realistic portraits from pictures 2.0

Interpreting the Portrait from Photographic Reference as if Painted from Life

The workshop can combine Old Master principles—Rembrandt, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Hals, and later Sargent—with contemporary understanding of color, photography, edges, and visual perception.

The central problem

A photograph gives the painter too much information and too little experience.

It freezes everything equally. It can exaggerate contrast, flatten subtle color relationships, sharpen irrelevant details, distort perspective, lose information in shadows and highlights, and make every square centimeter equally available for inspection.

When painting from life, this doesn’t happen. The eye moves. It focuses and relaxes. It adapts to shadow. Peripheral vision simplifies. Colors are perceived relationally. Some edges disappear while others become important.

We are not learning how to copy a photograph. We are learning how to translate photographic information back into the language of human vision.

A 5-Stage Painting Method

1. DESIGN — See the person before the details

Before touching color, students should analyze the photograph as painters.

Ask:

Where is the visual center?
What is the dominant light-and-dark pattern?
Where is the strongest contrast?
What can disappear?
What can be simplified?

Begin with a raw umber block-in.

But importantly, don’t draw eyelashes, nostrils, lips or individual features.

Think skull, head, neck, shoulders, hair mass, light and shadow.

Reduce the portrait almost to an abstract composition.

The Old Masters understood that resemblance doesn’t come primarily from details. It comes from the large proportional relationships and characteristic shapes.

A useful rule:

If the portrait doesn’t resemble the sitter when the eyes are only sockets and the mouth is one simple shape, details probably won’t save it.

2. THE KEY — Reconstruct believable light

Now establish the major color masses:

background → shadow family → light family.

This is where students must begin correcting the photograph.

Do not automatically paint the darkest pixel as black or the brightest pixel as white.

Instead ask:

If this person were sitting in front of me under this light, what would I actually see?

Establish a controlled value hierarchy.

The shadow family should remain unified. Reflected light must remain subordinate to the light side.

This is enormously important because photographs often make reflected lights appear brighter than they would feel when observing a sitter.

Think Rembrandt: enormous complexity exists inside a remarkably simple organization of light and shadow.

At the end of Stage 2, the painting should already read convincingly from across the room.

3. COLOR — Replace photographic color with flesh

Now introduce halftones.

This is where the portrait begins moving away from the photograph.

Rather than asking:

“What color is this pixel?”

ask:

“How is the plane turning relative to the light?”

The forehead, cheekbone, muzzle, jaw and neck are planes receiving light at different angles.

As forms turn away from the light, temperature and chroma change.

This gives us a beautiful contemporary synthesis of academic painting and perceptual painting:

Value describes the light.
Temperature helps describe the turning of the form.
Chroma describes the character of the flesh.

Students can exaggerate these relationships slightly if necessary.

A photographic face may look uniformly beige. A painted face can contain muted reds, ochres, violets, greens, cool greys and warm reflected notes—without becoming colorful for its own sake.

This is where painters such as Sargent become particularly instructive.

4. FOCUS — Paint features as forms, not objects

Only now do we really address eyes, nose and mouth.

This is where students commonly return to photographic thinking.

Instead of:

“Now I’m painting the eye.”

teach:

“I’m painting the plane around the eye socket.”

The eye emerges from the surrounding flesh.

Likewise, don’t “draw the nose.” Paint the planes around it until the nose becomes inevitable.

Don’t outline the lips. Paint the muzzle, the turning planes of the mouth, and the temperature/value relationships between upper lip, lower lip and surrounding flesh.

A particularly useful sequence is:

socket → brow → eye → nose planes → muzzle → mouth → chin.

And constantly reconnect each feature to the larger head.

5. ORCHESTRATION — Make it a painting

This is perhaps the most important stage of the workshop.

Now students should deliberately depart from the photograph.

Walk several feet away.

Ask:

Where do I want the viewer to look?

Everything does not deserve equal resolution.

Sharpen selected passages. Lose others.

Simplify hair.

Merge part of the head into the background.

Suppress clothing details.

Reduce unnecessary highlights.

Strengthen one or two accents.

Soften transitions that the camera recorded too sharply.

This introduces the idea of hierarchy of finish.

