How To Paint Stylized Portraits
Go from reference to finished stylized portrait
Turning a photo reference into a stylized portrait is not about copying the face and adding bigger eyes or sharper shapes. It is about making clear artistic decisions: what to simplify, what to exaggerate, what to keep, and what to remove, so the final portrait feels graphic, readable, and full of personality. In How to Paint Stylized Portraits, you’ll learn a repeatable workflow for transforming reference photos into polished stylized portraits with strong values, expressive color, and a bold graphic finish.
Art Style
What it is, how it works, and how simplification and exaggeration shape the final look of a portrait.
Values
You’ll learn how to choose references that make your job easier, how to understand the anatomy of light on the face, and how to identify key light, halftone, core shadow, bounce light, and other important value groups. Then we’ll put it into practice by creating a full-value portrait from a reference.
Color
I’ll teach you my simple color workflow for stylized portraits, plus a more advanced workflow for complex lighting situations. Then we’ll create a full color portrait from start to finish, using playful graphic elements to make your portrait stand out
This course is for artists who want to paint stylized portraits with stronger values, cleaner color, and a more graphic finish.
It is especially useful if you:
- Want to turn photo references into stylized portrait paintings
- Struggle to simplify or exaggerate faces without making them look wrong
- Want a clearer understanding of art style
- Struggle to understand light and shadow on the face
- Want a repeatable and reliable workflow
- Like graphic, animation-inspired painting styles
This is mainly a painting course. There is a short head-structure introduction, but the main focus is stylization, values, lighting, color, and finishing.
The demonstrations are likely best suited for digital artists, but the concepts of style, values, light, and color apply to traditional artists too.
You can use any digital painting software to follow along with the demos. Procreate, Photoshop, Krita, Clip Studio Paint, or similar software.
In the course, I'll be demonstrating with Clip Studio Paint.
Another of my courses, How to Draw Faces Like a Pro, teaches the full foundation of drawing faces. This course focuses specifically on stylized painting, values, color, and final rendering.
Storytelling Portraits, another of my courses, is about designing original character faces for a story. How to Paint Stylized Portraits is about turning references into finished stylized portrait paintings.
