Annette Smith portrait workshop

If watercolor painting is the hardest medium to master, I think painting the human face in watercolor is even harder! Recently I took an online watercolor portrait workshop with Annette Smith from Scottsdale Artist’s School, a highly-regarded art school in Phoenix, AZ. Annette was a student of the late Charles Reid, whom I greatly admire for his loose, colorful portraits. The workshop met on Zoom on three successive Tuesdays, giving us time to paint between classes. For each Zoom session, Annette painted a three-hour portrait, talking us through everything she did.

Annette draws the model very carefully, taking a long time to get all the features accurately. She uses a measuring stick to compare the distances between features. For instance, the width of the face is often the same as the distance from the chin to the eyebrows. She’s very particular about the drawing.

She then paints the face with a light wash, using the three primary colors of yellow, red, and blue. This underpainting will glow through the other layers painted on top of it. She paints the hair with more than one color, allowing the colors to blend, then she creates the eyes and eye sockets and defines the planes of the face, lips, and chin.

She mixes her paints in the palette before she begins a wash, and she carefully places a brush full of paint on the paper. Then she swirls the brush slightly, cleans it in water, and softens the edges of the brushstroke. It makes for beautiful skin tones in the face. There are very few hard edges in her portraits; everything blends together.

It took me four tries to get a satisfactory portrait of our first model, a lovely young lady.

I only needed two attempts for my second portrait of a young Hispanic man dressed as a troubadour.

Our third and final model was a beautiful black woman with high cheekbones.

I learned a lot from this workshop. Just watching Annette choose her colors and apply the paint to the paper was a revelation. I have a long way to go before I can produce good portraits, but I think I made a big leap forward in this workshop.