How to Paint an Oil Portrait in Two Hours

2 Hour Portrait Tutorial

I prefer working on a toned canvas, preferably a warm, bright tone. The warmer the tone, generally the more it will pop forward to the final layers.

Set- up

Here I am using a mixture of Quinacridone Magenta and burnt sienna. I put this layer down with a fair bit of Odorless Mineral Spirits so it dries quickly enough to begin sketching right over it. I also just use a few flat brushes for the entirety of the painting. Fiddling around with too many brushes slows you down and makes your painting set-up less mobile for on-the-go painting.

Sketching

For sketching, I like using a mix of burnt sienna and ultramarine. I can control how warm or cool toned my color is by changing the amount of blue or brown. Burnt umber also works well as a pigment for a sketch layer. Both burnt umber and burnt sienna are very dry pigments so they don't need oms to dry up quickly.

I went ahead and threw some green for the hat to give me more of an idea of color balance as I move forward.

Blocking In

I go ahead now and start to block in some of the darkest or most saturated parts of the painting. We can already tell that the green of the squid hat will be playing interestingly with the pink of our starting layer.

I find that it is always easier to add light to dark rather than to darken something that already has light tones. You risk making the image muddy otherwise.

Adding more saturation and lighter pigments

For the skin, I often like using a mix of pigments that make a bright orange or red as a mid-tone. I feel like this vibrancy comes through to the final layers. At this stage, you can still continue to block in big shapes with a big brush, as oil paints make it easy to push shapes around.

You can see that the hat and some of the background elements could be considered finished at this point, as attention to detail is not as important here as it would be in a face.

Details

This is where we add things like pupils, the outline of glasses frames, and definition to the nose and lips. Still letting some of that pink push through, though.

Highlights

Here we finally add any touches of white that we need to the face. I tend to stay away from pure white and usually mix a little pink or yellow into mine to make it look less jarring. Pure blazing white in nature is less common that you think!

Take the tape off of your paper/canvas sheet or paint the edges of your canvas and voila! You are done!

This method of painting may not always be the most elegant, but starting with a toned surface and working with limited supplies and from dark to light will vastly cut down how long it takes you to paint! This is very useful for public events or for quickly capturing a live sitter.

Thanks, as always for checking out my page and happy painting :)