Step 1

There are a whole bunch of ways to sketch your picture before you paint and a whole lot of mediums to use to sketch it with but I like to get into the painting as quickly as possible so . . . here's my thoughts about some of the other methods and why I discarded those ideas:

pencil - takes too long and I get too detailed with pencil, I've also found that sometimes the lead mixes with my paint and makes a sort of grey mess

charcoal - same mess but some artists swear by it. I get messy enough with the paint, don't need any extra black sooty mess around me or the studio

enlargers - maybe, if I have the time to adjust it so that there's no distortion (which is easy to get when the enlarger is out of level) plus on this piece it's the spontaneity that's important, not the accuracy of details

Grid - nope, not on this one (see the commissioned portrait blog for details on that method) Besides, I'm ready to paint, not measure little squares.

So you see, there are lots of other ways I could approach this painting but I've chosen to just jump in and start. Therefore, here I go as I load a paint brush that is larger than I might normally use so that I won't get too tight on the drawing part. I usually use whatever is left on my palette OR a little light brown or yellow ochre paint. Looking carefully at the photo and it's placement of objects I use this observation as my first guidelines for showing me how tall the piece should be, where it should come in relation to the sides of the canvas and any outstanding features. The more the photo correlates to the painting (8 X 10 to a 16X20, rather than an 8 X 10 to a 11 X 14) the easier this is to do. I can see that the head comes about 1/3 over from the right side of the canvas, the guitar is at a 45 degree right in the center of the canvas, etc) These guideline points are marked in with quick lines or slashes of paint. Now I have the parameters of my piece.

In this painting my subject is a human. There are all sorts of schools, books, rules, etc for drawing the figure. For example the full figure of a normal person should be 7 - 8 heads tall. Once you draw an egg shaped area for the head, you can measure down 7 - 8 heads (refer to your photograph or model) and make a mark so that you will know where the feet need to go. Likewise you can "measure" this way to find out where the waist goes, the arms and the hips. From there the legs and knees and bends can be "measured" and figured.

OK, so you hate to measure. Trust Jane's Perspective on this - you'll measure now, when you can correct everything easier or you'll end up completing the painting only to find out that something just doesn't look right and you'll have to measure later to find out what to do about it. Do it now and save some grief later. And it doesn't have to be ruler type measuring. Just line up your paint brush with the height of the head on the photo. Slide your finger back to note the length of the head. Move that measurement to the body or the arms or the leg on the photo and see how it compares. Is the forearm the exact length of the head? Is the chest two heads tall? Is the knee to the foot one and one half heads tall?

Likewise, measure the head that you drew on your painting. Use the same proportions that you discovered on the photo to measure how long the forearm needs to be or how wide the shoulders need to be. If the forearm of the photo was the same length as the head on the photo, you make the forearm of the painting as long as the length of the head in the painting. Get it? Make tiny slash marks for the proper lengths or widths or anything you want to measure and all you will have to do is fill in the blanks between these marks.

Here's another hint I use to create my figures. I draw stick people. Yep, good old stick folks so that once I start measuring I can just draw right over or rearrange body parts as necessary. You can sorta see the stick figure in this painting and you can see how the parts relate to each other. I add more details as I get the parts in the right spaces.

In this picture you can see how I change my sketch as I go along. Normally I just use one neutral color like a yellow ochre to draw my picture but in this demo I switched to a darker brown so that you can see the corrections I make as I go along.

Up close you can see how much the leg moved. As I created the body I start not only measuring but relating one part to another. When I drew an imaginary line straight down from the shoulder I saw that the foot should have been directly below. I had it too far to the left so I moved it in the sketch. Imagine how much trouble this would have been had I painted the whole painting and then tried to move the whole leg over.

You can get as detailed as you want with this initial sketch and if you find mistakes you can easily cover them with paint later in this project. Plus because this project is so spontaneous with the colors, some of these "mistakes" make turn out to be happy accidents. Look how, in this sketch, the leg seems to have motion. Likewise on the hip, as the guitar came into play I saw where the hip needed to come over to the right more. Again an easy fix at this point.

Like I said, you can take all day and draw details til the cows come home but aren't you ready to paint yet? I am. So here I go with one of the most unusual underpaintings that you will ever see.

