Watercolor Painting: Portrait of My Parents (Clive and Maureen Wright)

Other than the Joe Desch painting, this is my first true attempt at creating a portrait.  This shows my parents, Clive and Maureen Wright as they appeared in a photograph taken circa 2000.   It was a beautiful photograph, and seemed the perfect inspiration for me to try my hand at painting figures.

My interest in trying a large format portrait came from reading (and thoroughly enjoying) Mary Whyte's Painting Portraits and Figures in Watercolor (http://amzn.com/0823026736).  Her amazing paintings have the rare quality of capturing both the likeness and the life history of the subjects. 


The paper I used for my parents portrait was 22 x 30 inch Arches 140 lb cold press paper, stretched and stapled onto a wooden board.  The watercolors (tubes and pans) used in this painting were primarily the following (Winsor and Newton):

• French Ultramarine
• Permanent Rose
• Raw Sienna
• Vandyke Brown
• Hooker's Green
• Lamp Black

A small quantity of the following colors were also used:

• Cadmium Orange
• New Gamboge
• Zinc White (Gouache)
• Davy's Gray

The following photo's show various stages of the portrait being produced.  To improve the degree of accuracy I turned to tracing paper to copy elements of the original photograph.