, I love to start with watercolor for the major forms, but I do all the details with pencil and it makes it really, really approachable. Put a grid through the center and then you're doing dots for eyes, an L-shaped nose, and a line for the mouth. The grid in the center helps you understand where to put everything. The eyes are always in line with the ears, which of course are right in the middle. Then we grab our colored pencils and we use them to do details like a ribbing around the neck on this sweater. I also do a bit of scribble shading to show shadow, so the lower arms are in shadow. Her bust is in shadow from the giant mug. For the hair, we could do curling lines, like curly Q lines or straight lines depending on the texture you want to show. I'm going to get rid of that grid on the face and I think I'll add a little bit of dark brown to the hair as well so you can mix your colors and create some real depth as well as pattern and texture. We could add things like makeup and freckles, earrings, shading, so I did a little bit of shading on the hands and the neck. I put some lines on the mug. You could do just about any design on a mug. I also did a little checkered tablecloth and then anything in shadow I just did a little darker. Man, this girl with the giant mug is so cute and she is going to stay cozy. Friends, if you like my teaching style and this approach of watercolor for the forms and pen or pencil for the smaller details is speaking to you, then I think you're really going to enjoy my book, Whimsical Watercolor Doodles, which comes out this fall. Pre-orders are open now and, you know, pre-orders are so important to the success of the book. I would appreciate it if you would click that link or use the QR code to shop now. Thanks for being here. I'll see you soon with a new tutorial. Don't forget to subscribe!