Totally different

Today I'm starting my blog with Jane's Perspective on an American icon. This piece is the fifth in a series of famous American musicians, artists, and movie stars - the ones that are immediately identifiable. The title of it is "American Icon" but you can pretty much tell who it is. The other paintings in this series, so far, include Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Jim Morrison, John Lennon and another Elvis. Though they are all portraits, they are completely different from the last series of blogs because in these I am trying to delve deeper in my painting to create an "atmosphere" or "attitude" about the portrait. Instead of copying what I see, I use the subject to create what I "feel".

To make myself dig deeper into the "feel" of the person, place, and event I work hard to find or re-create (sometimes simply by copying on my printer) a sepia or black and white photo for reference so I will not be tempted to paint the colors that I see.

I mean, this picture of Elvis that I used as my reference just screams excitement. The black and white makes me use my imagination for the colors. The awkward pose stresses the "movement" of the moment more than just the posed figure. Now, I not only have a subject but I have ideas popping in my head for color and lively-ness (is that a word?).

But how did I get from black and white to the colors of the completed painting? Here's my step by step Jane's Perspective "secrets".

First of all, it takes nothing fancy in the way of supplies. This painting was done in acrylics but I could just have easily done the picture in oils. Oils might have taken more time since I might have to wait before I applied each layer of color to prevent excessive blending, and I really wanted to get to the finished product sooner. The brushes, as you can see, are just some old scruffy ones like I use in all my work. OK, sometimes I buy new brushes, but these old ones just work so well, I hardly ever discard them. Notice two things. First of all, none of the brushes are smalled than a #8 flat and secondly, notice the condition of the second brush from the top in this photo. That's not a special brush that you can just go out and buy. It's a square brush that has been literally "sanded" off on the edges as I paint on some of my rough surfaces. For a painting with as much texture (both real and impressioned) as this one will have, I like a rough stretched canvas. I stretch my own and gesso once with no further refinement or sanding and re-gessoing. AND in this case, the canvas already had a painting on it that had a whole different type of texture on it created from the underlying painting. I just gesso-ed over the old painting and began this one. Sometimes I don't even gesso over the old one - I just turn it upside down and begin the new painting. Talk about strange colors that appear!

My palette for acrylics is a Masters Stay Wet Palette. Boy, I wish I had a nickle for every time I recommend this palette to acrylic painters. But I really love it. Here is the palette as I start my work. The paper in the palette is stained from a previous smaller work but all I did was wash the paper off and set it back on the sponge in the palette. When I put out my acrylic paint (you can see a nice little blob of yellow ochre on the palette) and finish for the day, I just close up the set and can literally open the set two to three days later and the paint will still be wet. Yep, that's right, acrylic paint still wet after three days! This is great if I've created a color that I don't want to have to try to re-mix. The only thing I have seen people do "wrong" with this set is to spritz your paint with water. This is not a watercolor tool. You don't spritz the paint like watercolors, you just get the sponge wet. All the instructions are in the "kit" when you purchase one. By the way, one of my Jane's Perspective pet peeves is to see someone try to reconstitute their acrylics by spritzing them. All that does is make a big watery mess. Acrylics is a plastic kinda paint. It does not reconstitute like watercolor. In acrylic's dry state it's just hunk of plastic that basically repels water so why spritz?!?

Because this painting is so colorful, I thought I'd let you see the palette at the end of the painting. Sometimes even palettes can be inspiring. Next blog, I start the painting. You're gonna get a kick out of how strange it looks as I begin.

