Thanks to the extraordinarily good cameras built into most smartphones, almost anyone can take a decent photograph of themselves. Most of the resulting images are not great art, so what makes the self-portrait of a professional artist that much better?
See for yourself in the work of these masters (both historical and contemporary).
In Paul Cézanne’s quest to explore the possibilities of color, watercolors played a major role. They were studies for his oil paintings and were often key to understanding those works, yet they offered him an aesthetic that oil painting simply couldn’t achieve.
In the portrait above, Lucy May Stanton presents herself in a forthright, no-nonsense pose, displaying her virtuosity in handling watercolor. She followed the traditional technique of roughening the surface of the ivory so that pigment would adhere to it, but then tilted her work board to move the flow of the washes. In “puddling,” an innovative wet-on-wet technique, she allowed broad pools of color to shift over the surface and then dry, leaving a rich texture.
Fine-tune your watercolor portrait painting skills in Stan Miller: Watercolor Portraits.
