Portrait Painting

You will be tracing a photo of a famous person and then painting using a variety of brushes.

The instructions below are with Mona Lisa...

Or you can do a famous person of your choice. Just make sure you are starting with a decent quality photo (at least 700 px H/W), that includes some of the upper body/clothes.

1. Right-click on the image below .... "Copy Image".
2. In Fireworks, CTRL+N (to get a new document that size), Enter, and CTRL+V (to paste) and you'll be ready to go. 

Save what you have so far as "MonaLisa" in your Z:>Graphic Arts "Bitmap" folder.

You want to be able to see what you're drawing, so we make the photo lighter. Reduce opacity to about 50% in the Layers panel. 

In the Layers panel,

1. Select the layer with the photo and insert 2 new layers folder above it.  
2. Rename each layer as shown below.
3. Then lock the "Photo" layer and "Painting" layers, and click on the "Tracing" or "Sketch" layer.

Select the Zoom tool. Click and drag to zoom in on the face.

Click on the Pencil tool. Make it black, and check “Anti-aliased” in Properties.

Start tracing the face...

When you've done the face, zoom back out to 100% (double-click on Zoom tool). See how it looks by hiding the "Photo" layer.

To draw the hair, good to zoom in to 200%.

To draw the clothes and background, you'll want to be at 100%.

When you're done, hide the photo layer.

If you have messy/overlapping/thicker spots, like the ones circles below, you need to zoom in and clean them up (Eraser, redraw parts):

1. Lock "Sketch" or "Tracing" layer.
2. Unlock the "Painting" layer and have it selected. 

You can collapse the Sketch and Background layers, and hide the background layer contents as we don't really need that anymore. It should look like this...

Each time you paint a new area, insert a new bitmap layer for it.

You're now ready to start painting...

Brush  - find a skin color. Paint the skin. Don't have to be precise. You will be painting the hair and eyes etc. in separate bitmap layers and they can be on top.

Each time you've painted one thing, rename the bitmap layer.

Brush the hands in a new bitmap layer - easier for later, can have on top of clothes (then don't have to brush the clothes around the hands).

To clean up around the hands, zoom in on them and then you can use the Eraser tool, changing the size of the brush as needed...

... or you can use the Lasso tool to select areas and Delete.

• Each time you are going to paint another part, first insert a new Bitmap layer!
• Really zoom in as you're painting... then out to 100% to see how it looks (without background/picture).

Keep in mind what's going to be on top (be careful, clean up edges), and what's going to be underneath something else (don't have to be careful with edges). For example, you don't have to be careful with the face's skin because it'll sit underneath the hair layer, but the hair layer is on top of everything else so you have to be careful with the edges for that.

You should have many layers…

• skin face
• hands
• hair
• eyes
• lips
• dress
• background

Make sure you've saved your work before doing the next steps.

Click on the eyeballs to hide the tracing and painting layers. Unlock your original photo layer and bring the opacity back up to 100%. 

Then go to FILE>Save As... browse to your Z:>Graphic Arts 8>Bitmap folder.

1. Change the file type to JPG
2. Name your file "who painted 1 - your first name and last initial"

Then hide the original photo layer and show the "Tracing" layer. 

Go to FILE>Save As... and change the "1" to "2" in the file name.

Show the "Painting" layer now and then go to FILE>Save As... and change the "2" to "3".

Go to your Z:>Graphic Arts 8>Bitmap folder. Select the 3 JPG files and copy (CTRL+C)...

Go up to your main Z: level, double-click on your shortcut to "Hand in" for your class. Then paste the files (CTRL+V).