We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karen Wilharm. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karen below.

Alright, Karen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Learning to do portraits

Karen, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi! My name is Karen Wilharm, I’m a Fine Artist living in Savannah, GA. I paint portraits and landscapes and I also teach workshops, private lessons and do online mentoring for women artists. I have always loved drawing people and am incredibly grateful to get to do this for the bulk of my career. For my clients, I generally aim to capture the subject’s likeness to the best of my ability while keeping the application as painterly as I can and making the piece of art beautiful and enjoyable to look at. I begin with a client meeting and do my best to gather what preferences he or she has going into the commission. Once we’ve verbally established some ideas, we schedule a photo shoot and work together in choosing the best reference(es). From the top ten photos, I make composition mock ups so the client can visualize the references at the proportion of the final painting. Occasionally, I make adjustments in photoshop such as combining an head from one photo and an hand from another. Sometimes we even do an entirely new shoot. I do whatever it takes to get the best possible reference. When both the client and I are excited about the same comp is when I know we have the right one and I can start with confidence. Towards the end of the portrait, I share it with my client to get their final approval. If there are any changes they want made, I happily do them they are completely satisfied.

I always loved drawing the portrait, even as a child. In college, I started out in Scientific illustration (mainly because I didn’t how to go about learning to do professional portraiture). The illustration department taught realistic drawing, and I was interested in that. After graduation, I was teaching at SCAD and a professor shared a Daniel Greene book with me. That book showed me what was possible and I was encouraged to learn more however I could.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is that I get to share my spiritual gift. Whether that means sharing my experience with other artists who (like me) want to learn and need help or doing commissions for a family who will treasure a painting of their child. It excites me like nothing else to do these things and work with these kinds of clients. Doing what I love is a gift that I don’t think I’l ever take for granted. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or relaxing, it actually can be very difficult at times, But I’m ok with that.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I do wish I’d found a school or mentorship early on or ever! I took a long road to get here, learning on my own, taking workshops here and there, failing over and over again. I didn’t know that this could be a viable career for me back then nor did I know how to find artists that could teach me. The internet has opened some doors in that way. But more than not knowing, a career doing portraits seemed like it wasn’t a “real” option.

Contact Info:

• Website: Karenbwilharm.com
• Instagram: Karenbradleyfineart
• Facebook: Karen Bradley Wilharm

Image Credits
All images belong to Karen Wilharm