You've stared at portraits in galleries and wondered how artists capture life on canvas. The process feels mysterious. Paint tubes sit unopened in your drawer because starting seems impossible.
This guide breaks down the oil portrait process into a clear, manageable system for beginners. Follow these steps to move past uncertainty and build your painting with confidence.
Plan Your Portrait
Planning prevents frustration later. Your choices now determine your painting's success.
Gather Your Reference
Choose a photo with strong, clear lighting to define form. One light source works best. It creates shadows that sculpt the face naturally. Avoid photos with multiple light sources or flat lighting. Your reference needs visible contrast between light and dark areas. Sharp focus matters too—blurry images make painting harder.
Print your reference image at the same size as your canvas. This approach makes comparing tones and shapes easier. You can flick your eyes between both surfaces without mental calculations.
Prepare Your Materials
Set up a limited palette and a sturdy, adjustable easel stand for proper posture and perspective. You need only five colors to start: titanium white, raw umber, yellow ochre, cadmium red, and ultramarine blue.
Get filbert brushes in sizes 2, 4, and 8. Hog bristle brushes move oil paint effectively. Add odorless mineral spirits for thinning and linseed oil for later layers.
Position your easel stand so you can see both canvas and reference without moving. This saves time and keeps your focus sharp. Work standing if possible—it gives you better perspective on proportions.
Choose Your Canvas Surface
Pre-primed canvas saves time and works well for beginners. Cotton canvas offers a coarser texture while linen provides a tighter weave. Both work fine when you're learning. Canvas boards cost less and suit practice work. Stretched canvas feels more professional and remains the standard choice. Make sure your surface has been properly primed with gesso.
Tone Your Canvas
A colored ground helps you judge values accurately. Pure white canvas makes everything look too dark by comparison. Mix raw umber with white acrylic paint and water.
Apply this mixture thinly across your entire canvas. Let some white show through—you want texture, not a seal. This mid-tone background unifies your painting and makes establishing extremes easier.
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Build The Foundation (The Underpainting)
The underpainting establishes everything that follows. Rush this stage and problems multiply later.
Create A Line Drawing
Focus on accurate proportions and major shapes. Use a 2B pencil to sketch lightly on your canvas. Map the head's placement first.
Find the centerline of the face. Mark where eyes, nose, and mouth sit. Check distances between features against your reference. Erase hard until only faint lines remain—graphite mixes with oil paint and muddies colors.
Draw in the shadow line where no direct light hits the subject. This becomes your darkest area. Keep your initial sketch simple and focus on shapes rather than details.
Paint The Grisaille
Use thinned paint to establish a full range of light and shadow values, ignoring color. Mix raw umber with mineral spirits until it flows like ink. This first layer dries quickly because it contains little oil.
Block in your darkest darks first. Apply paint thinly with a dry brush technique. The grain of the canvas should show through slightly. Work from dark to light, building up mid-tones gradually. Squint at your reference photo to simplify what you see. This reveals only essential values without distracting details.
Keep all edges soft at this stage. Hard lines prove difficult to cover later with thin paint layers. Use a dry brush or soft rag to blend transitions between tones.
Understanding Fat Over Lean
Each paint layer needs more oil than the one beneath it. This prevents cracking as your painting dries over time. Oil paint dries through oxidation, not evaporation like water-based paints.
Your first layer should be lean—mostly mineral spirits with paint. Later layers get progressively fatter by adding linseed oil. The top layers dry last and remain most flexible. Mineral spirits evaporate quickly while oil takes decades to fully cure. This timing difference makes the fat-over-lean rule essential for lasting paintings.
Apply Color And Develop Form
Color comes after values are established. This sequence prevents common beginner mistakes.
Block In Local Colors
Apply thin layers of color, using your dried underpainting as a value guide. Your grisaille shows you how light or dark each area should be. Now add the actual hue. Mix skin tones using yellow ochre, white, and small amounts of red. Every skin tone leans either warm or cool. The forehead tends warmer while the chin appears cooler.
