Painting Figures - Demystify the Process
Feb 10, 2025If you're looking to elevate your work, painting believable figures in your scenes is a great way to introduce a feeling of life, vibrancy, and even a narrative to your watercolor painting.
4 Keys to Lifelike Figures
Here are some quick and easy tips to painting realistic figures in watercolor!
1. Your average adult figure should be just a little taller than a car.
Most often, you're going to be painting people who are a part of a larger scene. Remember to keep your figures in proportion to the rest of the painting.
For example, if you've painted a door, your people should be able to fit through the door. If you've painted a car, an adult figure should be just a tad bit taller than the car.
2. Don't paint a figure's head too big.
If your person's head is too big for their body, they will look like a child. This is a common mistake I see in student work.
These two figures have the same-sized head. Whether your figure looks like a child or an adult comes down to the proportion of the figure's head to its body.
3. Give your figure a sense of motion.
To avoid inert, uninteresting figures, paint them a little off-center with one shoulder more prominent than the other.
Experiment with poses. I often take a picture of a crowd (like the one below) and pick a particular person. Then I try to mimic their pose, position, and motion. Try it out!
4. In general, heads of figures in a scene should align.
No matter where your figure is in the scene (up close or far away), paint their heads on the "eye line" or horizon line.
Use scale to indicate how close the person is to the foreground rather than placement on the page.
How to Improve Your Watercolor Figures
This video is a part of a series of intuitive watercolor practices. A few weeks back, I taught how to practice painting trees. In a few weeks, I'll introduce another practice exercise.
Improving specific watercolor skills comes down to repetition. If you want to get really good at painting people, I suggest taking 10 minutes of your painting time, three times a week and just paint figures. Don't worry about color, mixing, or layers - just do what I did in the picture above. Paint people in motion. And, of course, if you don't have that much time to give this practice, set a goal that works for you. Whatever time you can devote will pay off.
Next Week on the Blog
Next week I'm going to be painting this boat and we're going to be paying attention to how to do this in steps to really make this light come alive.
I have new videos every Monday and you don't want to miss one of these, so go ahead and hit subscribe on my video!
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