Painting a watercolor portrait of a child from live
Step-by-step watercolor portrait painting demonstration
Start from the main subjects
I first laid the base wash to the face. Notice that I left the highlight area on the nose untouched. There are other techniques can bring back the white back without leaving the white space (see other demonstrations for samples), but I would never use opaque white color to create the highlight, for some reasons.
Then I quickly used blue and Burnt Umber for the hair on the left side, and define the right side of the face.
I used a big round sable brush for this step. I didn't pay attention to the details. This is only the first step of the painting, and I knew that I would come back again and again to create the shapes and details. At this point I rather worried about how the face would fit and balance with the rest of the portrait painting.
