For Christmas this year I painted a portrait of my daughter and her boyfriend.
Though the portrait was in color in acrylics, I started with the black lines only. The black line version looks considerably different from the finished painting, because much of the important information about facial structure is entirely composed of the other colors.
It was easy to segregate the black portions from all the others, as I had run out of ink in the color cartridge when I first printed out the reference photo. This allowed me to contrast the full color photo with the photo that only had black markings.
After I had copied the black lines, I added color. But adding color is not the same as just coloring in an outline.
Many structures did not emerge until the colorful shadows and highlights defined their boundaries. For instance, neither figure had a nose until the color portion built its structure and boundaries.
Here is a video about the painting process:
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