Fine Art Airbrush Lesson:
B&W Portrait

For this airbrush lesson I will show you how I painted the beautiful woman shown above.

(The original photo was purchased from (c) www.istockphotos.com/dpaint and is a copyrighted photo therefore it can only be used for demonstration purposes and not sold as original art)

For this project you will need the following:

• your airbrush equipment
• black transparent paint
• painting surface (I used illustration board)
• black water color pencil
• opaque projector (or drawing skills)
• Frisket
• erasers

Scroll down when you are ready to start!

Step 1

Using an opaque projector, or some really good drawing skills, trace all the details of the reference photo onto your painting surface. Add as much detail as you have patience for.

Airbrush Lesson: My typical "attack" is to divide the tracing into parts. First I outline the major detail (the basic shapes, then I mark all the darkest areas, then the lightest and then what ever I have the patience left to add.

Take your time in doing this - don't rush. This is an opportunity for you to stop looking at the image as a whole and start to see it as simple shapes.

I use a plain old pencil or water color pencil to make the outline.

Step 2

With people, I always start with the eyes.

Airbrush Lesson: Well rendered eyes make a painting (while poor ones can ruin it).

To paint the eyes I applied frisket to the eye area and cut the iris, the pupil, the highlights and the whites of the eyes.

First I removed the pupil and painted it full on black - I paint this dark area first so that I have a reference for what true black is going to look like in my painting (it is amazing how hard it is to tell after a while).

Next I remove the iris (the colored part of the eye) and with VERY diluted black transparent paint I airbrush only around the very outside ring where the color is darkest. I use the pupil I painted previously as a guide for judging darkness and let the overspray color in the rest of the iris area.

To make the iris more life like, I use an eraser to create some light spots in the iris... keep your reference photo close and refer to it often. Try to make the iris look just like the photo - not how you think it should look.

Lastly, using extremely diluted paint, I add the upper lash line and a few details around the eyes. Using very diluted paint makes this process very very slow, but also limits the mistakes.

Step 3

Here is a close up view of the right eye (her right). You can see that it is not perfect - but that it does have the necessary details to make it look like an eye.

In this case, the whites of the eyes remain fairly white so I will leave the frisket covering them on until the very end.

Step 4

Note: This airbrush lesson gets a little "fuzzy" from here because, for me, creating a portrait is about patience... not steps...what I have done is taken a picture approximately every half hour to show you the progress

Here I have very lightly, with diluted paint, airbrushed in the very darkest areas of the reference photo. See that they are not even remotely close to being as dark as the final product. These are simply just starting guidelines....and, if I make a mistake here, it won't effect the end result.

Airbrush Lesson: How diluted, you ask? In the early stages of a B&W painting I start with about a 10 to 1 ratio of water and paint. As the painting progresses (and as I get bolder) I increase the paint.

Step 5

At this point, I have darkened the darkest areas quite a bit - notice that her face is starting to take on some shape.... this is done purely by observing where the dark areas or on the photo, using the lines I traced in at the beginning and slowly applying paint in very light passes over the areas.

Step 6

Here I have added some of the medium shades in the hair and used an eraser (an electric one) to bring the highlights back.

Step 7

Here I have done a lot of work on the fingers to define them. When I need to, I use a shield made out of a piece of paper to help define the lines. There are very few hard edges in this photo though, so I don't want to use the shield too much or it will look too "hard".

At this point the painting looks really blotchy and the shapes don't make a lot of visual sense - it will improve though - you just have to be patient.

Step 8

This photo shows the work done on the lips.

Airbrush Lesson: Be very careful when painting lips - they are rarely big bow-tie shaped dark marks on a person's face!

Her lips are barely even visible in the reference photo and it took over half an hour of very VERY lightly adding detail to them to make them look that way in the painting.

Again - patience.

Step 9

Important Step

This is probably the most important step in any airbrush lesson - WALK AWAY!!

Take a little breather, walk the dog, eat your dinner - anything - just step away from the photo for a little while to get some perspective back!

When you work on a detailed painting it is very easy to not be able to see the forest for the trees - so give yourself this time.

When I walked away and came back, I could see that her face needed a little more darkening and that I had completely lost the highlights on her left side - this photo shows them added back in.

The change is subtle, but makes a big difference.

Step 10

At this point I am pretty satisfied with her facial features and hand - it is just the hair that need some work.

Curly hair is tough! There is so much dimension to it, and movement that it is hard to keep all the shapes straight - or is that curly :)

To help myself find the shapes and to be able to add the shadows where they were needed, I flipped the entire work upside down - this helps a lot!

Airbrush Lesson: Turning the painting (and the reference) upside down stops you from painting what you THINK it should look like and makes you paint what it ACTUALLY looks like.

Once I was done adding some shading, I used a black water color pencil to add in a few little details - this had minimal impact on the overall painting, but made me feel better about it.

Step 11

And here she is all done!

Since the last photo, I spent some time on the ring to punch it up a bit.

Now.... I know it may seem like this airbrush lesson was not very, well, instructional, but the lesson is here is not HOW to paint it - but how to approach painting it.

• Take your time.
• Go Slow.
• Look at your reference.
• Paint what you see.

Those are the lessons.

Speed, like anything, comes with practice!