Hair and There

With all the measuring and trial and errors to the face completed you are now ready to either chunk it all and go back to painting still lifes and landscapes or you have found that you have a pretty good likeness and can continue on to the hair. Congratulations. For the hair you must do that squinty thing again so that you can see the shadows and follow my Jane's Perspective rule of using at least 3 colors to paint something. You need the color of the object, the shadow color and the highlight color. Mix these colors and test them on the baggie that contains you photograph. When you get a good match for the hair you can paint the shadows in with a medium size brush. Once you have the shadows in place (just blocked in basically) then you can paint in the rest of hair in its' natural color. With enough paint on your portrait's hair you can then pick up a round or liner brush to actually paint each little hair. It's sort of like brushing the subjects hair with this little brush. Without picking up any paint on this brush, you should be able to stroke through the shadow colors and hair colors to make the individual hairs. You run the paint strokes in the exact direction of the hair. Now, I admit that's going to take a while with one little pointy brush, so what I do to speed up the process (and keep my sanity) is to use my fan brush to "brush" the hair. I have various sizes of fan brushes so I can get into the small areas OR here's a good and economical idea - whenever anyone tells you that they "used to paint" but they don't paint anymore and want to know if you want their old paint brushes - grab them. Some of them will be in excellent shape and some will honestly be kinda scraggly. It's the little scraggly ones that you'll find useful here. Those scraggly bristles will create wonderful fine "hair lines". So, Jane's Perspective says that no brush is really a "throw-away". Even if you just use them to clean between the grout cracks in the bathtub - I've found a use for almost every old paint brush I've come upon.

Once you get all the hair strokes in place, you can add the highlights the same way. Squint you eyes so that you won't do too many - just the ones in the photo. Highlights are like accessories. Too many and it's not a highlight anymore, it becomes more of a "what's all that white stuff in their hair?" (Dont you just hate it when someone can't see your artistic vision?)

Once you get these beautiful hair strokes in place you can start on the details of the clothing. Remember to use three colors, the color of the cloth, the shadow color and the highlight color. In my example I had the misforture (or challenge) of creating plaid!!! What I found useful was to paint the background fabric color (in this case, white), then shade the white. I did this on both the hat and on the dress. Then I took a good look at the direction and colors of the plaid, used a dry brush of red and blue and crisscrossed the colors. The hat was rather simple to duplicate. . .

as was the bow, since it was just a matter of using the color of the bow, creating the shadows and then the highlights with my mixed colors. . . BUT

the sleeve was something else. The pattern of the plaid actually had to run with the folds. Careful observation was the biggest help. If you have stripes or a checkerboard pattern to paint you can easily see what I mean. Watch carefully how each line "jumps" as it goes over a fold or how each box of the checkerboard pattern, shifts. Then you may need to add a little more shadow. I can recommend a glazing technique here. Once the picture is dry, use a little liquin with your paint which will create a transparency. Painting a transparent shadow over the patterned area will create a delightful subtleness. The liquin will also help the oil to dry faster so that you can add more layers of shadow if needed. If you have no liquin you can thin your shadow color with mineral spirits but make sure the paint is good and dry or you will thin out and smear the whole thing.

There, now we have the whole portrait completed. I'm sure there's probably something I've left out or a question you have about your particular portrait so I'm available at LivePerson.com if you need some personal help. I'm also tempted to delve into the world of videos and would love to make a video of the whole process - I'm no movie star orVanna White-type person but if you're concentrating on what my hands do and not my whole persona, I might just have a video that you can use. Stay tuned and I'll be sure to let you know when and where that might just become available. And thanks for reading my blog. I hope you're excited about painting your first portrait. Next, let's see, how about a landscape or one of my "off the wall" music "portraits". Hmmmmmmm.

The completed portrait on the easel.

Details, details, details

OK, so you are following these instructions possibly because you have tried to do a portrait and it wasn't very successful and maybe you're just needing a pointer or two. If that's the case then all the tips I'll be telling you from Jane's Perspective should help. If you've never done even a drawing of a face, I'll try to include lots of the basics and you can go find tons of books and instruction takes with the drawing basics BUT that said, even though it's nice to know the basics you can STILL jump right into the painting and be pleasantly surprised with the results.

When I do a portrait I begin with the eyes for two reasons. First of all, the eyes are the windows to your soul and the key to the positions for everything else on the face. Secondly, if you get the eyes right everything else will just fall into place.

From your initial sketch and the fact that (hopefully) you painted AROUND the eye space, you can still see where the eyes need to go. If the face is still wet you may find it easier to do the shadows and highlights that you see around the eyes with a very small brush FIRST and then let the eye dry to do the details. Test it yourself and see. If you get the shadows and highlights around the eyes done (like you did all the fleshy areas except using a much smaller brush) and then you start painting the pupil and whites of the eyes and they just blur into the paint, then let the face dry before this next step.

