Benoit Toubab Baude

Fast, Gestural Painting

Fast, Gestural Painting

BY BENOIT TOUBAB BAUDE

Painter, Illustrator

Lille, France

Benoit Toubab Baude has a visceral feeling about painting on mobile devices and shares the process in his stylistic portrait. The steps in this chapter are built for speed where brush strokes and color become intuitive and spontaneous.

Step 1

I always start with color before painting to work with color’s contrast from the beginning. Here I start with the purple background. I can begin to place the head on the canvas with big strokes, I choose a warm skin tone to contrast with the cold, purple background.

My plan is to use these two colors and also use the many different tones that exist between them, to maintain a harmonious palette.

Step 2

I start to put the first mixed shades in place and play with combinations of these two colors to create the basic volume of the head.

Now I can paint with a lighter color to highlight different parts of the face, like the nose.

As I begin to put in details and refine the outlines, I always use brushes at less than maximum opacity in order to use the transparency for shading.

Step 3

Now that I have a nice basis for the head, I can start to paint the eyes, with a skin color a bit darker. I also use this color for dark areas of the face to work more on the depth.

I do portraits when I want to do a complete drawing on the iPhone, but I’ve found the iPhone a great digital sketchbook, great to begin a sketch or an idea when you’re not at home and continue it later on your desktop!

Step 4

I put in the first strokes of the hair. Again, I choose a color that is within the range of the original two colors to maintain a unified palette.

Step 5

I start shading the hair and the eyebrows. I love drawing eyebrows because they make up a large part of the facial expression.

Step 6

I start adding details in different parts of the face, the eyes and the hair, and choose a glowing red to bring out the eyes from the face.

I choose the shading for the color of the hair to outline the eyes and soften the red. To play with the eyes and to create a link between the face and the background, I add some fuchsia lipstick.

Step 7

To strengthen the depth of the piece and the neck’s depth, I add purple variations to the background.

Step 8

For finishing touches, I use a fine brush to put some motion into the hair with the same color as I’ve used for the shading.

Step 9

I put more shading details on the lips to give them some gloss, and I also continue to outline the eyes with eyelashes.

Step 10

In order to dress her up a little bit, I draw earrings using the same colors as the eyes, and demonstrate how one color and two tones, one light, one dark, can bring objects up from the canvas.