This portrait is of my beautiful mom ๐ค She was photographed for a newspaper article while making lei of plumeria flowers with another hula dancer.
The black and white portion of this portrait is done in ink wash, in a large sketchbook of mine. Layer and layer of increasingly dark dilutions of ink and water.
I scanned the original ink portrait and added a digitally painted background and ‘colorized’ parts of it. This was made as a gift for either a birthday or mother’s day.
Hi!โThanks for viewing this post ๐ค This ink wash portrait was done with a photo reference I found online @ Flickr by AndrewFPhoto.โ
I basically just copied the photo straight-up as some practice for ink wash technique.โHigh contrast black and white photos are the easiest to work with for this style of ink portrait.โI begin with a detailed pencil sketch, lightly lining out the areas of heavy shadows and bright highlights.โUsing a light wash, I start to build the face.โAvoid all highlight areas ~ those will remain as empty paper.โContinue using darker washes to build the shadows that add depth and character to the face.โThe final step is going in the darkest areas of the reference with heavy black ink. That’s when the image finally pops! ๐ค OR, when you spill the ink or leave a smudge ๐คฃ
Please scroll through my portrait posts below.โOnly some of them have notes, but I’m trying to add more.โI’m mainly just posting these to get the images to scroll in this fancy carousel here…
For a few days, I will be posting some of my old portrait work.โI LOVE doing portraits of people ๐ค
A lot of these pieces are made along with classes @ Sktchy.com where I always learn new & useful techniques, and have been very proud of the pieces I’ve created.
