Painting portraits in watercolor

We held a portrait painting course here at the ARThouse Studio School this past summer, and I would like to share with you some of the things we learned about painting a portrait in watercolor and some of the results obtained from students! First, here are some samples of the demonstration paintings I did during the course:

"Oscar Wilde" watercolor painted in neutral tint, 10x13"

"Sasha" watercolor, 10x13"

"Chloe with Red Poppy", watercolor, 20x14

"Dad", watercolor, 14x18

Here are 10 tips for portraits:

1. Make some decisions before you start: How loose or tight is the painting going to be? How are you going to handle the background? What do you want to convey about the person? How can you make this a more compelling portrait? What colors are you going to use?
2. The face is basically a three-dimensional sculptural form. Give it form by concentrating on the shadow shapes and their values. Then worry about the features and details.
3. Use a Masquepen to preserve small white areas that would be difficult to paint around, such as strands on hair or beard.
4. A good color combination for flesh tones is brown madder, new gamboge, and cobalt blue medium. You can use any combination of these to produce different shades of skin, in light or in shadow. Beware of rose madder genuine since it is not really lightfast, and beware of cobalt blue dark because it granulates too much.
5. Be aware of the soft edges of many shadows on the face. You can either try to obtain them directly by softening your edges with a damp brush after putting them down, or gently soften the edges with a stencil brush after they are dry.
6. Be careful about using blues and purples in the flesh tones. Only use them in the shadows--in the light they can look like bruises.
7. The value contrasts in your picture will help convey the type of light. In bright clear sunlight, the value contrasts will be very dark, while on an overcast day they will be subdued.
8. Depending on your style, you may not want to over-emphasize certain things: teeth, if showing, should only be suggested, eyebrows made fairly light, hair painted mostly in tresses.
9. Create a soft transition from the top of the forehead into the hair.
10. Work from the general to the specific. Then, when you have added a certain amount of detail, you may find that you are done sooner than you thought!

And now, last but not least, here is a sample of some of the paintings students completed during the course:

"Charles Dickens", watercolor by Carol Riddle

"Chloe", watercolor by Jean Perretta

"Louisa", watercolor by Evelyn McKay

"My Little Girl", watercolor by Louise Jung

"Little Boy and Dog", watercolor by Donna Moeller

"Oscar Wilde" watercolor by Tanya Rostovtseva

"Man from Manassas" watercolor by Donna Moeller

"Checkered Hat" watercolor by Sally Drew

"A Little Girl I Know" watercolor by Mimi Hegler

Aren't they great!? We had a lot of fun painting these portraits, and many more will be on display at the ARThouse student show this December 4 & 5--stay tuned.

Susan Murphy

Come see! Our ARThouse Spring Show June 19-Sept 26

I hope you can come to our annual Spring Studio Show this weekend! If you miss the opening event, you can still see the show--it is on until September 26. However some of the paintings might be missing--we hope to sell a few! The opening, which is June 19 & 20 from 11-5 pm both days, is quite a gala event. We will have beautiful refreshments, including our May Bowl (Rhine wine flavored with home-grown sweet woodruff and decorated with flowers and strawberries), and lots of fancy finger foods. If the weather is good, the show will take place partially "en plein air" on the front lawn of ARThouse.

I am thrilled to introduce artist Roberta Staat to our ARThouse community. She is our new drawing instructor at ARThouse and I have invited her to join me in our annual studio show. Your invitation is above!

Roberta is a life-long artist who has lived in the Olney, Maryland area for about 20 years, and is well-known in these parts. She is co-organizer of the "Plein Aire Olney" outdoor painting event that will take place in September. Please see the ARThouse website for more information about this--www.arthouseart.com.

Roberta is one artist who loves to draw! Especially cows and farm critters! She also paints beautifully in oil, using a bold, painterly style. You can see many of her paintings at the show.

Roberta has been teaching beginner and intermediate drawing classes at ARThouse this past year, and is starting a new class on June 21, "Drawing the Face and Figure". You may still be able to sign up--again, go to our website at www.arthouseart.com to find a registration form.

Hope to see you at the show!
Sue Murphy

I attended an amazing conference: "Art of the Portrait"

Hi Folks! Just wanted to fill you in on an amazing 4-day conference I attended in April: "The Art of the Portrait" 2010 annual conference sponsored by the Portrait Society of America and held in Reston Virginia. I am so glad I went to this event--it was worth every minute and every penny! My sister, Doris Murphy, from Pennington, NJ, came with me and we had a lot of fun.
The organizers, who are some of America's best artists of portrait and figurative art, invited 15 "faculty members" to come and give talks and demonstrations before an audience of about 800 artists from all over the country. For more info and list of the faculty, check out their website at www.portraitsociety.org. Also, for some live material, check out their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pages/Portrait-Society-of-America .

