Watercolour portrait

Have you ever been fascinated by painted portraits? I have always been in awe of artists who paint portraits. Well, I was finally learned a simple technique from Elsie & Jamie (growcreative.blogspot) that has allowed me to paint portraits in watercolour. I am delighted to share this amazing technique with you this week.

Materials:
Computer
Digital photo of a person
Printer
Printer paper
Carbon/graphite paper for tracing
Pencil
Watercolour paper
Watercolour paints
Paintbrushes

Procedure:
Step 1:  Find a nice digital photo of your subject with an even amount of light and shadow on the face.  This can be surprisingly tricky.  If there's too much light or shadow on the face, you won't have enough definition to make this work.  So you may have to try this with several photos to see what works best.  Finding the right photo is the key!
Step 2:  Open the photo in PicMonkey, a free online photo editor.  You can use another editor if you like, but I'll explain the next steps in terms of the Picmonkey editor.
Step 3:  In PicMonkey, select the “Effects” option on the left sidebar. In “Effects”, select the “Posterize” option towards the bottom of the sidebar.
Step 4:  In “Posterize”, slide the number of colours bar down to 2.  It's important to have only two colours here.  This project won't work with any more colours or any less.  Keep the detail at 80 per cent and the fade at 0 per cent.  Then hit apply. Now, your photo should have one light shade and one dark shade.
Step 5:  Decide on the size of painting you want to make and print out the digital photo in black and white in the size that you desire.  I printed mine to fill a whole 8½ x 11 piece of copy paper and it worked well to make an 8 x 10 painting.
Step 6:  Once you have your printed photo, use a carbon paper to trace your picture on the watercolour paper. You need to make sure the paper doesn't shift or move during the steps so it may be a good idea to tape it down.  I traced all the black outlines of the face and then moved down to trace the outlines of the neck and shoulders.  Depending on your particular photo, you may want to leave the background out.  Since this is your first such portrait, it is best to not include the background.
Step 7:  Once you have the whole image traced, take the printed copy off to see the image transferred onto the watercolour paper.
Step 8:  Now it's time to add some watercolour! Select a colour and carefully start painting inside the lines you traced.  Keep your printed copy handy to make sure you are painting in the right spots. To give the portrait a more varied look, try adding just a hint of another colour on certain areas. I added a touch more red in some areas and left others more orange-y.
Step 9:  Fill in the entire portrait and let the paint dry and finally... You Are Done!