A portrait of Buddha. How to paint Buddha step by step.

I decided to do a painting of Buddha for my daughter's Christmas present. She had seen a lot of Buddha statues, small and large, on her travels around Asia. 

I worked from photos I had taken from my holiday in Thailand.

The first stage was to paint a canvas with a mottled brown paint effect. I used acrylic paints. 

I then sketched in a rough outline of Buddhas face. I used pencil initially, then went over it with black marker pen.

I then used black paint to do a thick black outline. I added in a bit more detail, plus a small amount of shading.

Next I started to build up areas of light and shade. I used small dabs of acrylic paint for the main highlight and shadow areas.

I then continued to build up the face with mixtures of black, white and brown paint. I tried to avoid grey, although have used it in a few places.  I have made the eyes a bit less wide.

 The next stage was to work a bit more on facial features. I have made the overall face shape a bit wider, altered the size of the mouth, and worked a bit more on the eyes, so they look as if Buddha is looking down. I filled in the ears, and slimmed them down a bit too.  I started to consider background shapes and colours.

After this I continued building up some soft background shapes. I did small details, to improve contrast and shading. I introduced some metallic paint in copper, gold and bronze. This was just put on as small dabs over the other colours.

I continued to work in some small dabs of metallic paint, so it became about a quarter of the total surface area. I finished the soft lines of the background, and changed the shadow areas to make the cheeks stand out more. Overall the painting became more brown as the shadows were starting to look too harsh. I sprayed on a very light thin metallic bronze varnish over the whole painting. This gives a lovely glow to it when the light catches it, and it makes it look different depending on the time of day and the lighting.

So this became part of my daughters Christmas present ...and yes she really liked it!!!!