Japanese Style Watercolor Portraits: Learn to Paint Lifelike Portraits in 48 Easy Lessons

by Hiroko Shibasaki

The ability to capture a realistic likeness requires expert guidance!

Japanese Style Watercolor Portraits provides the professional guidance and all of the expert tips and techniques you need to succeed at creating beautiful, realistic watercolor portraits. With 48 step-by-step lessons covering tools, techniques, sketching, painting and finishing, this book makes learning fun and effective. It will take you through each step of the watercolor portrait process, from choosing a paper size and sketching your subject to layering in the colors and rendering the fine details. Author Hiroko Shibasaki provides expert guidance on the best materials to use along with many insightful tips that every artist should know.

The portraits presented in the 12 comprehensive painting tutorials express a distinctively Japanese aesthetic. The subjects in the foreground are rendered in exquisite detail, while the backgrounds are only subtly suggested. This technique places the emphasis on the masterful portraits, leaving it to the viewer's imagination to fill in the peripheral details.

The lessons in this book cover all the key topics,

Genres: Art

112 pages, Hardcover

Published November 8, 2022

Reviews

[Tara Blais Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 This book is fabulous. I highly recommend it for painters who are interested in portrait painting. I’m not certain it depicts the Japanese style of water colour painting per se as I have no specialist knowledge of any particular watercolour technique and it is for this reason alone that I do not give it five stars. It is one of the most detailed, step-by-step, instructional manuals of portrait painting in water colour form I have read.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title and the backmatter are misleading, "The portraits ... express a distinctively Japanese aesthetic" unless that's simply painting Japanese people with Western watercolors and techniques. Other than that, it's very much a detailed paint by the numbers approach to basic portrait painting.

I blame the publisher for this, the author makes no such claims.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully done. There are step by step instructions and helpful tips throughout. If you are just starting out, you may need to supplement additional guides or YouTube videos for capturing a likeness and color mixing.