Suzanne Brooker

Paint Better Portraits From Photographs

Suzanne Brooker

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  • In-depth Instruction; over 143 mins
  • On-demand video access anytime
  • Bonus downloadable PDF resources
  • Access to class Q&A
Meet painting instructor Suzanne Brooker, and begin the class with a tutorial on choosing effective reference photos. Discover the best techniques for lighting your subject, and try Suzanne's simple, effective trick for examining foreshortening.
Learn how to identify key landmarks and unique features of the face and skull. Suzanne shows you how to assess your reference photos to locate proportions, angles and other valuable information that will help inform your preliminary drawings.
Learn how to choose, prepare and tone the ideal ground for your surface. Suzanne shares tips that will help you apply paint smoothly and evenly, and demonstrates ways to block in your reference image on your canvas or board.
The underpainting serves as a major roadmap for your portrait, helping you identify lights and darks in the photo, and how to translate to them canvas to create dimension and a realistic effect. Learn how to mix hues and create a value scale using tints, tones and shade. Next, Suzanne teaches you how to match and paint the values that you see in your reference photo.
Skin tones can be daunting to recreate, but Suzanne's professional tips will help you assess and mix any tone to match your model. Explore color relationships that yield realistic skin colors, and learn how to unify your palette with one important pigment.
Apply the palette you developed in the previous lesson as you continue to develop your painting further. Suzanne shows you how to control the pressure of your brush with a variety of brushstrokes, and demonstrates methods for creating transitions between various values and color notes.
Push your skills from amateur to professional levels as Suzanne shows you how to conquer tricky facial feature details. Study ways to depict the contours of the nose and mouth, experiment with the dimensions of the ear, and learn how to suggest the play of light in your model's hair.
 
 
7 Lessons
2  hrs 23  mins

Description

Build a foundation of portrait painting skills with step-by-step guidance from professional instructor Suzanne Brooker. Start with tips for taking and selecting better reference photographs. Grasp foreshortening to create more convincing compositions. Discover the key landmarks of the face and structure of the skull. Use measurements to achieve more accurate proportion. Tone the ideal ground, add a reference grid to your canvas, block in major shapes and create an underpainting. Learn to match and paint the values and skin tones in your reference. Use brushstroke techniques to develop your painting further. Depict facial features and hair with confidence. Apply the fundamentals of painting from photographs to propel your portraiture to new levels of dimension and realism.

Suzanne Brooker

Suzanne Brooker has been teaching at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington, for more than 15 years. She has a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and earned her MFA from California State University, Long Beach, where master figurative painter Domenic Cretara was her graduate mentor. Suzanne is also the author of two books on oil painting: Portrait Painting Atelier and Elements of Landscape Painting.

Suzanne Brooker

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