How To Draw Portrait |a the young girl

This isn't Facebook, prisoner 9641798; we expect some words to go with yet another link to a YouTube vid. Is this you drawing in the video? Somebody else? Why do you like this video? What's in it for us?

I think the poster's first language isn't English, but I found the link to the demonstrations from his first posting (of an oil painting) and there are many other demos to be found on the same site - I was more interested in this one because drawing as we all doubtless know is a lot harder than painting - you can cover things up in paint.... And I think I might learn rather more from it. So I can take a few of these! Even so, I understand what you're saying - but it's not costing us anything, the demos are of interest; so I welcome them thus far at least. By the way, while I'm at it - many thanks for your reports of spam posts: they're very helpful because neither I nor the site staff would always notice them without a bit of help: I'm hoping that the speed with which they're removed may yet discourage the spammers. Well, you can always hope..... Wish I could clear out the blog page too, but we have our limitations......

Robert, why do you think that drawing is harder than painting? I'd have said it's the other way round. When drawing you've only got tones (values) whereas with painting there's thousands of colours to consider. I found a comment by John Ruskin, who wrote that painting was a " thousandfold " times more difficult than drawing. It's in his book, the Elements of Drawing, at the start of the final chapter on colour and composition.

Drawing depends on many things - line, tone, spatial relationships, all of which you have to get right if the drawing is going to be successful (saleable, perhaps, more accurately). A painting using opaque colour - watercolour is something else - requires the same things, but you can keep going in layers, correcting, cutting in, painting out. All that colour mixing requires is experience and the basic knowledge to start with - once you have those, it's not difficult and by dint of labour you can usually achieve something presentable. All you get if you try that with drawing is a ghastly mess. Ruskin may have been talking about watercolour rather than oil painting, and that is far more difficult than drawing; but if he was talking about oil painting as well, I disagree with him there as strongly as I do with his remarks about Whistler. Incidentally, if you can't draw you're unlikely to be able to paint, abstracts to one side - which suggests that drawing is the fundamental skill that has to be acquired if your paintings are going to work.

He's talking about the Victorian method of watercolour painting - it is gouache, technically, but I don't think he would have used that term - this is the use of watercolour with a little white to make "body colour". The Victorians very often used small quantities of Chinese (Zinc) White to add a little opacity - it required very careful handling or you lost the transparency, but any Victorian painter would have known that. There's a very interesting guide to painting by Hesketh Hubberd, part of which was reproduced by Winsor and Newton, in which he harks back to this technique and advises .... I'll find it, rather than guessing at what he said: (you are to imagine a feverish search amongst my papers here, because that's exactly what has just happened...). "White has been excluded from the water-colour mixtures [in the booklet] though its moderate use with colours often adds to their subtlety" - Hubberd wrote a book "Notes on Colour Mixing", which I don't have, and I suspect is long out of print; it would also be out of date in many ways because paint technology has moved on since then. But it described this method, well known to Turner and Constable. Later watercolourists have emphasized "pure" watercolour - ie, with no body colour (ie, white) but this term isn't helpful really, even though very prominent watercolourists have employed it, since it's fairly meaningless if a painter has used Naples Yellow, or Light Red, both of which contain a good dose of opaque white already. And finally, just to put the cherry on top - there is a good reason not to call this method gouache painting, because of course you can buy gouache in tubes; it's already opaque and produces a very different look to watercolour with or without body colour added. It's likely to have Titanium White mixed with it, rather than Chinese/Zinc White, and that is much more opaque: you can of course buy Titanium White in watercolour now, to add all sorts of effects which would have been difficult for Ruskin (who nevertheless employed watercolour with absolutely masterly skill).