Don't try matching exact colors immediately. Paint the average color of each area first. You'll refine everything later through additional layers.
Working With Skin Tones
The face contains three distinct color zones. Foreheads and cheeks appear redder and warmer. The area around eyes and temples shows more yellow. Chins and jawlines lean cooler with subtle green or blue undertones.
Mix white with yellow ochre as your base. Add tiny amounts of cadmium red to warm areas. Use ultramarine blue sparingly to cool shadows. Never use pure white for highlights—it looks artificial.
Test your mixed color against your reference. Place a small dab on your palette over your toned canvas color. This shows how it will actually appear on your painting.
Refine And Adjust
Develop subtle transitions, correct colors, and unify the entire composition. Look for temperature shifts across the face. Cheeks appear redder than foreheads. Build form through gradual value changes within each area. The side of the nose turns from light to shadow smoothly. Paint these transitions with a clean, dry brush to blend edges.
Step back every few minutes. Distance reveals problems invisible up close. Take breaks—fresh eyes spot errors tired ones miss. Check your painting by taking a photo and converting it to black and white. This reveals whether your values match your reference regardless of color accuracy.
Add Definition And Final Details
Details make portraits convincing. But they only work when placed on solid foundations.
Focus on Features
Carefully render eyes, lips, and hair with smaller brushes. Eyes anchor the entire portrait. Paint both eyes simultaneously to maintain symmetry and proportion.
The white of the eye isn't pure white. Mix white with touches of ochre and blue. This prevents that startled, unrealistic look.
Lips require careful observation of planes. The upper lip usually sits darker than the lower. Soften the corners where lips meet—hard edges there look unnatural. Hair reads as masses, not individual strands. Block large shapes first. Add a few strategic highlights to suggest texture without overworking it.
Soft and Sharp Edges
Use edge work to create depth and direct the viewer's focus. Hard edges draw attention. Soft edges let areas recede.
The focal point needs your sharpest edges. Usually that's the eyes. Everything else can soften progressively as it moves away from this center of interest.
Blend edges by gently brushing across them with a clean, dry brush. Work perpendicular to the edge itself. This creates smooth transitions that feel natural rather than painted. Blur the edges where hair meets background. This mimics how human eyes actually see. Sharp edges everywhere create an artificial, overworked appearance.
Building Texture And Dimension
Value creates the illusion of three-dimensional form. Contrast makes certain areas advance while others recede. Your darkest darks and lightest lights shouldn't appear everywhere. Reserve your strongest contrasts for the focal area. Reduce contrast as you move toward less important regions. This guides viewer attention exactly where you want it.
Layer paint gradually to build richness. Thin applications allow underlying colors to influence what's on top. This creates depth impossible with single thick layers.
Adding Background Elements
Your background supports the portrait without competing for attention. Keep it simple and slightly out of focus compared to your subject's face.
Use muted versions of colors that appear in the face. This creates harmony across the entire painting. Avoid introducing completely new color families in the background.
Soften background edges more than anything else. This pushes those areas back in space and keeps focus on your subject.
Finishing Your Portrait
The final stage requires patience and careful observation. Small adjustments make significant differences.
Allow Proper Drying Time
Oil paint stays workable for days but needs weeks to dry completely. Let your painting sit untouched overnight at minimum between major sessions. Thick paint areas take longer to dry than thin ones. The surface may feel dry while underneath remains wet. This affects how new paint adheres and blends.
Varnishing and Protection
Wait six months before applying varnish. Oil paint continues curing for years despite appearing dry. Premature varnishing traps solvents and causes problems.
Varnish protects against dust and UV damage. It also unifies the finish across areas that dried to different sheens. Choose between matte, satin, or gloss depending on your preference. Apply varnish in thin coats with soft brushes. Work in one direction to avoid streaking. Two thin coats protect better than one thick application.
Conclusion
Oil portrait painting rewards patience and systematic work. Each stage builds on the previous one. Skip steps and you'll struggle; follow them and results come. Start your first portrait today using these techniques. Choose a simple reference photo with clear lighting. Set up your limited palette and work through each stage without rushing.