And this step (my Jane's Perspective first step) is to paint in the colored iris of the eyes. You can test the correct color by dabbing a bit of the color on the plastic baggie that holds your photo. Once you have the round iris painted in, stop and walk away from the painting, turn and look at the face. Are the eyes looking where they need to look? Or are they too close, too far apart, or even cross-eyed? Are they too big or too small? If all you have is the iris you can easily correct by enlarging one side, moving one side over, or correct them by adding the whites of the eyes making adjustments as needed.

Still off? Go back to the basics. The distance between the eyes is the length of one eye. Use your paint brush as a measuring tool or actually use a ruler. You can get the irises to be the right size this way also. AND don't forget to measure from the photo. Sometimes people's eyes are close set or wider set. Whatever the proportion is in the photo should be the proportion in your photo. If the eye is 1 1/4 inch across in the photo for one eye (five 1/4 inch sections) and 1 1/2 inch across (six 1/4 inch sections) for the other eye, then your eyes should be proportionate (however you measure) so that one eye is 5 parts across and the other eye is 6 parts across. Make sense? E-mail me, I'll try to walk you through it.

Once you get the iris and whites of the eyes in their correct spaces add the dark pupil (and here is one of the only places I let you use black in your portrait ( too much black on a portrait and you'll never get those shadows to show up and without shadows your portrait will look flat and amateur). Jane's Perspective says that if you want the eyes to look deeper or more sincere (picture the cat from the movie Shrek) then you can exaggerate the size a little.

Now look at the photograph really good and note the actual shape of the iris. Doesn't it get "cut off" a little at the top and bottom? Basics and science tells us that the eye is actually a ball. This ball has the iris right in the center. What keeps our eyes from looking like they are actually popping out of our heads is the eye lids (both upper and lower). If you haven't already established that these parts of the eye come OVER the eye ball, then you need to bring them into place.

Next, (and you may have to wait for the paint to dry to do this step), take your smallest brush and paint in the eye lashes. Practise with your brush to be able to paint tiny lashes to the top and bottom of the eyes OR (and this is a little Jane's Perspective trick) paint eye liner to the eyes, clean the brush, and pull a tiny bit of the paint up or out from the eye liner to make the lashes. This gives you such a limited amount of paint that you can't hardly help making tiny lashes.

One final piece de resistance (best part) to the eye is to take a tiny amount of shadow color on your brush and shade right underneath the upper eye lid. This shadow pushes the eyeball back into it's socket and keeps you from having that protruding eyeball look.

At this point you can also take the end of your paint brush, dip it in white and CAREFULLY dot it on the eyes (one spot per eye) at the angle from which the light would be reflecting to give the eye that special glisten (another piece de resistance).

Once you get the eyes in place you can use them as your guidelines for everything else on the face. So they need to be as correct as you can make them before you go any further or everything else will be out of whack proportionately.

Assuming that you are happy with the eyes (or at least satisfied enough in your first try to go on to the next step - remember you'll get better with each portrait) you can paint the eye brows. Measure the photo to find out how far above the eye the eyebrow is along with exactly where the eyebrow starts in relation to the eye. You can do this by simply using your paint brush. For example, put the staff end of the paint brush to the end of the eye on the photo. Hold the brush horizontal on the eye and slide your finger to the part of the paint brush that corresponds with the other end of the eye. Hold your finger in place on the brush as you measure in the photo from the top of the pupil to the eye brow. How far is that distance? Half of the distance? 1/4rd of the distance? 1/3rd of the distance?

Next, take your finger off the paint brush. Measure the eye on your painting. Holding your finger on the point that corresponds to the end of the eye, look at the paint brush and estimate 1/4th or 1/3rd of that distance (or whatever the coordinating distance that your found on the photo for your eyebrow - NOTE - this is not the MATCHING distance but the coordinating distance, 1/2 of the distance or 1/3rd of the distance on the painting will not necessarily be the exact measurement as 1/2 or 1/3rd of the distance measured on the photo). Turn the paint brush vertically and make a tiny mark with a pencil or paintbrush to show where the eyebrow should be on the painting.

