Top Tips for Portrait Painting
Painting portraits is the toughest task for any painter. The human eye can distinguish minute differences between one face and another so any mistakes are immediately visible - there's no place to hide! Here are some tips to help you...
Start with an eye and work outwards. The key to getting a likeness is to get the relationship between all the features correct. Start with the corner of the eye, then judge the distance to the bridge of the nose, and then use the nose to move across to the other eye. Go back to the first eye and sketch in the eyebrow, from the eyebrow move the hairline and so on, building the face up in a series of small hops.
Keep working on the whole face; never concentrate too much on one feature. Your brush should be constantly moving between the features. This way you'll maintain the relationships between the features while keeping the painting fresh and spontaneous.
As a general rule, noses, ears and fingers have a slight reddish tint caused by the small capillary blood vessels that rise near the surface of the skin. Conversely, bony areas, especially the forehead, often have a slightly green or bluish tint.
Deep shadows for the face can often be created by adding burnt sienna (a warm reddish brown) or burnt umber (a slightly cooler brown) to your normal flesh tone mix.
To create very light shadows, try adding a cool blue (French ultramarine) or green (viridian) to you basic flesh tone mixture.
The 'whites of the eyes' are never actually white. Usually they're a very slightly whiter shade than the skin.
You can make a general, all-purpose flesh tone colour (for white skins) by mixing titanium white, yellow ochre and cadmium red. But good skin tones can also be mixed with different combinations of cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, burnt sienna, zinc white or burnt umber. Keep trying different colour mixes - if you find a good one, let me know!