Thursday, May 27, 2010

Portraits and Caricature as a Second Income?

I recently had a query about drawing and painting portraits, perhaps as a second income. As you probably know I don't paint a lot of portraits but I have done a few.

One of the projects in Part Three of the Acrylic Painting Course is a portrait. I chose painting a portrait as I was trying to cover a wide range of subjects. Also, the painting is about working the whole of the picture at the same time. Usually in landscapes I paint in layers from the distance to the foreground. But in the portrait painting the whole of the subject is worked at the same time.


Top Portrait Tip

However one important tip I can give you is to make your subject look good. Pretty much everyone would prefer to have a portrait that flatters them. Don't go too far but make them look nice.

I was watching a program on the television about a famous portrait painter of the 18th century (whose name I cannot remember) and the commentator said that his portraits were sought after because he always made the sitter look a little better than they really did appear.

As the advert says - "You but on a really good day!"

If you want to do portraits as a business you may want to take this into consideration.


Caricature Video Clip

A variation on portrait painting is drawing caricatures of people. These are often a lot quicker to do and you can produce one for sale in a fairly short timescale compared to painting a portrait.

This is something I haven't done. I rather paint than draw! However if you're interested you can have a look at this short video.

It is an interesting video clip of Graeme Biddle drawing a caricature that you may find worth watching, I enjoyed it! He sells a course on how to draw them and has this video on his website. It's only about 6½ minutes long.

Here is the link so you can see it too

http://72c7adq0sfkhh4q2zabc1o7ya2.hop.clickbank.net/


I can imagine that once you master this skill that you'll be a very popular person with all your friends and family asking you to draw one for them.

I also signed up and received the free first part of his course. It has a further video link in it where he draws a more realistic face. This video runs for about 7 minutes and makes the whole process look quite straight forward.

You get further chapters at no cost too. I just received a video on using cartoon software to help with looking at the proportions of the face. I haven't tried it yet but it looks like it will be fun.





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