Kathy Barker shows us how to paint ears in oils.

Ears can be pointy, jug-like, shell-like, have large or small lobes. These little nuances are important as they help you to achieve a likeness of your sitter. You seldom paint an ear in isolation, of course, but you do relate it to the shape of the head as a whole.

Alignment

Straight-on: When viewed straight-on, the top of the ear more or less aligns with the brow ridge, and the bottom of the ear or lobe is usually on the same horizontal line as the base of the nose. This will vary slightly depending on who you are painting – ear cartilage doesn’t stop growing and ear lobes become elongated with age.

Profile: The position is similar in a profile view but the lobes often drop a little lower than the base of the nose and the top of ears may mark-up around the eye line rather than the brow. The ears when in profile start at the halfway measurement based from the tip of the nose to the back of the head.

Position: Ears can also reinforce the angle or tilt of a head. For example, when a person has their head tilted down, the ear alignment will rise above the brow; when the head is tilted up, the ears will align much lower than the usual base of the nose line.

Mixes for skin colours

First prepare your canvas by toning it with a mix of some yellow ochre or raw umber with a touch of ivory black, diluted with a little turpentine. You can brush this on, or even spread it on with a rag or cloth and wipe back – you should have a translucent ground.

Top Tip If you make an oil-based ground using white your subsequent colours and painting will deaden and sink in a chalky way.

The reason for painting on a neutral-coloured toned canvas is that it is much easier to judge the values of light and dark; it is hard to decipher the value on a highlight, for instance, when it competes with the white background of the canvas.

Step 1

Begin with a thinned brown, made with raw umber or mixed from cadmium light red and 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. Ears in profile will rarely be parallel to your canvas – think of the shape of a muscle shell tilted at an angle.

Step 2

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.

Step 3

Start to block in skin tones and 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.

If you're new to oils, don't stop here! Explore our other beginner-friendly guides to learn all you need to progress and develop your oil skills.

Step 4

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.

Step 5

Depending on your lighting and to a degree the skin tone 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.

Top Tip A three-dimensional look can be achieved by softening edges, either with a brush or your finger.

Kathy Barker studied fine art painting at Wimbledon School of Art and portraiture at Charles Cecil Studio, Florence. Kathy tutored for several years at West Dean College and currently teaches at the Roehampton Club, London, and holds a weekly portrait class at her studio in Fulham. She has exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and exhibits annually with the Society of Women Artists, of which she is an associate member.

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