Watercolor Portrait Of Young Chinese Woman

Here is a portrait in watercolor I did of a young friend.  Her father took a nice picture of her and posted it to social media.

She is a beautiful young lady and it was a pleasure to paint this for them.

The lighting in the photo was from the back and there was a lot of incidental lighting from the sides which did not give a lot of dramatic shadows to work with. This is part of what drew me to the project since it had a lot of challenges with light and tone.

I actually printed the photo from social media and traced the image onto watercolor paper,. since the photo was good quality. Though she is Chinese her skin has a lovely rose hue to it which was easier than I thought would be to render.  I gave a wash of alizarin crimson as a base and then began to work in the middle tones with orange, sienna, and lavender. After the middle tones were laid down I use violet and ultramarine blue for the shadows. There are a lot of places where the cool and light values were mixed together creating subtle value changes, so I did a lot of blending and lifting colors out with clear water and tissue.

The mouth was several hours getting it right there are all the values between the lights and darks the cools and warms. the upper lip had an unusual reflected light on it and the lower lip was more in a shadow than usual.

More hours were spent on the nose, this is one of the areas that had a lot of subtle changes in values.

Normally I have a lot of difficulty with the eyes. She has brown eyes that are almost black so I painted them brown first and then washed black over the brown. The photo does not capture the richness of the results. In some ways, the Asian eye shape is easier to draw but is harder to get the gradual shading

I always do the hair and clothing last and I always make it simpler than it really is.

Watercolor Portrait of Young Chinese Woman

(c) Adron

Watercolor Portrait of Young Woman Looking Down

I spent a few days working on this watercolor portrait. It was a very enjoyable project and a very frustrating project at the same time. 

My model is one of my favorite young ladies who is one of the sweetness people I know I was hoping to capture her sweetness in this project.  

The over face turned out well but the photo doesn't do it justice. I began with a wash of light rose and then went over with some senna and violets to get the shading in and the highlights.

The hair in the reference photos I took was a mess. She has beautiful long hair but it was all over her knit shirt.  I should have simplified the hair and edited it with more care to give the picture a greater unity.

I may come back to it later and try to clean up the hair a bit. I'll try lifting some of it out with a brush of clear water and paper towel. Then reintroduce the fix with a fresh application of color. I might use black acrylic or even black gesso to the hair.

Watercolor Portrait of Young Asian Woman With Long Hair.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work. 
Thanks for taking the time to look. 
Use the search box to find more of my work you might like or try one of the favorites in the sidebar.

Use the buttons below to share this with your social networks.

(c) Adron

Watercolor of Young Asian Woman in Knit Hat

This is a watercolor of a young friend and student of mine. She has a face of such subtle expressions that I am quite captured by it.  She was wearing a hat during an art lesson and I took some snapshots of her. She was not particularly happy with the idea of me taking pictures when she was not prepared but I liked the spontaneity of it.

She is a very spiritual person and it is refreshing to find that in a young lady. I hope to capture her reflective nature in art.

Her long black hair gives some extra dimension to the portrait. Normally I downplay the hair since it is so subject to fashion and I don't want some future generation looking at the painting and saying what strange hair styles they had back when that was painted, I want them to see something deeper in the person I am portraying not clothing or hairstyle. In her case, the long hair is so intrinsic with the young lady that I couldn't consider painting her without the long black strands.

This painting took about eight hours to finish over a period of two weeks. I find that if I try to do too much at once I get enthralled with some little area and sacrifice other parts. I took a long time sketching the face. I did the background with the same color as her blouse to strengthen the mystical effect of her personality. I put blue highlights in her hair, it is a little artificial but I wanted to pull the background into the portrait. At one point I had blue in her face but as I was working it over the blue was washed out by the warmer tones of her skin. Her complexion is more chocolate than I portrayed her, I have had this problem before with the Asian complexion. I think that the blue background is affecting my pallet and choice of colors.

The knit cap was a salmon red but I toned it down for the painting and used it for a texture contrast to the other textures of the hair and background.

It photographed warmer than it actually is.

Young Asian Woman With A Knit hat

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work. 
Thanks for taking the time to look. 
Use the search box to find more of my work you might like or try one of the favorites in the sidebar.

Use the buttons below to share this with your social networks.

(c) Adron

Pencil Drawing of a Young Oriental Woman With Long Hair.

I do not always enjoy drawing a beautiful face, they are too common and the person is usually very demanding of representing some concept of perfection. But this beautiful Oriental woman has a matching beautiful personality. She has become a favorite model for me.

I did this quick study in pencil using a 2h and an 8h for the darkest areas. The long hair is very interesting for me since it gives opportunity to experiment with flowing lines that I do not always get to try. She often has one eye hidden like it is playing peek-a-boo.

 

Pencil Portrait of  Young Oriental Woman

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work.

Thanks for taking the time to look.
 Adron
 Click on an image in the sidebar to see more favorites. 

 Use the buttons below to share this with your social networks.

Watercolor Portrait of a Young Asian Woman With Black Hair

This is a watercolor I did as a practice study for a larger work. I am trying to study my subjects more carefully to try to understand the person as well as the image that I want to create. This young lady is also an art student. My impression of her is that she is a very spiritual person which, of course, is very rare in a person so young, but her spiritual qualities are something I would love to portray in art.

I am fascinated with her long black hair. I have always drawn or painted people with wavy or curly hair but have not experimented with the possibilities that the flowing lines offer with the long straight hairstyle.   I know she will cut it short because most women get tired of all the work and bother of long hair so I feel I want to do as many studies of her and her beautiful hair while I can. I think this picture shows her as a reflective person. Actually when I took the photo that was the foundation of the painting she was concentrating and working on repairing a broken paint brush.

I might try a different medium for the hair in a future project since the watercolor was a little too translucent. If I used ink I know it would be very stark but maybe acrylic might be a good option. I love working in mixed media it expands your possibilities.

Watercolor of a Young Asian Woman

I really had a hard time with her skin tone she is more chocolate than in my picture but I will get it more correct next time.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my work. Thanks for taking the time to look. Please take a moment and visit my online art gallery link in the sidebar to purchase my work.

(c) Adron 

Click on an image in the sidebar to see more favorites.

Use the buttons below to share this with your social networks.