The materials needed by the beginner for portrait painting are but few, but these should be of excellent quality and carefully selected. The materials required are: a canvas, a selection of brushes, linseed oil and of course a wide selection of paints. Once you have these materials you are ready to go.
Canvas
I prefer linen. It is a great aid to good painting, as the paint moves more freely and does not pull all the oil out of the pigment, leaving the painting dull and flat. However, for demonstrating and practice I quite often use good grade (hard) cotton.
Many students use prepared "panels" of canvas mounted on heavy cardboard. Each should be given a light coat of white shellac. Professionals more often prefer canvas bought by the yard or the roll and tacked onto the canvas stretchers obtainable at all dealers. I recommend this, or stretchers with canvas already in place.
Brushes
Like the Old Masters I choose the round bristle brush and use the side of it to apply the paint with a scratching movement (except when drawing the eyes and other fine details). This allows all the tones to come together in a soft blend, and your pigment will stand out and sparkle instead of pasting down to an enamel effect.
With brushes known as "flats" and "brights" - both of them thin - there is a tendency to flatten and paste down the color unpleasantly. Also, the flat stroke will invariably leave raised edges which call for some care if they are to be blended properly with the surrounding tones. (I do, however, use a flat brush for drawing.)
Care of Brushes
If you paint for two or three days in a row, just stand or rinse your brushes in kerosene. (Don't stand them for long on their points.) When storing them for any length of time, wash them thoroughly with soap and cold water. Make sure the paint is out at the heel (next to ferrule).
Mixing Medium
I have found students more confused about this material than any other. Some have read so much about mediums, and have experimented with so many, that they have not had time to learn to paint!
For the present, forget prepared mediums. Use artists purified linseed oil. Modern methods of refining have overcome nearly all of its former tendency to yellow. If you want a heavier medium to make your paint stand out from the painted surface, substitute stand oil, which is sun-thickened linseed oil. Though turpentine is a popular medium, especially when mat (dull) effects are wanted, avoid it as it will thin and wash out the desirable dense quality of the pigment. Its only legitimate use is in the drawing stage for wiping errors from the canvas.
To obtain full advantage of the natural brilliance of your paint, use it as it comes from the tube. If it refuses to spread or move freely, mix in a minimum amount of linseed oil.
Now you are ready to paint!
In portrait painting there is the matter of representing the human features: notably the eye, ear, nose and mouth. Of these, the easiest to do are usually the ear and the nose. The ear is a complicated thing in appearance to be sure, but excepting for its size and general set and shape there is nothing very individual about it; normally we pay little attention to the ears of even our closest friends unless there is something radically distinctive about them.
For that matter, the ear is often wholly or partially hidden by the hair, or viewed in shadow or in a greatly foreshortened position. So the usual rule is to suppress the ear's complexity of parts, merging them in the simplest possible indication so that the spectator's eye will scarcely be aware that the sitter even has an ear.
While the nose is a more distinctive and distinguishing feature, prominently located as it is at the front center of the face, it is relatively easy to do, for, though capable of some movement, it is quite immobile when compared with the ever-shifting eyes or the changeable and highly expressive mouth. An important point in doing the nose is to avoid the all-too-common effect (in work of the beginner) that it is plastered on to the face and has little relationship to it. Make it look like part of the head, for it is.
Artists differ in their feeling toward the eye. Many - perhaps a majority - speak of it as the most expressive of all the features.
Some, however, point out that although the eyeball itself has a quality of mobility and animation which the painter should strive to catch, the individuality and expressiveness of the eye come less from the eyeball - for eyeballs look much alike - than from the flexible muscles of the forehead and eyebrows, the type and position of the lid, and the surrounding network of wrinkles, in particular those at the outer eye corner and across the bridge of the nose.
But don't overdo these details - one can paint a perfect likeness with the eyes almost lost in the general tone of the eye socket.
It is the mouth which is the truly sensitive thing. It is seldom twice alike, for under normal conditions it records instantly every change of inward thought or feeling. There are times when the shifting of the lines of the mouth by scarcely more than a hairbreadth will alter one's entire appearance. Therefore, the painter must observe his sitter's mouth keenly, recording with fidelity what he thinks to be its most significant expression.
But it is pointless to write much of such features. The main thing is to paint them all with restraint, remembering that they are but parts of a whole. Yet they are not separate parts, each complete in itself, but they form, together with the cheeks, the chin - the whole head, in fact - a homogeneous mass which must be painted as a unit. Only in this way can all the features be of consistent shape, size, light and shade and coloring.
The best way to get these features right is by practice, so begin now!
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