Surrealism Self Portrait: Dali and Magritte Style Watercolor Paintings

Written by Teresita Blanco (The Artsy Sister)

Today, I wanted to show you my two new self-portraits. Both paintings were made with watercolors and markers. I used markers for the skin.

It saves me the trouble of having to blend for skin tone. Rendering human skin with paint is a bit hard. It wastes as lot of paint trying to get it just right.

So, for the sake of time, I used skin tone markers. I blend them together as I apply them in order to get the skin tone I am going for. The first painting is Salvador Dali’s Soft Self Portrait.

He was often melting things in order to create a dream like quality to his paintings. So, I made my face soft for this painting.

I added hair and other facial features to make it super obvious that it was me. I added glitter watercolor to the box that says soft self-portrait.

While I was making the painting, I noticed that Dali’s painting had ants coming out of the mouth and eyes. Some crazy folks have been known to hallucinate ants.

They feel them crawling up in their skin, and it is quite the stressful situation for them. So, one could speculate that Dali was either a creative genius or a mad genius, or a little bit of both.

The second surrealist painting that I mimicked is Rene Magritte. He is a little bit more down to earth, but not too much.

The painting that I am referencing is called The Son of Man. Instead of an apple, I had a yellow rose covering my face. I chose to make this change because roses mean something to me.

Plus, I am not a big fan of apples. I used an old photograph as reference. I was by the beach and the sky looked a little cloudy.

So, there was not that much guesswork to be done between the references, and the final painting. There is a little bit of glitter paint around the inside of the rose. I wanted to give it a nice sheen.

I learned a lot from this exercise. By distorting the face or adding random vegetables, you can turn a simple painting into a surrealist masterwork.

The videos showing the making of these paintings are already up and about. You can see them in my Tiktok and Youtube. I start with pencil. I trace over the pencil with ink.

I erase the pencil lines before adding the watercolors. I like working with the background first. Once I take care of the large element, I can focus on the smaller details.

This is my Artist Process. I hope you find it useful in your endeavors. My name is Teresita Blanco, the Artsy Sister. Bye, bye and God bless.