The painting might contain:

5% highly resolved information
20% descriptive information
75% suggestion

—not as a rigid formula, but as a way of thinking.

Sargent is particularly powerful here. What appears extraordinarily detailed from a distance often dissolves into surprisingly economical shapes and strokes when examined closely.

The Five Things the Painter Must Correct in a Photograph

I would make this a major teaching component of the workshop.



Photograph tends to

Painter should

Sharpen everything

Create an edge hierarchy

Freeze everything

Introduce movement and selection

Flatten color

Reconstruct temperature relationships

Compress or exaggerate values

Re-establish a believable light key

Give equal importance to details

Establish visual hierarchy

This is essentially the bridge between photographic vision and painterly vision.

The Edge Map

I would add an exercise specifically about edges, because this may be the single most effective way to make a photo-based portrait stop looking photographic.

Before refinement, students identify four kinds of edges:

Lost — Soft — Firm — Sharp

There should be very few truly sharp edges.

The sharpest edge should usually occur near the focal area.

Some contours should disappear entirely.

Hair should merge with background in places. Shadow may merge with the neck. One side of the face may dissolve while the other becomes more articulate.

Instead of painting the entire silhouette equally:

find → lose → find → soften → accent.

That rhythm immediately makes the painting breathe.

A powerful workshop exercise: The “Anti-Photo” Study

Before students begin the final portrait, I would have them make a small 30–45 minute study from the photograph.

But impose rules:

No small brushes.
No details.
No eyelashes.
No individual hairs.
No nostril drawing.
No hard outlines.
Maximum 15–20 major shapes.

The objective is to make the portrait recognizable using the minimum possible information.

Then students make a second small study concentrating only on temperature and edges.

Only after those exercises do they begin the larger portrait.

This could dramatically change the way they approach the final painting.

Old Masters + Contemporary Vision

The workshop shouldn’t pretend that Old Masters painted exactly as we should today.

Instead, we extract principles.

Rembrandt teaches selective illumination, shadow unity, psychological focus and lost edges.

Velázquez teaches economy—the astonishing ability of a few correctly placed relationships to become reality.

Frans Hals teaches gesture and the vitality of the visible brushstroke.

Van Dyck teaches elegance of design and organization of flesh against surrounding masses.

Sargent becomes the bridge toward modern painting: simplification, confident shapes, edge hierarchy, color economy and extraordinarily selective finish.

Then contemporary painters can take those principles further because we understand what cameras do. We can deliberately compensate for lens distortion, HDR, white balance, digital sharpening and compressed tonal information.

The final principle: Paint the experience, not the evidence

This could become the philosophical heart of the workshop.

The photograph says:

“This is what was there.”

The painter asks:

“What was it like to see this person?”

Those are profoundly different questions.

The portrait painter selects what deserves attention, what should disappear, what should remain mysterious, where the eye should rest, where it should travel, and ultimately what kind of presence the sitter has.

That is precisely why a successful portrait painted from a photograph can still feel completely alive.

And I think this workshop could fit extremely well after your Alla Prima workshop: the Alla Prima class teaches how to paint what you see, while this one teaches the more sophisticated problem of how to decide what should be seen.

Oil colors:

• Whites: lead or Titanium White
• Yellows: cadmium yellow light and yellow ochre.
• Reds & Oranges: CVermilion or cadmium red. Terra Rosa.
• Purples & Pinks: Alizarin Crimson, cobalt violet.
• Greens: Viridian.
• Blues: Cobalt blue, French ultramarine.
• Browns: Burnt Siena, Raw Umber.
• Black: Ivory black

Brushes:

•Bristles:

Filberts #2, 4, 6, 8

Flats: #4, 6

•Soft (sable or synthetic:

Rounds  #0, 2, 4.

Filberts #2, 4, 6

Medium:

•Linseed oil. (or walnut oil)
•Odorless Mineral spirits for cleaning the brushes (with a cup or container)
(“No turpentine allowed in the studio”)

Canvases:

•One  18” x 24’’  or  20”x 16”

Canvas panels are also ok.
Centurion brand, oil primed linen recommended.

"LEAVE YOUR CANVAS WHITE" as Sorolla used to do. dont stain it, don't paint any wash or imprimatura on it.

•Palette knife.
•paper towel
•palette
•mineral spirits (odorless)