Easy Watercolor Portrait Tutorial

So this is my first tutorial.  Super excited!!!  I'm going to be showing you how to make watercolor portraits extremely easily.  This tutorial was inspired by Grow Creative's original tutorial, but I made a few adjustments.

First, choose the picture you want to create a watercolor of.  You may have to test a few photos, because some of them will look weird once you edit them, depending on the shadows.

Once you have your picture, upload it to Picmonkey.  Then, go to the Effects section, and scroll all the way to the bottom.  Then select Posterize, and scale it to 2 colors.  Leave everything else as is. 

                                                 

In the end, it should look something like this:

Then, print your edited photo.  Take a piece of water color or normal printer paper (I used printer paper.)  Lay your paper on top of your photo, and trace the photo in a dark pen(use a bright window, computer or phone screen.)  This may not work as well with watercolor paper.

Your paper should look something like this.  Don't be afraid to simplify your picture as you trace, because anything too small will be hard to watercolor.  Flip your paper over.  You should be able to see the pen lines lightly through the paper.  If you can't make them darker until you can.  Now, choose a color to paint in, and, using your smallest brush, go over the lines you made on the back in pen with paint of your selected color.  It should look something like this:

As you can see, I messed up a bit, and already colored in the small bits.  That's okay, you can awlays fudge the lines a bit, no one will know (except me, but I won't tell!)  Now, fill in all the parts you want to be colored.  On your photo version, the background will be colored in, but if you want to paint the face instead, that is fine.  I painted the background and the parts that correspond with it, and in the end this is what I got!

It's not evenly colored, but that's part of how watercolor looks.  I also got rid of some details that were to small.  Feel free to do the same.  And I don't know if you can tell, but the paper is a bit warped because it got all wet.  I ironed it after taking this picture, and it flattened right out!

All right, that's it!  You're done!  I'm doing a series of these of my entire family, pets included, and I'll update with photos when I finish!

-Amelia