Surreal Portraits, Fountain Pens, and Painting Outside My Comfort Zone

I bought a fountain pen while I was in Victoria, BC using some of my birthday money. It is beautiful. It has been sitting on my desk ever since, quietly judging me, because I paint — I do not draw, and I have not had a good enough reason to pick it up. Until now.

I have been toying with the idea of doing a collection of surreal portraits this year. Surrealism is something I love to look at and consume, but rarely make. My portfolio is mostly flowers and animals. A woman with a cloud for a head surrounded by pine trees is about as far from my usual territory as you can get. So I thought: let's solve two problems at once. Use the fountain pen. Paint the surreal portrait. Do it on inexpensive paper so the stakes are low enough to actually let go.

Building the Reference: Procreate as a Compositing Tool

I started by finding a portrait photo of a woman on Unsplash — one of my favorite sites for free reference images. But the surreal elements were not in the photo. I brought it into Procreate and added a cloud and some pine trees myself, essentially building a composite reference image before ever picking up a brush. It is a simple workflow and one I think more painters should try: you are not limited to painting what already exists in a photograph. Take a base image, build on top of it digitally, and then use that as your reference.

The Fountain Pen Sketch: Committing to Confident Lines

The fountain pen I used has a copper-shimmer ink, which I loved for this — subtle and a little unexpected. But the more important decision was not what pen I used, it was how I used it. I challenged myself to not lift the pen off the paper as I drew, which forces your lines to be continuous, slightly sketchy, and most importantly, committed. You cannot second-guess yourself when the pen never leaves the surface.

And of course — you cannot erase. That was the whole point. I sketched half the face, mapped the shoulder, and left the top of the head open because that space was going to become the cloud. If you want to try this approach but prefer something erasable, a pencil works just as well. Use the same no-lift technique for the confidence-building practice, and then erase the lines once the painting is fully dry — or leave them, depending on how they look.

Why I Chose Cheap Paper on Purpose

I painted this on Canson XL watercolor paper — a cellulose student paper that is not typically my first choice. But for this particular project it was exactly right. Cellulose paper produces very pronounced watercolor blooms because it is less absorbent than cotton paper. The paint sits on the surface longer before sinking in, which creates that unpredictable, textured quality I was after. For a portrait surrounded by atmospheric surreal elements, a painting that has some controlled chaos in it is a feature, not a bug.

There is also the psychological benefit. When you are trying something genuinely new — a new subject, a new approach, a new tool — inexpensive paper removes the pressure. If it goes wrong, it is a scrap of cheap paper, not a sheet of Arches or Hahnemühle. I genuinely believe more people would experiment more freely if they gave themselves permission to work on inexpensive materials. You can make a good painting on student paper. It might buckle more, the transitions might be less smooth, the colors might not be as lightfast — but you can absolutely make something beautiful.

I taped three of the four sides of the paper down to manage warping and prevent the drips from bleeding through to the sheets underneath — and because I wanted to be able to prop it at an angle. Even with all of that, the paper buckled significantly from the amount of water I was using. Something to know going in.

Painting the Face: Hard Lines, Blooms, and Letting Go of Control

I used Kuretake Shadow Black paints for this painting — specifically the reddish black and a purple tone. My usual instinct when painting a face is gradual soft transitions everywhere, blending hard edges away as fast as they form. For this portrait, I made a deliberate choice to leave some hard lines. That is the effect I was going for. Not every edge needs to be soft. Surrealism has an allowance for strangeness and structure that more naturalistic work does not.

I used my size 8 Silver Black Velvet round brush and kept the highlights as bare white paper throughout — no mixing, no lifting, just leaving the paper untouched wherever the light should be. The reddish black went in for the cheeks and lip definition; the purple for the ear, neck, and shoulders. I used a lot of water, intentionally, because I wanted drips and blooms. I propped the paper at an angle to encourage that movement downward.

One thing to watch on cellulose paper when layering: it does lift more easily than cotton, and not always where you want it to. When bleeding out and blending marks, keep your brush light and be mindful of how much water you are carrying. Too heavy-handed and you will start disturbing the layers beneath.

Pine Trees and a Sword Brush

For the pine trees flanking the portrait I switched to a three-eighths inch Princeton Neptune sword brush. The technique is simple: use just the tip of the brush and wiggle it back and forth to suggest branches. The sword shape gives you a lot of control over how much of the bristle you engage, which makes it great for this kind of mark.

One challenge: Canson XL dries fast. I had hoped to drop in the trunks and then add branches wet-into-wet so everything would merge softly. By the time I got to the branches, the trunks were already dry. The layers did not fuse the way I had planned, so I ended up going back in several times — adding branches, then noticing the trunk needed to be deeper in value, then adjusting again. It worked out, but it was a reminder to either work faster or do those studies on scrap paper first.

The Cloud: What I Would Do Differently

I do not paint clouds. I probably should have done a quick practice one on a scrap piece of paper before going straight in. I did not. I YOLO-ed it with a large mop brush loaded with water and paint, following the sketch I had assembled in Procreate.

The result was okay. But looking back — and looking at the painting now as it sits on my desk — I wish I had kept the cloud much lighter in value. I lost some of the fluffy airiness I was after by going in too deep. I also thought the paper was fully dry before I started the cloud, and it was not quite. When the wet paint hit the shoulders, the drips moved differently than I had expected — a little too thick, a little too obvious. I like uncontrolled drips, but these particular ones were more uncontrolled than I had intended.

In hindsight, rather than adding more splatter and pigment to try to fix the cloud area, I should have taken a soft tissue and dotted out some of the excess to lift the highlights back in. Removal before addition. It is a lesson I keep relearning in different contexts.

The Bloom Texture Trick and a Final Note on Imperfect Studies

One technique I used toward the end that I really love on this paper: wait until the surface is damp — not wet, not dry, but that in-between state — and then dot on clean water. On cellulose paper, this creates beautiful pronounced blooms that spread outward from the drop. Those circular texture marks in the final painting came from this, and they added exactly the kind of organic, dreamy quality I was looking for in a surreal piece.

This painting is not perfect. The cloud is a little heavy, the drips went their own way, and the paper buckled despite my best efforts. But I made a painting, and that alone counts as a success to me. I got to use my fountain pen. I got to try something genuinely outside my comfort zone. And I have a clearer sense now of what I would do differently — lighter cloud values, a scrap paper cloud study first, and possibly better paper to reduce the buckling.