Say Cheese...
by Merekat
Portraits. Sure. You know what happens. Relatives and friends find out you're an artist and all of a sudden that volunteers you to do that special portrait of Great-Aunt Irma from an old black and white photo. And they want it done as if color cameras existed back then and make sure it looks healthy and make sure it looks like her because you know how delicate her sensibilities are and you don't want to offend the lady. But wait! There's more! Could you just make her a little happier? And she never liked that hair color she had back then anyway. And for goodness sake make sure it looks like her because that old photo doesn't look like her, never mind it's 30 years younger and 50 pounds lighter. Oh, and when you're done with that let us know because Great-Uncle Gerald wants his done and a nice family portrait of all the first cousins...

You know the situation. I bet you've been in it plenty of times. Well, if you're unfortunate enough to be backed into the proverbial corner like some indentured servant out of the middle ages just because you happend to try and better yourself as an artist and folks noticed, you have my condolences. So rather than fight the system, remember that all this effort just might yield you brownie points down the road and though you should try not to let folks talk you into a career as a doormat, the occasional shot of good karma is always a bonus. So once in a while, you get to do a portrait.

Don't worry. It'll be okay. I'll talk ya through it. And since this isn't one of your serious studies, you just want to learn some techniques fast and simple, we're going to do something I don't usually approve of.

We're going to cheat.

Sure. If you want to take the extra 2-3 hours to hand draw this sucker, then by all means, do it. I approve. In fact, you shouldn't use this technique until after you know how to do it on your own by hand because you'll just be crippled by a shortcut and not learn all the lessons of anatomy, lighting and form on your own which elevate you to a nirvanna happy-like-state of an artist that dances in the moonlight stark naked because he likes the way the reflective light works.

So for you who don't know how to draw a face reasonably on your own, stop reading. You are not yet ready. For those of you who do know the valuable stuffs on your own and would just like to freakin' speed up the process...

This is your dream come true.

Step One: Okay, you have your old b/w photo with you, right? Good. Grab that photo, put it on the background layer of a new photoshop file and for giggles, make sure the file was opened to a nice final print size. That means if you want it to be 5" x 6", then make it that size at 300 resolution. This way, when the relatives want a printout of the piece, you'll have enough pixels to oblidge them. ;} Here's one on loan from the artistic brother for whom this tutorial/lecture was created:

Okay. First thing I want you to do. Create a new layer in Photoshop, pick out a nice medium skin tone from a nice color photo with good skin tones. You'll see the one I found in later steps (see step 6). This is so you can eyedrop realistic colors. This helps decrease the margin of error a bit, but be careful, pixels aren't always the same tone as they appear as they usually work together in packs. If you find a wild one, just try its neighboor or kinda average the tone. Since we are coloring a black and white photo, this is how you get your proper skin tones to apply to the portrait.

It's not incredibly important what you choose at this stage, as we're just blocking in the color. We can always tweak that color later. For now, simply take a hard-edged paintbrush with the medium skin tone and block in the skin areas. I've put in the face, shoulder and part of the back as you see here:
Step Two: Take that skin layer you just drew and fade the opacity back on it so you can see the picture through the layer in the background. Create a new layer. On this layer, take a nice darker skin tone and block in loosely where the shadows of the skin are. Don't worry too much about being neat here. It's just to get the shape.

Create another new layer. On this layer, take a nice pinkish lighter skin tone and put in the areas that are more lit on the face. This highlight layer is not supposed to show the really really light parts. Those are the final highlights. Neither are we using the extreme darks yet. On a scale of 1 to 10, (10 being the darkest parts of the skin like the corners of the mouth and 1 being the lightest highlight of her nose or eye) we are only using the value range of about 3 to 7 here.

Once you have blocked in the outlined areas of highlight and shadow onto the medium tone, bring the opacity of the base skin tone back up to 100% and flatten the layers of medium, dark and light into one layer. Don't flatten the photo with it. You'll need that photo to gauge your details later.