Now I went in great detail with that measuring thing because it will SO help you get your face "right". Skip these kind of steps and you will be working FOREVER to try to "get it right". Trust me - measuring helps. AND it helps so much that even with that one mark, you can keep measuring and marking until you get ALL the coordinates of the eyebrow and other parts of the face in place accurately.

In addition. Line up the straight edge of the paint brush vertically with the side of the canvas to see exactly where the eyebrow should begin and end in relation to the eye. If you held the paintbrush vertically from the inside corner of the eye, you can see if that is where the eyebrow starts or you can readily see that it may start straight up from the iris instead. Take a look at this photo and you will see that I found the eyebrow on the right (facing the painting) eye to start over the iris but the left eyebrow started over a little to the right of the inside of the left eye.

Eyebrows are tiny little hairs so paint them as such and don't give your face those Joan Crawford eyebrows. Paint tiny little hairs like you did the eyelashes, making the hairs grow away from the center of the face. If they look too "hairy" or thick you can go back and paint flesh color from the brow down into the hairs to make them smaller. (That was just a little extra trick - no extra charge, thank you).

Likewise, measure one eye on the photo and see how many eye lengths the nose is supposed to be. You already know that it should be half way from the eyes to the chin but that was the basic information. Now you need to make it look "right" so measure and make a little coordinating mark on your painting. (A review - if the nose is 1 1/2 eye length's long on the photo, then it will be 1 1/2 painted eye lengths long on the painting). AND if you hold the brush vertically from the inside of the eye or the iris, where does the side of the nose go?

The nose does NOT have lines at the side, only shadows and these shadows should already be in place. The only thing you have to paint (now that your guidelines are in place) is the little balls of the nose. There's one big one in the middle and two smaller ones on each side. Treat the nose as such and you can literally paint a round ball in the center with white and two smaller balls on each side which you can blend into a little flesh or pink color and voila, zee nose.

Add some shadow to the underside (just a little - no mustaches unless the photo calls for one) and a little to the sides and the nose is really easy to recreate.

Use the same techniques to measure for the mouth. Mark it's beginnings and endings and widths and fill in the blanks with a nice rosy flesh color for the lips. Got teeth showing? Yep, you have to paint each one but don't panic. Here's some tricks. Paint each tooth, paint the gums (if they show) and paint a line between the teeth. Yep, it'll look like snaggle-puss BUT you are going to go back to the teeth with a brush that is as close to the exact size of the tooth as possible and repaint it closing up that line until it's just the tiniest bit of a line (you would have needed a 00000 brush to paint it but you have created this tiny line by repainting the tooth, not by trying to paint that tiny tiny line - Jane's Perspective "It's not always what you paint but what you paint AROUND what you paint - aka the negative space". A shadow on the teeth under the upper lip and between the lower teeth and the lower lip pushes the teeth back into the mouth to keep from creating "buck teeth". Dark (almost black) shadows at the corners and more shadows on the side teeth give the mouth its proper curve.

For other details like hands, there are also a bunch of books to tell you the basics like bone structure, etc but if you will just MEASURE like I've shown you, you'll be surprised how much simpler they can be. You can use the eyes again. One eye length equals one pinky fingernail to knuckle, 1 1/2 eye length equals one pointer fingernail to first bend, 1/2 eye length equals how much shorter the pinky is to the ring finger, etc etc, etc.

And yes, I use the eye to measure everything so that if anything gets measured wrong or goes out of whack, then I've got the same standard to go to. Instead of comparing the measurements of the eye for this and the measurements of the nose for that (though logic tells me that if I get one right the next one should be right, etc) then I stay consistant.

Hope all of this makes sense. You CAN just wing it and try "eyeballing" your portrait or you can be more accurate and save yourself a lot of "fixing" later by actually USING the eyeball for measuring.

Uncomplicated skin tones

My perspective on painting (aka Jane's Perspective) is to make things as simple as possible. After all, they call in "art" not "work". OK, so maybe sometimes they call it "artwork" but I digress.

Anyway, to make your skin colors easy to mix I use this basic formula for Caucasian skin.

