Painting an Oil Portrait: Step-by-Step Method

Step 1: the preparatory drawing

We start the drawing with a burnt Sienna colored pencil (Faber-Castell Polychromos) directly on the canvas. It can be erased but leaves faint traces, which is no problem since everything will be covered with paint. Burnt Sienna is dark enough to give a readable line on white canvas, light enough to stay discreet under a black line, and its flesh tone means any accidental mix with the paint layer would go unnoticed.

If happy with the drawing, rework the main lines with black stone (Conté crayon). Black stone gives a very black line with excellent adhesion to the support, so the drawing holds up well when washed over with paint.

Black stone, resinous and tacky, bleeds relatively little and mixes little with paint, which keeps your color clean! Charcoal is another story: awkward to use, it sheds black dust as soon as you cover it with paint.

Note: Drawing is the first and most structuring step. If the drawing is bad, there is no point moving on to paint. Drawing problems must be solved during the drawing stage; they will not solve themselves once painting starts. A proportion issue costs one pass of the eraser at the drawing stage but will eat up the whole painting session if a painted chunk of face has to be moved — often with disastrous results.

Step 3: the dark layer

Getting truly dark darks takes several passes even with well-covering colors, and becomes very hard as soon as there is white on the canvas (one touch of white in black is enough to turn all your blacks gray).

To preserve dark/light contrasts, we choose to treat all the darks first, then deal with the lights. To have a dark dominant ready to lighten, we slather flesh ochre (transparent red oxide) over the skin surface. This lean, barely diluted layer also gives good grip for the lights that will follow.

Darks are placed with a grayed mix of burnt Sienna, chrome green and naphthol red (you get a brownish gray, but any opaque dark mix without white would do).

Step 5: the light layer

Only move to this step once all the darks are in place! While it is indeed possible to darken paint containing white, the darkened mix will always keep white in it, difficult to snuff out.

Lights are applied patch by patch, starting with the brightest areas of the subject (forehead, nose, cheekbones). Go at it boldly, applying a good amount of material.

Note that light yellow on the brush will give a slightly duller orange on the canvas as it blends into the current orange-ish layer — exactly what we want, since we aim to lighten from a dark base rather than darken lights later on.

Lights are therefore applied with pinkish tones, yellow, etc., loaded with white on the very bright parts, leaner on diffuse shadows.