Turn Your Creative Process on Its Head with Charlotte Hamilton

In this watercolor session, artist Charlotte Hamilton flips traditional portraiture on its head—literally—by guiding you through painting a subject upside down.

When you paint an image inverted, your brain stops trying to draw a "face," an "eye," or a "nose". Instead, you bypass your assumptions and focus strictly on pure visual information: negative space, value contrast, and the raw shapes of light and shadow. Working directly with paint rather than a pencil draft, Charlotte demonstrates how tricking your brain allows you to avert overwhelm, build accurate proportions, and stay present in the process.

This lesson is less about hitting a flawless final likeness on your first pass and more about embracing the experiment, trusting your eye, and discovering the freedom of working loosely.

What You'll Explore in This Lesson

• The Upside-Down Technique: How inverting your reference image frees you from overthinking facial features, allowing you to see pure color, negative space, and abstract shapes.
• Direct Painting Without a Sketch: Diving straight into watercolor with a large brush, blocking in the lightest values and shadow masses before adding any detail.

• Lifting and Correcting: How to view mistakes not as failures, but as part of the natural rhythm of watercolor through lifting paint and refining shapes once the portrait is turned right-side up.
• Mixing Deep Values with Primaries: Building dynamic contrast and luminous shadow tones using a simple primary palette.

Ready to invert your portrait process? Let's get started!