Learning to paint people is exciting and sometimes challenging. There are some tips and techniques that can help you as you begin your portrait painting journey.

Start with an accurate drawing of the subject you plan to paint.

Some artists use the grid method, while others freehand the initial drawing. One clue you should take seriously is this; If you don’t have an accurate drawing, don’t try to paint the person. Chances are you won’t get a likeness if you don’t have a pencil likeness first.

Painting the closed mouth is quite easy with practice. Painting the open mouth is more difficult and requires a lot of practice. This is because not only the lips have to be painted, but also the gums and teeth and sometimes the tongue. The mouth is the facial feature that most expresses the mood of the subjects. The mouth and lips can make or break a portrait. They can make a realistic portrait look different from the person or even cartoonish if it doesn’t come close to being exact. To paint closed lips, make sure the pencil drawing is accurate. You will need to step back and look at the drawing to make sure it looks like the subject.

Using the correct color for the lips.

When you are satisfied that the drawing is correct, use a color that matches the person’s skin tone and create the outline of the mouth and the line between the lips. The color you will use to outline the lips is a nude shade with a bit of alizarin burnt and crimson. Be careful not to make the lips look too pink or red, unless there is lipstick on the subject. The lips are actually a bit more pink or red than the flesh color. The outline color should be slightly darker than the actual color of the lips. Think of this stage as a coloring book. For the lip outline, you are just painting over the drawn lip lines.

After you have painted the outline color, use the same color but a little lighter and paint on the upper lip. The upper lip will be darker than the lower lip. Now, paint the lower lip with a slightly lighter lip color.

Highlight the lips

Now highlight both lips. The upper lip will have a hint of very light or even white lip color along the top center. The lower lip will have a fairly large area of ​​highlighting along the “puffy” center of the lip. The highlighting gives the illusion that the swollen part of the lip is rounded and closer to the viewer, so to speak. When adding the light or bleached highlights to the lower lip, do it with vertical strokes. You should leave some trace lines to indicate the lines in the skin that make up the lips.

If your subject is a person who wears lipstick, you might end up with the lips because lipstick sometimes shows a definite line. But if your subjects’ lips are natural, you should gently blend the lip color into the flesh color of the face so there isn’t a hard edge where there isn’t one.

final keys

The last thing to do with your mouth closed is to add shadows directly above your upper lip where the crease below your nose is, and directly below your lower lip and in your chin area. Accurately painting people is an art that requires a lot of practice and patience. You should purchase literature on acrylic painting techniques that demonstrates these methods.