Wrinkles and lips

Lips, the shape of the mouth, are crucial, and because crucial, difficult. There's a view that the eyes are the most important things in portraiture, but not for getting a likeness they're not: a portrait with dead eyes will look at best alarming, at worst just dull; but get the mouth wrong, and you've no likeness at all. I can recommend only practice, measurement - of the features in relation to each other, life class specializing in portraiture - of which there are few - studying plaster busts (I do wish that term didn't have a double-meaning, but you know what I mean), and books on portraiture plus DVDs, YouTube films and so on. You have to keep doing it, and look to getting the underlying muscle structures right. Which brings me to your point about lines and wrinkles: they don't just sit on the surface of the skin: if you paint them that way, you'll end up with a rather leathery look which will age your subjects. This is a very common beginner's problem, as a quick look at many local exhibitions will tell you. Lines form in older people where the skin creases, and deepen over time - but they always reflect what's going on in the muscle beneath the skin - in the young, those underlying structures show as different planes, not as hard lines. So to avoid them, you need to study the shape and volume of the muscles, especially round the mouth, the cheek, the way it abuts the nose. Don't try to delineate these changes with hard lines - study the structure, shade it in, be aware of its volume and plasticity - a good exercise is to use Chinese ink, or watercolour wash: indicate the shapes, the planes of the face without using lines other than the line of the mouth itself (and obviously be careful with that): observe where the light falls, where the shadows are cast. Above all, resist any temptation to draw an egg shape or balloon and then impose features on top of it - the surface of the face and skull undulate: skin may be smooth (or may not if you get to my age) but bone and sinew and tendon and subcutaneous fat form shapes, hollows, planes, and these in turn cast shadows. So - forget going for a likeness to start with, even forget features; draw an approximate head shape, and just look for the areas of shadow and prominence, and try to capture those in a monochrome wash (for which Chinese ink is ideal). Once you get the shapes to look convincing, in this all-purpose head, you'll have got half-way there - and the rest is observation, and more practice. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk

Forget lines on a young face. Good advice about concentrating on the major area of shadow. Psychologists will tell you that what makes a picture of a person recognisable is the proportions, distances and angles between the features. Age in a face is not all about wrinkles and lines:- Usually, the younger the face, the fuller the lips and in the case of children, the larger and brighter the eyes. Also adults noses are longer than children. Men in particular lose the upper lip with age. When working from life it pays to do the pencil measuring thing, particularly with angles. Common mistakes for beginners are: making the head too small and the eyes too big; putting the eyes too high on the face (the eyes are usually half way up the head); Eyes either too close together or too far apart (there should be one a distance equivalent to one eye between the eyes); Wrong shape of head (the highest pint is above the ear). Hope this helps.