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Digital Portraiture

Author: Roger Elliot, Associate Editor

OK...for all of you who have written asking about doing portraits in digital painting, here we go! I must, however, warn you that portrait painting is a difficult under any circumstances and that is intensified when working within the confines of the computer. It will be necessary for me to attach a great deal of text with these lessons so that I might attempt to explain to you the intricacies of color, skin tones, etc. I will make every attempt to keep the session as simple as possible but remember that a portrait can be very complex in it's simplicity. Very subtle changes can change the character of a portrait and we must pay very close attention to detail. If you are attempting your first portrait, or your first portrait digitally, I suggest that you paint the same picture that I will be attempting in this session. There will be plenty of time to paint your wife, husband, child, uncle or cousin after we have mastered the process. Simply right click on my drawing and choose "Save image as..". Save it to a local file then open that file in Photoshop. Once you have opened the file click "Image" and select "Image Size". Make the image 500 pixels in height and 350 pixels in width. Then you will be set to begin. Before we begin we must talk a little about the picture and what we want to do with it. I have decided to do an older lady. There are several reasons for this; (1) Older people are always easier to paint because they are truly distinctive. They have age lines and character in their faces that have accrued over time. This is much easier to capture than a young person who has not yet aged to distinction. (2) Since the MOOD of a portrait is so very important it is easier to capture that in an older subject. Before you begin, talk to yourself about what you believe this character is all about! There are many factors that determine the LOOK of someone. How hard have they worked in their life? Are they fair, dark, or middle complexions? How did they feel on the day they sat for you or on the day the photo was taken? Remember, your job as an artist is to capture a MOMENT in this individuals' life and to capture a mood not just a picture. Cameras do nicely for that! The finest portrait is one that makes the viewer believe that the subject COULD ALMOST MOVE! Achieving that digitally is a huge undertaking. Now, if I have been successful, I have scared off all of you who weren't sure that you wanted to accept the challenge of portraiture. For the rest of you brave souls, let's get started. And, as always, have fun!

Here is the preliminary sketch. I attempted to sketch this with a mouse and found it to be nearly impossible. One needs the hand and pencil for such an undertaking. For those of you who may be new to art and are still in the process of learning the skills of drawing. DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED! When you move on to doing a portrait from a photograph, simply get an opaque projector and draw from that! Don't let your lack of drawing skills stop you from your objective! DO work on your drawing skills but in the meantime DON'T let that stop you! For this exercise, I strongly suggest that you simply download this image and open it in Photoshop (or another like program you might be using). Enlarge the image to the parameters above and follow along.

I have begun with the scarf. I select (in my mind) four values of, in this case blue-violet. I think of these as values 1, 2, 3, and 4 with #4 being the darkest and #1 the lightest. I begin by placing my #3 value in the areas shown. You may paint the scarf any color you wish but keep in mind that we must always be aware of the temperature of our work. The human skin is quite warm and if we surround our portrait with only more warm colors, then our picture becomes overly warm without some coolness for contrast. I have laid this in with the paintbrush tool in the next to smallest brush size from the "brushes" tab.

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