# Digital Art Tutorial: How to Paint Stylized Portraits - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/digital-art-tutorial-how-to-paint-stylized-portraits/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # Digital Art Tutorial: How to Paint Stylized Portraits Updated September 2026 Maxine Vee · Artist and Illustrator Intermediate · 36 min A tight 36-minute workflow for coloring a portrait already sketched, not a lesson in drawing one. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fdigital-art-tutorial-how-to-paint-stylized-portraits%2F1237789603) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. This course picks up exactly where a sketch leaves off. It assumes a finished lineart or initial drawing already exists, either the student's own or the file Maxine Vee provides, and spends its 36 minutes entirely on the coloring and rendering stage: values, palette, shading, hair, and polish. That scope is narrow by design, and the course is honest about it from the first lesson. The structure moves logically from foundation to finish. It opens with canvas setup in Procreate, including a practical note on choosing 300 DPI for print versus roughly 150 DPI for web or Instagram work, then moves into values, where the portrait is reduced to two or three tonal groups (light, mid, dark) using clipping masks so shapes stay contained. Only after the values are locked in does color enter the process, chosen with the tonal structure already in mind and tested using a black-and-white check layer that reveals whether the values still read correctly once color is applied. Lineart comes next, and notably after coloring rather than before, painted in a color picked from each shape's own palette rather than left black. This ordering is one of the course's more useful ideas: it treats line work as an extension of the color palette instead of a separate structural pass. The shading section is where the course earns its keep. Rather than relying on the brightness slider, which flattens color into gray, shadows and highlights are built by shifting hue, and skin tones are broken into three zones, a warm yellow near the forehead, a reddish tone through the brow and nose, and a cooler green-blue from nose to chin, blended together for a subtle but convincing sense of form. Hair gets its own dedicated lesson, treated as one large reflective shape rather than individual strands, with separate approaches shown for straight hair, braids, and afro textures, all built on the same block-shadows-then-add-highlights logic. The final stretch covers refinement and polish: tightening contrast around the eyes, adjusting color temperature, and finishing with a desaturated overlay layer to give the piece a softer, more cohesive look. These are small, practical moves rather than dramatic reveals, and they read as genuinely useful habits for anyone finishing a piece rather than abandoning it at 90 percent. Where the course comes up short is depth and pacing. Nine lessons in 36 minutes means most topics get only a few minutes each, and the shadow and highlight lesson in particular is trying to cover a lot of visual reasoning about head structure very quickly. There is also no instruction on sketching, proportion, or anatomy, so a student without a solid drawing foundation will follow the mechanics without understanding why the shapes are placed where they are. As a compact reference for finishing a stylized portrait once the drawing is done, it delivers real, specific technique. As a complete portrait course, it is not one. The standout The three-zone skin lighting technique, warm yellow forehead, reddish brow and nose, cool green-blue chin, paired with hue-shifting instead of just darkening for shadows, gives portraits a dimensional quality that a beginner would not think to apply. ## What you will learn - · Setting up Procreate canvas resolution and DPI correctly for print versus web output - · Simplifying a portrait into a 2-to-3 value scale (light, mid, dark) before any color goes down - · Building and testing a color palette, including a black-and-white check layer to verify values stay correct - · Painting lineart after color rather than before, using color-picked outlines matched to each shape - · Rendering directional light and shadow using hue shifts instead of brightness, plus a three-zone skin-tone method (warm forehead, reddish brow, cool chin) - · Blocking hair as one large reflective shape for straight, braided, and afro styles, then adding ribbon-style highlights Best for: Intermediate digital painters who already have sketching or lineart skills and want a repeatable, efficient color-and-shading process for stylized portraits, ideally in Procreate. Skip it if: Complete beginners with no drawing foundation, anyone hoping to learn anatomy or sketching, or artists who want deep, slow-paced explanations rather than a fast technique demo. Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Actionable Steps [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fdigital-art-tutorial-how-to-paint-stylized-portraits%2F1237789603)