Beginner's Guide to Creating Portraits: Learning the Essentials & Developing Your Own Style

For any artist new to portraiture, this beginner’s guide is an essential addition to your tool kit. Expert Steve Forster guides you through essential portraiture concepts and workflows: identifying your own personal style, using photo references, preparing your canvas, and establishing an effective process for striking results. You will learn how to identify your personal style, use photo references, prepare your canvas, and establish an effective workflow for striking results. Must-know portrait-painting techniques and exclusive step-by-step tutorials from expert artists help you put your newfound skills into practice, while gallery pages offer further inspiration and insight into the fascinating art of portraiture.

Unlock the secrets of portraiture with this essential beginner’s guide. Identify your personal style, use photo references, prepare your canvas, and establish an effective workflow for striking results.

Expert Steve Forster guides you through getting started, including why ‘creation cycles’ are the key to success. Especially valuable for beginners, this phased approach provides a clear decision-making route at every stage. Then artist Robyn Leora Lowe demonstrates how to create believable features, no matter your style and medium.

To understand real-life workflow, follow six professional artists step by step through specially commissioned portraits. Discover how concept, style, technique, subject, and experience converge for distinctive results. Galleries of work from these artists, and others, showcase an even wider range of powerful portraiture.

Whether a complete beginner or honing existing skills, you too can develop the approach, confidence, and mastery needed to produce compelling portraits.

The Creation Cycles
Drawing: Proportion • Shape and line
Color Value: Establishing relationships • Diversity • Developing values • Light and form
Edges: The four types • From sharp to lost • Complex edges • Brushstrokes and style • Adding movement • Choosing brushes

________

The portrait is one of the world’s oldest art forms, but today’s technology and culture mean it’s time to take a fresh look at how today’s portrait artists work outside the realms of realism and elevate their technique. The Instagram-friendly appeal of the portrait means that the modern version can be seen everywhere on social media as digital artists of all skill levels share their captivating characters, focusing on the face. This much-needed book for beginners to digital portraiture goes back to basics (simple anatomy, lighting, color, and perspective) as the starting point for even the most stylized of subjects. Professional artists with recognisable styles, including Loish, Simone Grunwald, and Francisco Garcés, still use these fundamentals. Readers learn from industry professionals how to infuse their subject with believable detail and atmospheric storytelling (especially relevant when working from photographs, as many artists do today). Experts demonstrate step-by-step their digital workflow, sharing techniques for rendering stylized skin tones, hair, and eyes. Sci-fi, fantasy, historical, and anthropomorphic portraits are created. Real-world individuals are highly stylized, yet convince the viewer.

This is the essential guide for the next generation of portrait artists who want to create contemporary, stylized work that is compelling, emotive, and memorable.