How do you start a portrait?

Hi Robert , I've done my fair share over the years ( for dosh ) and as subject matter portraits are not my favourite by a long chalk . I also always start with the eyes followed by nose and mouth , if the eyes are slightly off you're in a battle straight away and you're correct about the mouth the very slightest slip can ruin an otherwise good portrait . I always admire artists who can do extremely good loose believable portraits in oil and watercolur

I, like a good many of us don't paint too many portraits either these days, one of the main reasons for me is that you have to please the sitter, and that is not easy, they invariably see themselves differently to how me as an artist sees them. To please them means compromising in some form or another and that's not what my art is about, I don't think Lucian Freud made compromises, albeit as a brilliant painter he didn't need to and could pick and choose his models. Getting back on track, I only paint my self-portrait in the main these days, and maybe the occasional family member, always in oils and a decent size so that I can hopefully express myself in an impressionistic way and really let myself go, I do a self-portrait every year, keeps my hand in I suppose and is a record of how much of a change there is, frightening of course and they will probably all go on the skip when I depart. Going back some years now to college days and say life classes and figure drawing, portraits etc, we were always taught to be bold and block the image in as a whole, and never to work on isolated areas such as eyes and the like, checking the relationship of each feature carefully. This is how I work today, always scrubbing in my background base colour first which is important and covering the whole area, you can't work on a white background as your flesh tones are all relative to that background colour. After that I mix a selection of colours, both cool and warm going through the scale, time consuming but so much easier to work once you have these colours made up, and then simply work over the face in my case making positive and bold brush marks. I want to see brush marks in my work, a cool against a warm for example, I like that in a painting, I don't want to end up with a blended out photo, others will prefer to blend in these strokes. Finally, and only after all this is done I will use a smaller brush and tighten up areas like the mouth line and of course the eyes, but this is painted over many layers of paint which will have already formed these features, you just can't leave eyes as blanks until last and then expect to achieve any degree of realism, and as for starting with the eyes and working from them, that's not an option for me, but if it works then do it.

If I'm doing a full face self portrait using a mirror, I mark on the canvas two lines, for the top of the head and the bottom of the chin. Then a horizontal line for the eye level, usually half way between. I indicate the width of the head, which for me is the outer limit of the hair resting on the ears. If your ears are covered by long hair, use the cheeks as the boundary. It's useful to put two little blobs on the canvas to mark out the bottom of the nose and the centre of the dark shadow between the top and bottom lips. I often get the basic proportions wrong, mainly the face is too wide in relation to the height from chin to top of the head. I measure the important dimensions using scale dividers and resting them against my image in the mirror. At the art classes I go to I've never seen anybody else use dividers, so perhaps most artists don't like them. I then start drawing in the main features use a round brush, about size 2 and add the main darks and lights. Of course its much harder to do well than you think. Most of the portraits I do aren't that good, yet occasionally I get ones that I like. I paint on a coloured ground, usually diluted burnt sienna brushed on the canvas, then rubbed with an old cloth to make it paler and start the drying process. I paint close to a window, which gives strong light and shade and shows the form better, especially with a full face portrait. Three quarter portraits with the head turned slightly towards the painter, are better, but very hard to get right if you're doing a self portrait. It's the constant turning of the head, from the mirror to the canvas and back again, that;s the problem. I use a simplified palette (Zorn palette) for the face and hair - just yellow ochre or raw sienna, a warm red such as cadmium, a black and a white. You can get a surprising variety of skin and hair tones with just these four colours. I may use extra colours for clothing, background and eyes.

As the watercolourist who was stuck on the portrait of my son, I have found this debate fascinating, I have only been painting since Jan and only started using water colour a month ago. I have done a grand total of 2 watercolour portraits so far. For the first one, I started by layering the colours(not sure if that's the correct term) - starting with raw sienna(I think!) , then adding red, then blue. For the second one, I did a lot more colour mixing in the palette. People have said I am mad to try to paint portraits as a relative newcomer and especially watercolour portraits, but its something I am enjoying and really want to learn how to do well. I agree I found the mouth difficult on both paintings, especially as the head was tilted. I have added my updated painting to the WIP today and would welcome comments. Previously, I have found it very difficult to know when a portrait is complete and, when I did an acrylic portrait, lost the likeness by overworking it. This time, I had a couple of other works on the go at the same time and think this has helped me step back.

When portraits go wrong, it is usually in the drawing. What makes people recognisable is the proportions of the face - distances between features., so it is best to take time to get it right before adding lashings of paint. After roughly positioning the features and shape of the head, I look for light, shade, shadow, shine and reflected light.