WIP some advice please!

Why pick a nearly impossible article of clothing to paint ? i wold suggest that you do the jumper all red and concentrate on painting a good likeness of the boy, as I assume you regard of more importance. Happy painting,....Syd

Eek .... Too much detail, too soon. You're trying to paint the picture one section at a time, whereas you'd find it rather easier if you brought the whole thing together in a unified way, and then, when you'd got all the elements blocked in and preferably brought the face and hair to a quite high level of completion, went to work on the detail of the clothing (if you really want to do that: unless this is a uniform of some kind which is integral to the character of the sitter, I should be inclined to go for a much more approximate look). If you really have to incorporate these design elements - some fleurs-de-lys, and what look like arrows, each row pointing in a different direction - then it looks as if they're crowded too close together and are smaller in your painting than in the photograph from which you're working - they look a bit like hieroglyphics in the painting, whereas they're more clearly defined in the photograph - you've over-complicated their shape.

Robert is of course absolutely right, work on the whole image and you will get a degree of uniformity and cohesion throughout the painting and I would also suggest that you start your next portrait with a tinted background, possibly a warm grey (Burnt Sienna/Ultramarine/White), which will avoid having a 'cut-out' space for the face and will help with your tonal range particularly when it comes to the flesh tones. These vital subtle changes in tone are much easier to see when applied to a neutral coloured background rather than white, a well known tried and tested method. It does look Lucy as though you are going along the 'photorealism' route which is a pity, if you are you will not be able to show any of your artistic prowess which I'm sure you have, a clinical copy of a photograph can only achieve a somewhat static and generally uninspiring work and is a topic that has been discussed on this forum many times with the general consensus of 'why copy an already good and accurate photograph, what is the point'. I'm sure that you will carry on with this one now that you've made a start but give it some thought for your next project, painting should be about passion, not just making a slavish copy.

The thing about painting is working from the general to the specific. It is not filling in the gaps between the lines of a drawing. If you take this approach, then you will end up with a ruined drawing. (A mistake that I made many times before I learned.) I agree with the others on this regarding the embroidery. The jacket has to be subservient to the face and therefore less detailed. Hope this helps. Linda wilson

I agree

Yes Lucy, I would block in your main tonal range and then add to it exactly as you would do in oils but keep the whole painting on the go, that means introducing some background work and the clothing but don't even think about any detail until you have all the basic shapes and area's blocked in. You should have a window of around an hour or so before the acrylics start to harden so you will need to get cracking and make some progress in the first session. Robert will no doubt be of more help as he is our resident master of acrylics and will have more advice to share but I would also suggest that you have a look at a few tutorial videos online, these can be so helpful in pointing you in the right direction.

Well worth listening to these guys Lucy.... I have and it benefited me.

There are things you can do to delay the drying time - one of them is to work with more fluid paint, whether that be with water or medium, or a combination of the two. Or you can buy an acrylic retarder - a few drops of that in the water, or directly on the paints in the palette, keeps them workable longer: you do want to avoid overdoing it though - just a few drops, or you can find the paint actually takes too long to dry properly.... it can make it tacky and pretty horrible, i.e. sticky, to work with. The thing about acrylic as opposed to oil paint though is that, as you will have discovered, it dries to a flat, semi-matte finish - depending on the brand. It tends not to hold brush marks, and if you want to build up impasto, thick ridges of paint, you have to apply it very deliberately or use a texture paste (or even a glue). So while it would be hard if not impossible to work fresh oil paint into dry paint (you'd have to glaze or scumble over it) you can achieve the appearance of working into dried acrylic: how is a matter of experience, but basically - say you have an area of red, and it's dried. You can't re-wet it and make the paint workable (unless you're using Interactive acrylics, and I wouldn't start doing that in the middle of this painting) but if you take more red, diluted, you can brush it into the weave of your canvas or whatever you're painting on in a mixture of the glazing and scumbling techniques is the simplest way I can describe it. And provided the colour isn't obviously different, eg you've used the wrong red basically, it'll work - it will look as though you had refreshed the base layer; so it doesn't matter that the paint has dried fast. I'm conscious that this may be as clear as mud but you'll know what I mean if you play with your paints on a spare bit of board or acrylic painting paper. The shift, the difference in colour, tone and texture is something you can control in acrylic in a very different technique to that which you'd employ with oil, in short. In fact, the more layers of paint you have, the easier it gets to manipulate additional layers - the really hard stages with acrylics are the early ones. This is why I actually value acrylic's faster drying times, and have no desire for Interactives, and very rarely use retarder: I have a bottle of acrylic retarder here which I got with my first acrylic set in around 1968 and it's still half full! I discovered I just didn't really need it. (By the way - it's still in good nick, amazingly.) Finally for now - people will tell you that if you use too much water with acrylic paint, it will be underbound, and will rub off. There's a long and complicated story here, but in short, they're right in theory. But you have to dilute acrylic very far indeed for that to happen - farther than you'd normally ever need to. Again this is partially dependent on brand. But if you want to retain an even finish in your acrylic painting, you're usually perfectly safe to just dilute the paint with tap water. Or if you do use a medium, use it throughout. Hope that isn't more information than you can easily digest - I could probably condense it down if I weren't a bit tired, but my overall point - yes to everything Alan said above; and don't worry about paint drying too fast, you can apply layers of fresh paint that won't clog your canvas as oil paint would, and won't muddy the colour precisely because what you laid down first is already dry. The fast drying should be seen as an advantage, not a problem, even though so many people seem to find it one. I can understand that if you're working outside on a hot day, the fact that acrylic can dry mid-brushstroke IS a perishing nuisance, but that's where your retarder would come in.

Doesn't need to be lifeless/uninspired! Don't go thinking or expecting that, or you might find it a self-fulfilling prophecy - we're suggesting other approaches to the ones you adopted, but it doesn't mean your work's doomed because you didn't employ them in the first place: I daresay everyone on here has forgotten all they've ever learned and gone straight into a painting method without sufficient thought that they'd never recommend to anyone else - I certainly have, more than once, seized by an idea and wanting to get it down, or just being plain thoughtless. You can still pull it round, and really, this one hasn't gone wrong yet: you've done nothing that can't be put right - and there's always more than one way to skin a cat. No method is so right that it need be followed every time.

It's always refreshing to hear back from our new members after many of us have taken the time to give advice, it doesn't always happen as we know and we can often feel as though we have wasted our breath so for that I thank you Lucy. There has been a wealth of advice and lots to take in but pick out the bits that interest you most and stick at it, in the meantime get this one finished and don't forget to let us all see the results of your hard labour. I am very passionate about my painting and although some of my comments may seem a bit harsh rest assured that they are all said for the right reasons, and that is to help and I am sure that that goes for all of us.