For me, some of the highlights were the "Face-off", where the 15 invited faculty members painted live models for 2 hours in a setting where you could walk around and watch them up close. I was particularly interested in watching Robert Liberace paint the model "Ellyn", because the next day, Doris and I would be taking a drawing workshop with him. Here are some photos:





Another highlight was a special event they had called "The Mystery Panel Sale". I have never seen such an art buying frenzy! The Portrait Society asked 140 respected portrait artists to paint and donate a 6x9" masonite panel to be sold at this event. Each painting was $225 and none were signed, so you did not know who the artist was, and some were very famous... The paintings were all covered with a black cloth, except for a 10 minute period when hundreds of people were present, and they were unveiled. You had 10 minutes to decide which one you might like to buy. I had my eye on #48, which I suspected was by last year's Grand Prize Winner, Joseph Todorovitch. Wouldn't you know, about 20 other people wanted that painting. So we all put our name badges in a hat, and they drew mine! And lo-and-behold, it was by Joseph Todorovitch! I was the happiest person around, and everybody was so jealous! I was introduced to Joseph, and here is my photo with him and his beautiful painting, "Corina":



Joseph is a truly amazing painter and very nice person. You should check out his website at: www.onejoseph.com. Here is a close-up of his painting after I framed it:



And my sister Doris bought this beautiful painting by Maryland artist Sam Robinson--here she is posing with the artist!:



Another highlight was the watercolor demonstration by Mary Whyte using Burt Silverman as a model! They had three huge video monitors in the ballroom, so that anyone in the huge room could get a good view of the demonstration. Here is Mary talking with Burt and the split screen image we were watching as Mary Whyte did her portrait:





Taking this conference served me very well, since I have been concentrating on painting people lately. In fact, it was an excellent preliminary activity for the course I will be teaching at ARThouse this summer, called "Painting the Face and Figure in Watercolor". We are also having a drawing class this summer called "Drawing the Face and Figure" taught by Roberta Staat. See my website www.arthouseart.com for information about classes at ARThouse.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. Let me know if you have a comment! --Sue

I took a great workshop with Jean Uhl Spicer

Hi Folks,

I just got back from a great four-day watercolor workshop in flower painting with Jean Uhl Spicer. Jean is a wonderful artist from Philadelphia who has been working professionally as a artist all her life, and recently published a book with North Light called "Bright and Beautiful Flowers in Watercolor".

The workshop took place at the Howard County Center for the Arts in Ellicott City, Maryland, and was sponsored by the Baltimore Watercolor Society. Jean was the juror for the BWS' 2010 Mid-Atlantic Watercolor Exhibition this year. The show starts Saturday, April 17, at Strathmore Hall in Rockville and is an absolute must-see!

Each day in the workshop we took a different approach to painting the incredible fresh flowers she brought in. Below I am going to show you some examples of the paintings she did, and the paintings I did, and try to explain her technique a little bit.

Below is a picture I took of Jean demonstrating, and also some examples of Jean's paintings from the workshop.









Below are some of the paintings I did in the workshop (the last one is not finished yet), and then I will describe Jean's approach and palette of colors:










To me, Jean's flower paintings are characterized by an incredibly vibrant, cheerful look in which the flowers have a lot of personality and look almost cute and perky. She really simplifies and stylizes what she sees so that the main subjects of the painting are really color, shape and value. You appreciate the beauty of her paintings, not only for their depiction of flowers, but for the way the gorgeous colors flow and the interesting shapes interlock.

One key to her success with color is the palette of colors she uses. For yellows, she uses aureolin, Hansa yellow, and quinacridone gold. For reds, quinacridone red, cadmium scarlet, permanent magenta, and brown madder. And for blues she uses cobalt blue, French ultramarine, cerulean blue, and Antwerp, and occasionally Payne's gray. She doesn't have any greens or purples on her palette, but creates them with beautiful mixtures of the above colors.

Another key is the fact that she always squeezes out fresh paint. Her manner of application is very wet and juicy with lots of rich color. She encourages colors to blend together on the paper from one flower to another, creating interesting watercolory effects. Later she glazes with still bright, but darker colors in order to pull out details and negative shapes. These are just some of the ideas she conveyed in the workshop.

Other students in the workshop did excellent work and everybody had a great time. Jean Spicer is an extremely nice person and very capable teacher. Check out her website at www.jeanuhlspicer.com

I hope you enjoyed this posting, and please let me know your thoughts.