3 Must-Haves for a Great Portrait
Summer break is nearly here! I will be doing a few oil portraits over the summer, but I wanted to share some of my charcoal drawings and talk a bit about the process of creating a striking portrait in any medium. 1. Value Value (how light or dark a color or tone is) is the single most important part of creating a lifelike portrait. I usually start out with a two-value statement. This means separating the image into two tones- light and dark. When using charcoal, I use vine charcoal to create an even medium tone in the dark side and leave the white of the paper as the light side. This allows you to judge shapes and creates unity within the shadow shapes. I then add my darkest darks, apply mid tones to transition from dark to light, and then add my highlights last. This method allows me to work on the entire portrait at once, rather than shading in piece by piece, and keeps me focused and on-track. I follow a similar process when painting in oils. 2. Contrast Areas of
