in this portrait tutorial i'll be painting one of my heroes oprah winfrey
using gouache and only four colors known as the zorn palette: red yellow black and white
let's just do a very simple sketch let's start off with our ball and shield you can
see the entirety of one side of her face right and then notice her jaw
like she's got a pretty prominent jaw and you can kind of see it go up to the side of her face
if i look at the width of her face like from one cheek to the other cheek you can see this part of
her cheek right here to here this distance is doubled with her hair so the width of her hair
is about the width of her face so i'm going to take this distance from here to here and i'm
going to double it and then i'm going to take that same distance and double it minus a little
bit her hair on the right side is wider than the hair on the left put in the line of her eyes
somewhere in the middle and her nose is kind of at the bottom of this circle
and she's got very full lips so make sure we leave lots of room for her mouth
and from there i will try to sketch out her eyebrows and now once i have her face sketched in
i can now modify this sphere a little bit more easily for example her forehead is a little bit
thinner than this sphere and now i can find the top of her head i'm gonna guess that the
top of her hair is about here so now i'm going to sketch out the shape of her hair
don't worry about all of the texture just kind of sketch out the shape
so i actually want to do a bit of a watercolor technique for her hair
if you're using watercolors i would highly suggest having just like a little bit of salt so that you
can play around with texture if you wanted to tone your canvas so that you're not starting on white
what you can do is just tint it with a orangey color so what i would do is i would just mix
my yellow and red gouache colors and then add a tint just a touch of black but i wouldn't put any
white you can see i i have this like brownish reddish color then i would add water to it
you can see it's like a puddle now and then what you can do is you can just give her entire face
a tint of this brown so that will give it enough context for you to keep going and not feel like
you have to start with the white and then if you wanted to you can kind of lighten up her forehead
by using a wet brush i can do this easily because i'm using good paper but if you're using like not
so good paper or mixed media paper it might start to pill so you probably don't have too much leeway
here with removing so what i'm going to do for her hair is i'm going to do a wet on wet technique i'm
going to have to mix a lot of this black so it's just going to be the black and the red
and then i'm going to tint it with the white and then i'm going to add water to it
make a puddle this is like how i would do it with watercolor i would make a puddle and
then i would use it to dab into the water i'm going to make a puddle that's just pure black
so essentially i want to recreate those three colors that i made for the hair
the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to wet her hair i kind of wanted to use more of a
watercolor technique for her hair to make it soft and so that i don't have to paint all of those
little curls i'm just going to suggest them and see how it works out after you wet it then what
you can do is you can take your black like the puddle and then you want to try and put it in the
dark areas first and don't worry like her earring you can paint over it right so it's okay if the
black runs a little bit but i really like these soft edges that are starting to happen here
and then if you want softer edges you can take your wet brush and just kind of go along the side
and feather it out while it's still wet try to keep a harder edge along her face because
you can always go in and blend it later try to keep the softer edge along the outside
you can also be more playful with the texture along the outside so you can kind of take your
brush and just give it a bit of texture okay so then the top of our hair is more brown
right so i'm going to take this brown that i made the same brown that i used to tint her face with
and i'm going to start to put it in the top i'm going to sprinkle a tiny bit of salt
see if that will help with the texture and then just continue to do this and build up
the deep colors in her hair you can always go back in and soften that edge
just with a simple use of your brush and brush work
you can kind of capture the texture of her hair
so now you can see how light her skin tone looks
around the darkness of her hair hopefully i'm probably going to get the blue in of her shirt
if you want to stick to a very kind of traditional zorn palette then just go for your black and white
the next thing i'm going to do is paint in the darker areas of her
face because now if i squint at my piece and i squint at the reference i can kind of see
that the side of her face is a lot darker and her neck is a lot darker her photo there when
you squint at it you'll see that her neck is just as dark as her hair it's a different hue
but it's just as dark so what i'm doing right now is i'm mixing an opaque skin tone using my yellow
my red and my white so i'm just mixing a very very bright very saturated skin tone
