Watercolor Self Portrait Paintings: Sonaly Gandhi and Nina Tokhtaman Valetova Style
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Above, you can see my latest watercolor self-portraits. I like to post them in pairs. These two painters are grouped together because they have similar styles.
Gandhi does squares patterns, while Valetova does psychedelic patterns. I am first going to rant about the Gandhi style painting.
Gandhi is a West Bengal, Hindu painter. She makes contemporary art and pop art. She always adds grid pattern to all her subjects. I chose to imitate her art because of this butterfly painting. I like painting butterflies.
So, doing this self-portrait was just the excuse I needed to paint more butterflies. I used soft purples and pinks for the grid pattern. I added a neutral shade of baby pink to my face to make the shading.
The hair was shaded with a soft metallic black color. It is important to underpaint the shading, before adding the final layer of color.
I normally do not use glazing techniques, but this was a painting that demanded a little bit more skill on my part. For the background, I added golden glitter paint. Gold is a good compliment to purple.
This helped me stand out against the foreground objects. The second painting mimics the style of Nina Valetova. Valetova is a Russian born metaphysical realism painter.
It is just the fancy, artistic way of saying that she does psychedelic looking artworks. I chose to paint myself using her kaleidoscope painting as reference. I used glitter paints liberally.
I even added a bit of shine to the white parts. It works better to add pearly white to the paper, instead of leaving it empty.
This painting didn’t require any shading. It was just a matter of adding the pattern, and then coloring inside the black lines. Both paintings were a lot of fun to make.
It is amusing to challenge oneself by trying different styles of paintings. You should try it sometime. I think I ranted enough about my watercolor paintings. My name is Teresita Blanco, the Artsy Sister. Bye, bye and God bless.