White plus cad red light or orange with a little yellow ochre

I use the same formula for various races with perhaps a little more darker brown or yellow ochre. I've read portrait painting books, taken portrait workshops, and explored all avenues for creating correct skin color and you can get really really complicated while mixing skin color but trust me, if you start with this basic formula you will be well on your way to the correct color. And how do you know that you have the correct color? That's where the baggie that's holding your photo comes in handy. Just dab a little color on the baggie right next to the skin color and test it. If it's not right you just wipe the dab off, mix some more, and try again.

Along with your skin color you'll need to have a nice size blob of white on your palette - not mixable white but a good titanium will do.

With these colors and the shadow that you've already applied (which should still be wet on the canvas) you'll be able to create the foundation of your painting.

A side note here. As you can see from the dates of my blog I've left you dangling after the shadow was applied. My apologies if you were keeping up and now your shadows are completely dry. That's what I love about oil, however. You can just reapply the shadows and then continue to this step. It is IMPERATIVE that these three colors (shadow, skin tone and the white highlight) be wet as you begin to blend or you will have a harder time blending the foundation.

So, apology noted, you can now take a good squinty look at your photo and find all the really light or highligted areas of your photo. Paint these into your painting with white. Don't be shy with the paint. Think of yourself as "sculpting" the portrait and in doing so you need to add a lot of white "clay" so that you can push and shove and mold the face into being. Once you have the whites in place, fill in the spaces left on the face, hand and any skin showing with the skin color that you mixed up. Don't leave any skin with blank canvas exposed.

At this point the portrait, in particular the face is still going to look really strange. Sorta like this:

Up close you can see the divisions so that you can see everything blocked in. At this point there are no gradual shadows, just abrupt color changes. Look at the chin and hands up close. . .

Now that you have plenty of paint to "sculpt" with, take a stiff clean brush and follow these instructions really SLOOOOW. With the brush, blend ONE stroke from a white area into the flesh color. STOP. Clean out the brush. Dry it off real well. Blend again ONE stroke from the white area into the flesh color. STOP. Clean out the brush. Dry it off real well. DO NOT blend back and forth (at least for now). I want you to learn this technique and then once you get used to it you can shortcut however you like but for now, do one stroke at a time. Actually it's a very zen-like move. And as you work you will start to see a blend happening especially if you have plenty of paint. If you start to see white canvas peak through the paint, then you don't have enough paint. Go back and add some more. Once you get all the whites blended into the flesh, do the same thing to blend the flesh into the shadow color. If you accidently go back and forth with you brush strokes here (from the shadows into the flesh instead of the flesh into the shadows) you will see what I mean when I say that you are going to "dirty up" your skin tone. Go from the flesh to the shadow in ONE stroke only, clean out the brush, dry the brush, and do ONE stroke again.

You will also notice the shadows start to disappear. You thought you had the shadows too dark but they are disappearing before your eyes. See, I told you not to worry. When are you gonna trust me?

Once you have a nice blend, get out your mop brush. If you don't have a mop brush get the softest brush that you have and start to blend again. You can do the same moves that you did with the stiff brush, cleaning between each stroke, and eventually go (dare I say it) back and forth. Can you see how soft and realistic the skin tone is beginning to look?

In this photo one side of the face has just been blended versus the right side of the face that still has its' sectioned look.

As you work, if you see the need to add more white, flesh, or more cad red light or red for those rosy glows, add the paint, use the stiff brush to blend, and then use the mop brush. If you have enough paint on the portrait you will notice that even if you "over add" or add too much of a color, you can just blend and blend and blend and it will disappear into the skin much like the way that the shadows have disappeared or gotten softer.

All of this blending MUST be done in one sitting or these "sections" will stay sectioned off and dry making it impossible to blend BUT the worse that can happen is that you have to reapply the colors. Gee I love oil paint.

You can also see in this step how difficult it would be to do a portrait in acrylic. With the drying time involved it's possible to do BUT you have to do very small sections at a time and you'll need something like a "stay wet" brand palette to keep your mixed skin color from drying out. Whenever my students want to switch from painting with acrylics to oils, I make them do two portraits, one in acrylics and one in oil - you can really feel the difference in the two mediums that way. Try it but don't get to cussing me when that acrylic portrait becomes so frustrating. I'm an oil portrait promotor and my hat's off to you when and if you become a skilled acrylic portrait artist. Seriously, you need to write your own blog to convince me that acrylic would be the way to go.