Pastel Portrait Tutorials

On these pages you will find listings of pastel portrait tutorials of people created by us as well as those submitted by you, our loyal audience. Here you will find step-by-step pastel portrait lessons and pastel portrait techniques on drawing the human head using various techniques such as beginning the construction using the traditional oval, or egg shape. You may learn the inside out system preferred by portrait artist Daniel Greene, the ball & plane method independently developed by illustrators Andrew Loomis & Ms. E. Grace Hanks, other tutorials, and more. We may even show you how to construct the features of the human head, which include the eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Being an interactive site, you will learn by practicing the tutorials freely demonstrated on these pages. Enjoy.

Oh, by the way, here are three fascinating websites with tutorials I recommend. Two are art related websites with one called Art Made Easy , and the other called Art Devine Slasher , which has oil painting tutorials as well as her exquisite art for sale. The last one deals with digital photography and is called Digital-Photography-How-To.com . As you no doubt realize, taking digital photographs of your portrait models can be very helpful in obtaining a good likeness.

NEXT: Drawgirl - A Pastel Portrait Tutorials Home Page



Besides the lessons I provide in this, my site, you can enjoy free pastel portrait video tutorials from a few talented artists. One is Kevin Bentley. Maybe you can have him create some custom portraits for you. Either way, do visit his marvelous site. To do that, please point your mouse directly to the tutorial page on Mr. Bentley's website found at:

http://www.bentleysportraits.org/Pages/MytutorialVideos.aspx

Another talented artist, named Jason, created a series of portrait video tutorials found on YouTube, called "Learn to Draw Portraits." Here is Episode 1:

Now, don't you feel that Jason is a good teacher and knows what he is talking about? Don't you want to know more?

Jason has created over 70 videos and it will take awhile to go through them all. If you want to know more, then see all 27 - and counting - lessons at this Learn to Draw Portraits Playlist .

To see all of Jason's online training videos, including his pastel portrait videos, go to Learn to Draw Playlist .

Also on YouTube, is an extremely talented street portrait artist. His style is more akin to mine and that is probably why I favor it so much. I keep saying on these pages that I often times just plaster a basic skin tone pastel color mixture all over the drawing of the face and other visible skin areas I am working on as a first color step. You can see that the artist under discussion does the same thing.

Our drawing styles differ considerably, though. Even so, we both start in the middle and draw from the inside out. Notice that he draws the nose first. I use the ball and plane method, as I stated elsewhere, then I begin in the middle.

This great artist's name is Gerard Mineo. He is a French artist and he can be found in France executing his marvelous street portrait paintings.

We have e-mailed each other back-and-forth in the past. It was during these discussions where I learned that he can do the initial drawing in about five minutes, and the whole painting can take anywhere from 25 minutes, for a hurried painting on the streets, to two hours or more in his studio, where he can take his time to do it right.

In the video, showcased below, he finishes the portrait even faster because he is dealing with a squirming and fidgety little girl, and children generally do not sit still for extended periods. At the end, you can even see that he is still working on her portrait even though she has left the chair she was sitting on. Obviously, he is a skilled pastel portrait painter if he can still work long after his model has left. Let's take a look.

Enjoy!

There are numerous ways of executing pastel portraits and you just saw a preferred method of mine, showcased above. Now, view an alternate method which you may prefer, or at least find fascinating.

Now all of that is all fine, well, and good; however, what if you do not know how to apply pastels in the first place. Well, for those of you who would like to know the basics of pastel application, here is a brief (less than three minute) video explaining the process:

Painting with pastels is sort of similar to painting with the king of painting mediums - oil. For example, in both methods, one can start painting the darks, then the mediums, and finally the lights and highlights.

You can study a method from a highly skilled oil painting artist named Delmus and see if you can apply the lessons learned there with your efforts to painting pastel portraits. Go ahead and visit Delmus's oil painting tutorial site, called... Easy Oil Painting Techniques .