I'm currently teaching a class on portraits in watercolor, and as a preliminary exercise we painted from sculpture to practice modeling form with mostly monochromatic wash. This is a Roman copy of the Praxiteles Venus and is in the Vatican Museum in Rome. I mixed a gray using French ultramarine blue and burnt umber and it gave some interesting granularity. I used the same mixture for the dark background.
I painted another study of the unhappy
Thimo, one of the founder figures in the Naumberg Cathedral in Germany. Each of the founder figures sculpted by the anonymous Naumberg Meister is fully human, each invested with intense emotional realism. To see them in person is a powerful experience.
Watercolor portraits can be meticulously sculpted with numerous washes, or rather more informally and quickly sketched. In the Travel Journal workshop last weekend, I demonstrated the looser approach with this sketch of a young man, casually posing with hands in pockets.
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