Portraits in different media

As those who follow my dastardly doings may know, I was commissioned to paint a portrait of Jeremy Corbyn MP - and decided to execute it in acrylic.  It has been a struggle - the forum member who suggested I'd have problems with his facial hair was spot-on! - and while I've achieved the sort of image you might find on a trade union banner, I wished I'd followed Alan Bickley's gentle hint, and painted it in oil.   I've painted few portraits - very few.  All but one of them were based on photos; never satisfactory, in any way.  You don't want to just copy the photograph, so you try to adjust and adapt it; and without the live model in front of you, this inevitably entails some guess-work.  Get it wrong, and you soon understand the definition of a portrait as being a painting in which something went a bit wrong around the mouth.... Having, I suppose, completed the acrylic portrait - I am fully intending a further fiddle, though! - I thought I would have a go with a few oil sketches as well.  Why didn't I listen to Alan?  Why? They have so much more life - I don't say they're great works, but the malleability of the paint is so ... well, hugely much greater.  I used Cremnitz White, yellow ochre, Mars orange, and a a touch of Cadmium Red.  The lead white meant that the paint was gloriously 'tacky' after a day's settling down, I used no Turps, just a tiny amount of Linseed oil.  And now of course, I want to lay the acrylic to one side and start all over again with a full-sized oil portrait.   I'll take photos of these various bits and pieces asap, and horrify you with them, and will, I think, tackle a full-scale oil; I'll also dig out a portrait I began of a lady back in 1998 - it's in a bit of a state now, but I think the comparison will be of some technical interest, because I used Titanium White rather than lead; I didn't think that worked too well, but I'd like to see this on-screen (which I find more helpful than actually looking at the finished, or in this case half-finished, piece in order to discover the faults in it).  I didn't finish the portrait because the lady sadly died very suddenly; it's not a very honest portrait, because she was extremely vain - or just insecure - and I would only have hurt her if I'd painted her as she really was, rather than as she had once been.   A fatal compromise, but I'm not the first one to have made it.   I suppose this is why I never really painted portraits - I may have a cruel tongue at times, but not really a cruel nature; I could never, for example, have painted Lucian Freud's portrait of the Queen - he painted what he saw: a bored old lady who had sat for a thousand of these damn' things and was fed up to the back teeth with it.  I think perhaps he exaggerated her general dissociation from the whole project; but perhaps better that than Rolf Harris's very competent (I thought) but somewhat reverential version: I shall always treasure the programme in which poor old Rolf was labouring over his creation, got to the mouth, and said "she looks like she's sneering at me" - Harris is an honest painter, whatever his faults may be; perhaps his fault as an artist is a degree of tricksiness, but - not exactly the first to strive for the professional's short-cuts ...dangerous to be seen to be making excuses for him, though, so I shall cease.