Begin with a thinned brown, made with raw umber or mixed from your cadmium light red and some ivory black. Look for the shape of the outside ear contour. Check for the height, observing the comparative points it is lining up with, for example the brow and the base of the nose. Shapes of ears are much easier to see if they are in shadow, as all the detail has been taken away, and when seen from a front view. However, in a side profile you are looking at the angle made from the lobe to the top of the ear. How slanted is it? Ears in profile will rarely be parallel to your canvas – think of the shape of a muscle shell tilted at an angle.

Delineate the basics – refinement and modifications can be adjusted later. Suggest the helix (the rim), the fold line of the concha where the fold starts from the inner helix, and place a darker area for your ear hole if your lighting shows it. Remember, you paint your darks first, over which the lights will go.

Next, start to block in skin tones and start refining a little. If you lose some of your initial darker-painted structural underpinnings, simply reinforce them – sometimes whilst modifying one element you lose another, and so more modification is needed. This happens often in the process of painting.

When you have achieved more or less what you want, check shapes once more. You can now start to finesse what you have. In this example the upper ear has been pushed and tweaked out a bit more to increase the angle of the ear. A little more flesh area has been added to the upper rim or helix by the temple to give more solidity and flesh space leading to the sideburn of hair. The light and shade to this portrait was focused on the face, which bleached out the ear, rendering more simple values with more monochromatic hues, so it was just a question of continuing to lighten the skin tones.

Depending on your lighting and to a degree the skin tone complexion of your sitter it is still often the case that the earlobe and tragus will be lighter in tonal value. The helix area (rim) will usually be warmer and darker skin tones; in fact it is often darkest at mid-way as the helix juxtaposes against hair or even with the backdrop to your portrait. Cadmium red light and ivory black are useful to make mixtures of transparent red-browns that can be applied like a glaze using your painting medium as a carrier to create these soft tonal transitions. Of course you can add a little opacity with your white and ochre – paint what you see. Once painted you can also achieve a further three-dimensional look by softening your edges, either by using a flat soft sable brush (perhaps loaded with a little linseed oil) to blend those hues slightly one into another, or simply smudge to fudge edges with a finger, which works equally well.

See Kathy's demonstration on how to paint eyes by clicking here.

See Kathy's demonstration to draw portraits in charcoal by clicking here.

See Kathy's demonstration to paint portraits with character by clicking here.

See Kathy's demonstration for painting lips for portraiture by clicking here.

See a demonstration on how to paint hair by Ann Witheridge by clicking here.