Step Three: At this point it might be useful for you to have a copy of the photo opened in another file next to your painting, as switching off the painted layers to see the gradiants of the photo is a little time-consuming in later stages. You really need that photo in the back layer only for aligning your details, not for judging your progress. So copy and paste the photo into a new file as you see I've done in the picture below.

Now here's where I need to explain the shading technique carefully. It's best if you have a nice Wacom tablet or something similar for this technique, but if you play with the opacity levels of your brushes, it is possible to use this fashion with a mouse. A bit more difficult as you'll constantly be switching between shades of color with the color picker and opacity levels of the brush, but it is very doable.

Here's the basic technique I've colored the shoulder below:
  1. You have your blocked in colors representing the areas of value you want to keep on your painting. We want to blend these values gradually to produce a more realistic shade. Rather than gather the blending tool for this task, we are going to use a more fine art traditional technique of using tones of the three colors to soften the edges.
  2. Get a large hard-edged brush (no fuzzy brushes!!! that's an order!!) about the size of the circle shown in step two of the picture below. Use the eyedropper to select the medium skin tone and set the brush to 'normal' at about 50% or less if you need it. If you are using a tablet, lightly start stroking the pigment over the hard edge of the shadow to introduce tones of the medium color. You don't want to completely obliterate the shadow, just soften the edge.

  3. Again, don't worry about the skin not looking smooth. We aren't going from rough to smooth fuzzy skin here. We are going from rough to less rough to less rough to less rough skin to maybe fuzzy as a very very last step. When necessary, eyedrop the highlight color or the shadow color to reintroduce some gentle building-up of value.You can even eyedrop a tone in-between a dark and medium or medium to light if it helps you in smoothing out the tones.

This is a gradual process, and it takes time to get the technique down, but once you do, you'll find this is a very fast way to paint your works... I still use my blending technique now and then as I showed you in my 'Making of Mynx' tutorial. But this is a more sophisticated technique used by many many top-notch artists, and it's got better roots in traditional art. That means you can study the masters to learn this technique better. In fact, studying their Photoshop sketches will teach you a lot about their steps to creating a painting. I whole-heartedly endorse studying as many techniques as you can. Just make sure you give them all a fair shake before you dismiss anything as 'too hard to do'. Trust me, this one takes a little knack, but it's a very good knack to have.

This is how she looks once I've had one pass of smoothing on her. We'll do more now.
Step Four: Using the photoreference as a gauge, take another pass of smoothing using the hard-edged brush and low opacity tones. We're still using just the three colors at this point, but after you're decently happy with some of the early stages of the blending, it's time to take a darker color and introduce it into the mix. For this, always start with your darker tones as the highlights are to contrast as a final step. If you start with the highlights, they might get a little out of hand and overwhelm you, forcing you to add way too much dark. Then your painting looks bleached. We want to avoid that.

Remember, the medium skin tone should prevail.

Okay, I've grabbed a nice darker brown skin tone (about an 8 to 9 value level tone) and introduced some depth to the eyelashes, eyes, a bit on the eyebrows, nostril and mouth seam. As you can see, I took some more time sketching in the blends and tones of the 3 to 7 value levels of tones in the face. All this time, I'm referencing the photo in a file next to my painting. I've just hidden the photo to aid in space for this tutorial. Keep referencing the photo even when I don't mention it.
Step Five: I've refined the blending contrast a bit by reinforcing some lines where needed and blending others. Note the more clear definition of the beidge of the nose and the lower eyelids. At this point, I did take a very nice dark and added to the eyes, nostrils and mouth.

Step Six: Okay, so we have the skin at a decent pausing point. Now's time for the hair. I usually don't finish off pieces of the illustration alone. It is better to get parts to a nice stopping point and work at getting the rest of the illustration up to the same level. Then you can tweak the contrast and highlights and such better because you have the rest of the picture there to judge by.

