Enchanting Portraits

Discover the Painting Secrets That Turn Lifeless Portraits Into Enchanting Works of Art…

For artists seeking to create portraits that captivate and resonate on a deeper level, you’re about to uncover techniques that go beyond mere likeness…

…and allow you to infuse your work with mood, atmosphere, and emotion — making your art truly unforgettable.

Thanks to his vast experiences and painting approaches, Zhaoming Wu, trained in traditional painting principles, Chinese ink painting, and graphic design, is going to reveal techniques that will make your portraits worthy of gallery exhibitions.

Inside this video workshop, Wu will guide you on how to use the right approach and techniques when painting shapes — one of his many secrets to give the portrait an expressive and painterly look.

You’ll learn key principles on how to give your work that “portrait quality” you’ve come to know about … how to “entertain the eye” ... and how to add rhythm and movement to your brushwork.

You'll also understand why highlight placement is critical for capturing a likeness, and why it's key to view highlights as a continuous element flowing across the form rather than as isolated features.

This video workshop is a masterclass in creating portraits, giving you the skills to take the human visage to a higher level — not to express only mood, but drama and movement too.

You’re about to learn the art of interpretation in portraits, allowing you to bring your subjects to life in your own creative vision.

Join Zhaoming Wu in his brand new video workshop today and see your portraits come to life!

Here’s a small taste of what’s inside Enchanting Portraits:

• Discover Zhaoming Wu’s unique approach to painting highly expressive portraits that are full of atmosphere and mood…
• Copy Wu’s brushwork techniques to make your portraits engaging and entertaining…
• How to select the right reference photo that will help you create a successful portrait…
• Learn Wu’s favorite types of brushes when painting portraits…
• How to establish values correctly…
• How to capture the gesture of the shapes to create an expressive, painterly feel…
• Master the classic “3 Color Zones Rule” for painting the skin tone of the face
• Learn the important “30-minute check” to prevent yourself from getting lost…
• Why you should never copy the colors from your photo reference…
• How to keep shadows from looking chalky…
• How to handle wrinkles…
• How to suggest things with skillful brushwork instead of rendering all the details…
• How to skillfully use edges to show distance and turn of form…
• How to use color temperature to create depth (“atmosphere” between the nose and the cheek, for instance)...
• How to use changes in color and value on the eyebrow to show the turn of form of the brow bone…
• How to capture the CHARACTER of the features…
• How to use brush marks effectively to show form — and why sometimes you want to go against the form (to add excitement and energy)...
• How to use an angled brush effectively…
• How to create RHYTHM in your painting…
• Wu’s brushwork technique that allows for spontaneity and expressiveness…
• PLUS: How to use different brushwork on different parts of the portrait to make your brushwork itself entertaining (this makes your portrait engaging!)

 …and a ton of other tips and tricks to make your portraits amazing!

Drawing the Head in Charcoal

Zhaoming Wu is a consummate draftsman who can draw in any medium. If you have purchased his book on drawing, you know that he uses the charcoal medium in many different ways to create works that have distinctive looks.

This video shows you how he approaches drawing the head of a beautiful girl whose hair might be a challenge for many.

His process of building from a layer of vine charcoal (in many forms) before layers with the more permanent charcoal pencil and compressed charcoal is easy to understand. He uses his fingers, palms, paper napkins and kneaded eraser to smooth, blend, and highlight the lighted areas of the drawing.

It is magical to see how he pulls this incredibly beautiful head out of blank paper. If drawing is your nemesis, this is a program you will want to view over and over to see how little is required to create a head of astounding sculptural quality on a flat piece of paper.

This is another program we recommend for your art video library, and one you will refer to often if you are interested in perfecting your drawing techniques.
-Johnnie Liliedahl

Solitude

Many of the finest artists to enter the American art scene hail from China. The period of modernism held no influence over Chinese art schools, whose mentors were the Russian schools set up in the first half of the 20th Century. Ironically, the beauty and power of late 19th Century, western, realist art was saved by the Communist regime of the Soviet Union when it banned all modern art from its schools and Universities.

Despite great suppression of artistic experimentation, Western representative art was sanctioned and encouraged, and used to spread communist propaganda through the images of happy, working class figurative art to a people who could understand the painted images these paintings represented.

While our Western art culture disintegrated into abstraction and paint thrown on canvases with no content, the Russians and Chinese continued the study and practice of classical painting. With the easing of tensions between China and the West, many of the Chinese, trained in the classical style practiced by the Russians, immigrated to the United States and brought their long-lost expertise to America.

Zhaoming Wu is one of those artists, whose knowledge and talents merge into a convoluted path from the Nineteenth Century Masters down to us, today. He is currently one of the most valued faculty members of the San Francisco Academy of Art, and he instructs and mentors artists in the graduate program in representative painting and drawing.

We had the great privilege of filming him in his home studio painting a lovely model swathed in cascading folds of material, a subject for which he is becoming known as a master painter. Wu uniquely articulates what makes a painting, how he approaches the process, and how he works from the live model, the photo, and computer references in his gallery work.

We are proud to add his name to our roster of master artists with whom you may never have the opportunity to work with on a personal level, and we believe he and the other Chinese artists who have come to our country have brought us a magnificent gift indeed. Don't miss collecting this important video for your reference library if you are a figurative artist. You will want to collect all his books and videos when you see the mastery under his brush.
-Johnnie Liliedahl

Sunlight

Zhaoming Wu is a consummate painter with the skill and bravura of the 19th and 20th century masters.

Educated in China, he immigrated to the United States where he paints and teaches at the Art Academy in San Francisco, training a new generation of painters in classical methods.

This painting is a study in painting the brilliance of sunlight falling through a window on a model posed indoors.

The amount of light that he is able to create on the canvas is astounding and it is a lesson not to be missed.

Working from photographs and images on his laptop computer, Wu is able to recreate a sense of mystery and dynamism that would seem impossible for some. His control of values and temperature are the secret to painting a light that seems to vibrate through the space on the canvas. Being able to watch a master of this caliber paint the subject from start to finish is worth the price of the video.