Watercolor Portraits

Watercolor Portraits

How to Paint Ballerinas in Watercolor

By Anna Ivanova

Today, I will be painting alla prima, wet-into-wet. The topic of this lesson is ballet. The composition features beautiful poses of the ballet dancers. The piece will be done on a round piece of paper and I will show you how to paint human figures on an airy background. Here is the watercolor I will have by the end of this video. There are many figures here, so there is a lot to be done in a short painting season.

I already moistened the reverse side of the paper with water. Place it on the plastic board and now apply clean water with a soft, natural-hair brush on the front side of the what will be the painting. I will first paint the ballet dancers' figures and then will add a background around them. For the color of the faces, I'm using a mix of burnt umber, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson, and a bit of phthalo blue. This mix looks quite dark on white paper, but you have to remember that when the watercolor paint dries, it becomes about 20-30% lighter. Also, I need to account for the eventual background; the contrast between the light and dark tones of the figures and the background will not be as great as the contrast between the figure and the white paper. I will be using the wet-into-wet watercolor painting technique when depicting the dancers' dresses and adding the background. However, when painting alla prima, wet-into-wet is not fully suitable for very small and defined details like faces, hair, hands, and so on. That is why, for the areas where small details have to stay sharp, I will be using the dry-brush-on-moist painting technique.

You can see that I am painting small details with quite a sizable round brush. The belly of this brush is somewhere between damp and moist. To keep it semi-dry, I blot excess water from the brush with a paper towel. Also, the paint pigment is only put on the tip of the brush. It contains very little water and that's what makes it a "dry brush". In combination with moist paper, it's possible to paint such tiny details like the eyes, nose, and mouth. The dancer's face measures no more than one inch in this piece so it requires precision for the small details for the face to be recognizable. This is what the dry-brush-on-moist watercolor painting technique is good for: To make well-defined brush strokes which will stay as placed without diffusing and running down. On the other hand, the dry-brush-on-moist technique has its limitations. The main downside of this technique is that the artwork has to be painted in one session while the paper is moist. To keep the paper moist, I can add more water on its reverse side. So, a thin layer of water will be trapped between the sheet of paper and the plastic board. This will keep the paper wet from underneath but its front surface will be damp and cool to the touch. This type of surface accepts paint readily, almost sucking it from the brush.

The paper might dry unevenly which is why I prefer to work on one area of the artwork to its full completion before continuing to paint other objects. The ballet dancer in the center of the artwork stays in a beautiful pose with her arms raised up. For depicting this type of pose, an artist must know human anatomy very well. For example, when a person lifts an arm upward, the position of the muscles change. The deltoid no longer goes down but points upward; the biceps change the deltoid's shape, pushing it up; the widest muscle of the back has a more prominent place in this view; and the pectoralis major also changes its shape and influences the shape of the deltoid.

In addition to being a full-time professional fine artist, I also hold a degree as a medical doctor. Needless to say, anatomy was not new for me. But imagine my surprise when I started painting watercolors and oils and I realized the knowledge I had of anatomy as a doctor helped very little when it comes to creating figurative artworks. So, I had to learn human anatomy for artists which is very different from anatomy for medical students. Anatomy for artists does not cover the deep layers of muscles, nerves, and other systems like blood circulation, the digestive tract, and so on. This information is not required for an artist. However, what is needed is the knowledge of the main bones and muscles that influence the body's appearance. It includes muscle shapes, functions, and points of origin and insertion. The good thing is anatomy for artists is much simpler than anatomy for doctors. As an artist, you don't have to learn difficult Latin names of bones and muscles. For example, as long as you know that one of the main muscles of the neck, sternocleidomastoid, originates from the collar bone and from the top of the breast bone, spirals around the neck and inserts into the base of the skull just behind the ear, you don't have to memorize its difficult name.

