Andrew Tischler – Painting Portraits

“This Portrait Painting tutorial is loaded with information to help you take your portraits to the next level! We’re going to dive deep into the process with over 7 and a half hours of content!”

I have been working on this tutorial for a long while and it’s been in my mind for even longer. I wanted to come up with something that would provide students with the optimal techniques to push their portraiture further. “Painting Portraits” is a jam packed tutorial full of real, actionable techniques that you can apply directly to your own paintings. I wanted to bring all of my ideas together in one place and demonstrate my methodology in a simple, systematic way.

Many of us don’t have the time and luxury of painting from the model directly, so here in this tutorial I have purposely focussed on a process utilising photographic reference. We don’t have to just rely on what we are presented with, we can push this so much further!

My goal for every painting is to create the illusion of a 3 dimensional form on a 2 dimensional surface. Here, we’ll discuss in detail how I achieved incredible, eye-catching results and how you can do the same. I hold nothing back, and over the 7 and a half hours we have together you’ll gain a better understanding of tone, colour, form, composition as well engaging textured surfaces built up with slick brushwork.

This will be the tutorial you’ll keep going back to again and again!

For our first demonstration I paint Rere, a stunning young Maori woman with strong features and a smooth complexion. Her facial features, along with her hair were a central focus for this painting. I wanted to go for a slick and hyperrealistic approach here; creating many layers with the oil paint to build intricate details. In this first section of the tutorial I talk about structuring the face, creating a likeness using proportion. From here we manipulate our reference and make a colour sketch. Systematically we build up the final portrait with a straight forward methodology; from the first stokes to the last fine details.

In our second demonstration, I create a tribute to JW Waterhouse’s “Soul of the Rose”. In this homage, I used Stephanie as my model. She had the kind of look, like she stepped out of a Waterhouse painting. We recreated a similar scenario to “Soul of the Rose” in a walled garden. In this section I’ll show you how I break free from the restrictions posed by my photographs and created something new and unique. I’ll discuss in length the process of planning and transferring the design, and then finally building up the painting with exquisite detail.