and i want to mix all of my skin tones before i actually go in and paint it because if i mix
one i paint it then i mix another and i paint it the first one's already going to be dry and it's
going to be hard for me to mix it now i'm going to go in and if you look at her cheeks her cheeks
are a warmer version of this so i'm going to tint it tiny bit of red so i have a warmer version of
her skin tone that's like slightly darker but the same value so now i'm gonna go darker so taking my
pool of color here and i'm gonna start to add some black and as soon as i add black to this
you can start to see that it becomes a lot more desaturated and it doesn't look like a very nice
skin tone anymore i'm gonna have to add more red to it and more yellow to it to really warm it up
and so i'm gonna first test this dark color because it looks dark against the white but
once i put it on her face it might look a little bit different once i put it on i can take a second
brush with some water and i can just kind of work that in and blend it so this is almost like
working with gouache as if it's watercolor i'm just putting on a very transparent layer because
i'm just testing out the color right now but you can kind of see it's bringing in that warm
tone but it's also making the black of her hair feel lighter so the first thing i'm going to do
is i'm going to paint in her neck right because it's a very big shape that is not as scary as
putting in the rest of her face at this point so let's paint in her neck first then i'm going
to take my second brush with a little bit of water and i'm going to blend in her neck line
i'm going to take this dark paint and i'm going to paint in the side of her face
just following along the contours putting her ear in giving her more of a cheekbone
and i'm probably going to put in this part on the side of her face with the nose it
looks really dark right now but that's just because the tone underneath is very very light
now i'm going to go into my lighter color which is already starting to mix
and i'm just going to paint in the transitions
it can be really scary and daunting to do this because it looks very
blocky at first but it will come together
so you can see i'm going from dark to light i'm going lighter and lighter
one thing i want to point out about eyes is that the whites of the eyes are not
actually white and if you try to paint them really white it's actually going to look very unnatural
so what i did right now was i just kind of blended the surrounding colors
into the eye just to make sure that i don't have like a white outline once i'm done
while i let that dry because if i went to paint the eyes on and it's still damp then
it's just gonna bleed so i really just have to make sure that this part is dry so i'm gonna
paint the mouth first and then come back to the eyes you can kind of see her mouth is
like a reddish purpley color so red with a little bit of black i'm gonna start
at the corners of her mouth and just put in two darker spots in the corner and then i'm going to
draw the line or go over the line of the bottom of the upper lip and then the bottom of the lower lip
then i'm going to start to blend it up so now i'm going to move on to my lighter red
don't ever paint nostrils with a cold color like don't ever just use black
and like go in and paint two dots it's going to look horrible when you're painting nostrils
make sure that they're red so start off with your red tint it with a little bit of black
so it's not exactly a really really dark solid color it's kind of like a translucent dark red
now that i have this dark red i'm also going to put some of it in the eyes so in the corners
of the eyes are also really warm adding that warmth is going to make the eyes feel more alive
so now if i look at her face i can kind of see it's a little bit dull and i need to bring in
some of those lights on her forehead on her nose on her cheeks so to do that i'm going to mix a
brighter skin tone and when you're mixing really bright skin tones you do need yellow and red
and white to try to keep it as saturated as possible okay so now i'm taking the yellow
once i put in the warmth of her face her hair looks super flat just going around
her face and making it darker is going to make her skin tone feel more real
i'm missing the purples in her hair so basically mixing red into gray is gonna
get those nice purple colors so i'm gonna go in and just soften the edges around the hair
okay so for the earrings i'm just going to paint in
two triangle shapes that are about the same value as her shirt
i'm going to add a triangle shape to the top and i'm going to leave the white of the paper because
if i painted the gray and then i tried to paint white on top that white has to be really thick
otherwise it's going to mix with the gray and then i'm going to paint another triangle below
this and i'm going to start to make that triangle a little bit darker at the bottom
the last thing i would do is really blend in your hair you know you never
want a really really sharp edge around hair because it's going to look really unnatural
those little details are really what's going to make a difference even though
people they can't tell what you did they can kind of feel it intuitively
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