I am going to show you how to paint a portrait from a photo, and make it symmetrical. You will be painting like a pro after it’s all said and done. you will learn how to mix colors to create either light skin or dark skin. You will learn a trick on how to make fine lines. You will learn how to create dark and light shadow. You will impress and bless people at the same time with your art work.

Symmetrical paintings:

Have you ever dawn a picture and it looked kind of lop sided? This is what you do to keep that from happening. Use a grid. Let’s say that you have a photo that is 8″x10″ and you want to paint commission portrait it bigger on a canvas that is “16x”20, you will want to take a pen and draw grid on your photo 1/2″x1/2″ and then take a pencil and draw grids on your canvas 1″x1”. So, now we have grids on both the photo and the canvas. What do we do next? The grids will help get your drawing precise on the canvas. After we have the picture drawn on the canvas, we want to circle the shadows in the photo. Look closely at ever little shadow that you can find. After the shadows are circled, go back and draw the shadows onto the canvas. Your drawing should look like a “paint by number” now.

We are ready to paint!

The great thing about oil paint is that if you get tired than you can leave the painting and finish it later. If you mess up than you can fix it easily, because the oil doesn’t dry fast at all. I’ve had some paintings take 2 weeks to dry.

If you know how to put makeup on than you should not have a whole lot of trouble painting a portrait with oil paints. With a darker skin you will want to use dark brown, black, white and red. With a lighter skin you will want to use brown, red, and white. For shadows you can use the skin color along with black and red to darken it. If the skin is too dark than you can lighten it with a dab white or very light brown. If the skin is too light than you can darken it with a dab of brown, dark brown, or black. You can play around with it because the paint does not dry like a water paint.

Fine Lines:

This is a tip for those that do not have small brushes to make smaller lines. You can dab your brush in paint thinner and then mix the thinner with paint. The paint will become very thin, therefore, making it easier to create very thin lines.

There you have it! That is how I paint some of my portraits. I hope that this has given you a little insight on painting, and hopefully you can take this and run with it.