I have been painting for a while now and it's time to rewet the paper to keep it moist. I can do it by lifting the sheet from the plastic board on one side and applying water with a soft, natural-hair brush. If needed, I can do it for the other half as well. Also, applying water on the front side, soaks the paper even more from both sides. When applying water on the front side, you have to be careful not to touch the already-painted areas with the brush; this might dilute the paint and diffuse the brush strokes.

One of the main rules of watercolor painting is to work from light to darker tonal values. For example, I started painting this dress with its lighter tones. You may also notice that white highlights were preserved by painting around them. When the light underpainting for the dress is in place, I add darker brushstrokes depicting the folds and wrinkles of the fabric. Any object looks better in watercolor when it is painted with a cool and warm contrast. You may notice that the folds of the dress have warmer and cooler color tints. With two figures in place, I can now paint the third, sitting figure. I also start with its head, using slightly darker tonal values because when the paint dries it will appear lighter.

When painting portraits, even on a small scale, the knowledge of human anatomy plays an important role. The shape of a human head greatly depends on the bones under the skin. Understanding the skull anatomy helps to understand its main planes and proportions.

If you feel that you have gaps in your knowledge of human anatomy for artists, you can fix it by taking an Anatomy Master Class, the online course for fine artists where you can learn all you need to know about the main bones and muscles, as well as proportions of a human body. The information in this course is presented in 25 video lessons that you can watch one-by-one, and covers everything you need to know in a fast and easy way.

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I'm now painting a white dress. When it comes to depicting white objects on white paper, many art students have the same question: What paints should I use for white colors? For this dress, I'm mixing the following pigments: raw sienna, phthalo blue, sepia, and blue ultramarine. They produce nice-looking tints of light gray.

As we are talking about colors, I will also mention what pigments I used for the skin. Light tones of the skin are mixed from raw sienna, phthalo blue, alizarin crimson, and burnt umber. For the mid-tones of the skin, I also add sepia into that mix. And finally, for the cooler and darker skin shadows, I add a little bit of blue ultramarine to the pigments mentioned above which deepens the tone and lowers the temperature of the shadow color.

When using the dry-brush-on-moist watercolor painting technique, you have to keep in mind that the paint will remain wet on the paper surface for quite a long time. Some mixes of pigments might separate directly on the paper after 20 or more minutes of staying wet. This might give a granulation effect. This usually happens when a mix contains heavy particles of pigments that will behave differently from dyes or finely-ground lightweight pigments.

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With all the dancer figures complete, it is time to take care of the background. The color for this background is mixed from two pigments: sepia and ultramarine. These colors are on the opposite sides of the color wheel; a warm and a cool one. When mixed together, they produce a nice-looking, dark neutral gray. I apply this mix with a wide, flat brush, making sure I do not overlap with the figures.

You may notice I'm leaving a very thin gap between the background and the outline of the figures. Then, I work along this gap with a smaller, round brush, filling the gap with the necessary precision. Big areas of the background are painted with a flat brush, wet-into-wet, and narrow gaps are filled in using the dry-brush-on-moist watercolor painting technique.

The dancers' figures on the left-hand side are overpainted with the background shade. This puts them in shadow which helps attract the viewer's attention to the figures in the center. Also, because the figure on the left-hand side is cut off by the round paper shape, composition-wise, it makes sense not to attract too much attention to this figure.

You may also see that I vary tonal values of the background to achieve an illusion of an aerial perspective by making some places of the background darker and others lighter. This gives an airy depth to this piece and all figures appear in an environment instead of a plain gray wall. For this reason, I would like to keep the background very light on the right-hand side, as if this side of the stage is lit by bright light. To unite the ballet dancers' figures with the background, in some places, I go over the figures with a light tint of the background. Also, I paint over the figure on the right-hand side to place it in the shadow. There are a few more places left which I have to paint before finishing this piece. Although the white dress of the sitting figure is the closest object to a viewer, and according to the rules of aerial perspective must be depicted with sharp contrast with full details, I would like to keep it secondary, as well as the dress of the kneeling figure on the left-hand side. This way, I will keep the attention of the viewer on the figures in the center rather than on the fabric and folds of the dresses...

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