Portrait Painting For Beginners is a blog dedicated to the art of portrait painting.
This website offers you tips, tools and materials to get started as a portrait painter. It gives you access to video demonstrations, articles and interviews with artists. This site also lists art contests where you can submit your work for free.
The focus of this website is on oil paintings on canvas or gallery wrap canvas. The techniques are adaptable to other mediums as well
(such as acrylic portraits).
Many people have heard about portrait competitions, but not everyone knows what it is all about or how to enter these competitions. Portrait Painting for Beginners gives a short introduction about the process of entering a contest including: finding an artist who will sponsor you, sending your submission, preparing for the contest day, staying at the host hotel and getting ready for the interview with judges.
In this post I will share some of the basic tips, tools and materials to get started as a portrait painter. If you are just starting out or haven’t painted for a while, these are some of the basic things you need to know.
How to get started?
I recommend you start with watercolors and pencils initially. Watercolors are very versatile and easy to use. A little bit of water and they blend wonderfully! You don’t need to carry around huge amounts of paints or be worried about ruining your palette while traveling.
Pencils can be used to draw outlines and then erased if needed, it is much easier than starting out with charcoal or graphite. It is also easier to correct mistakes with a pencil than other media.
I recommend starting in black and white at first, that way you can concentrate on learning how to paint without worrying about color too much. Start with simple objects like fruit, flowers or bowls, try different types of light source until you start feeling comfortable with the medium and then move onto portraits.
When I began painting I started out by drawing something from life every day for 6 months in my sketchbook. That was a very helpful habit to develop. You will find that painting from life helps your observational skills
People who know me well are probably, by now, tired of hearing me say “I want to paint portraits, but I don’t have the money to buy a fancy setup.”
It’s a common dream. We admire the portraits that hang in our museums and galleries. We see them as a high art form with a rich history. We’ve seen the great portrait artists of the past, like Sargent and Rembrandt, at work, and been impressed by their skill and dedication. And we’d like to be able to create something comparable one day.
The trouble is that it can seem nearly impossible to start.
How do you get the right materials? How do you learn how to use them? Where can you find models? What if you can’t afford art school? How long will it take before you’re any good?
These are real questions I’ve asked myself, over and over again. And they’re not just questions I’m asking myself–they’re questions that everyone who wants to learn how to paint faces is asking themselves…
The first and most important piece of advice for any beginning artist or designer is to start with the fundamentals. The fundamentals include drawing, painting, modeling, sketching, composition, color theory and design. These are the building blocks from which every great artist or designer starts.
Taking a class or training in one of these areas is essential for developing your skills and improving as an artist. You will learn more in a good foundation course than you can imagine now.
Since this site is about portrait painting, I will discuss drawing and painting here. I will also mention some other topics that are relevant to the art of portraiture such as composition and color theory.
I am going to tell you the most valuable advice I’ve ever gotten in my career as an artist. It was from a teacher, who told me this:
“Don’t paint what you see, paint what you remember.”
I didn’t realize how valuable and powerful that simple sentence was, until I started painting more portraits of people. This is especially true when painting a portrait of a new client. The reason it’s so powerful is that it’s incredibly easy to get caught up putting detail into your paintings. Detail is great and all, but at some point the portrait needs to look like the person you’re trying to paint. If you’re only painting the details, your subject will look distorted and not represent them at all.
This is a huge problem for artists because we want to paint realistic portraits and we can easily get lost in realism leading us away from what we really want to do, which is capture who that person is.
The best way to approach capturing someone’s likeness when painting them, is to paint them as you remember them being, not as they appear in front of you. You don’t want to lose all of your skills by becoming some bad portrait painter who just slaps color on his canvas and calls it good, but by remembering your
The best way to learn how to paint a portrait is through practice. It may sound obvious, but the ability to draw or paint comes from long hours of work in a studio, not from going to school.
The best way for a beginner to get started is by imitating the great masters of the past. In this article I will discuss the basics of doing just that and give you some tips on how to go about it.
Artists use sketchbooks to practice, to keep up with their ideas, to try new things and record them. Sketchbooks are a way to experiment on the go without having to worry about making a mess.
I have been using this medium for over 15 years now, and there is no substitute for it in my opinion. I will often use it for an idea I have on the train or when I am waiting for a friend etc. The pocketbook folds down so small that I always carry it with me.
I have found that I tend to work more freely with my sketchbook than anywhere else and that it is a great place to keep up with my ideas and work on them as they come up rather than thinking that I need to wait until I get home before working on something new.”