Below you can see the photo I grabbed randomly from the web for my color picking. She just happens to be a brunette as well, so I'm going to grab colors from her hair. Just as we did for the face, create a new layer and muss in the rich medium brown. I did actually use the rich chocolate brown you see at the top of her head, it's the following highlights and shadows that have obscured it somewhat. But remember, I've been looking at the photo like a good little meerkat, so I've been placing the highlights and shadows properly. Just use a hard brush with some light strokes if you're using a tablet and with a lower opacity as needed if you're using a mouse. Put this on a new layer for convenience and get the shapes in like we did for the face.

Step Seven: At this point, I flattened the hair layers like we did for the skin tones and started finessing the details like we did with the toning technique. Below, however, I did introduce a new color to start adding a bit of the atmosphere of the portrait. Hair is usually extremely glossy. That means it gets to reflect things like light and colors of light. Usually this translates into a nice blue or purple brought on by the sky and reflective light bouncing off the ground onto the hair.

For this purpose, I found a nice purpleish brown (see my color picker swatch) and brushed it into the hair. You can see this mostly on the lower parts of the hair by her shoulders. This just softens the colors to make sure it starts behaving like realy hair. If you'll remember from my other tutorials, hair and skin is made up of very many different tones and forms of color. That sometimes means introducing purples, greens and blues or yellows. Whatever works. If you keep with only three colors, your picture won't have as much life to it and will seem flat and a bit dull. We're starting to introduce more color here.

Step Eight: Now, if needed, take a nice medium brown with a fuzzy brush and set the brush to color burn on an extremely low setting... perhaps 5% or so. If you streak it under and around the highlights in horizontalish strokes, it'll help fill out the hair more:

In referencing the light stokes to the hair for highlights, "horizontal" is to catch all of the hair onto one highlight, and not "vertical" to follow the hair strands itself.
Step Nine: Remember how I said skin has more colors just like hair does? Okay. Time to add them. For this, we're going to do something a little odd. Add purple to the skin. Since that is the lighting color we added to the hair, grab a nice muted purple (see the swatch below) and a large fuzzy brush set to a low opacity. Make sure the skin layer is locked. At this point, it's best to just experiment with the brush blend layers and I used 'multiply' with a bit of 'overlay' for most of it. The low setting of multiply with the purple works best for the effect, but I did put it on a bit of 'normal' for some of the shoulder. Just keep it light and build it up gradually as you see below. You don't want to make her skin LOOK purple. Just have a different skin-color tone that's a little desaturated and a little hued. Using purple (as it is the compliment to the peaches of the skin) just takes care of this faster.

Step Ten: Now we're adding a little more rose to the cheeks so to speak. Grab a nice amber orange skin tone as you see in the swatch (I grabbed this from my color photo reference in the corner) on that large fuzzy brush at low opacity set to 'overlay' this time. You want to be very careful with this, as the orange can make her look sickly if it's used too strongly. So be very gradual with the application.

Step Eleven: Guess what. ;} Finally, yes, we get to deal with some final highlights. This is where the whole portrait starts coming together. Grab a light peach, small fuzzy brush, tone down the opacity a notch and set it to 'screen'. This is perfect for the hightlight on the nose, the reflective shine on the nook of the nostril, the upper and lower lips, a bit of the cheek and forehead and that final gentle dab on the shoulder. ;}

Oh, don't forget the eyes. Mark in the whites using a light gray lavender, mind the shadows of the whites of the eyes and put in the highlight of the pupil.

Step Twelve: Finally, just a hint of shine for the hair. Take a nice large fuzzy brush, a nice rich light-medium brown, lock the hair layer and set the brush to 'color dodge' on about 15% or less as needed and sweep in some light onto the highlight areas using broad horizontal strokes.

Now all that is left is to tweak any final facial details to make her more like the photo (I made her smile more. She's so cute!) and voila! There you go! ;} Portrait's done and the family is happy. Now, if you can just do a quick one of Cousin Mertle seeing as this portrait thing isn't terribly hard for you...

All pictures and content of this site are copyright 2005 Kristen Perry.
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without written consent by Kristen Perry.