So I'm using this medium sized bright brush to begin. And I'm just mixing a little bit of walnut alkyd medium into my paint. So you want to paint to be a little bit translucent as you're working in this stage. So to begin with mix a little bit of the oil into the burnt umber and just mix it around and this will create more translucent paint, it'll also help it dry more quickly. And I'll begin by just doing a very light and very basic outline, which shows me the basic compositions that I'll be doing. And this might be out of proportion at this stage.

Now it doesn't really matter. We'll be honing it more as we go for now this is just to give me a basic indication of the composition that I will be using there. So I think that that's a very pleasing position for the head on the canvas. varying the amount of space around the head. So there's more space in the front of the face in the direction but it's looking less space behind him even less at the top. So there's a variety in this spacing on the canvas.

Next, we're going to start to hone in the proportions using the measurements that we talked about. So we remember that the eyes are slightly lower than centered on the face. So I'll replicate that on my canvas. Let's see just a little bit lower. Okay, so the eyes are about here. And to begin with, I'm just putting dots and lines and I'm still using very thin down oil paint.

You don't want to be putting any dark outlines on your canvas at this point. So using a thin down oil paint will be good at this stage. The next thing we want to check is the height of the head versus the width. So we remember that the width of the head is just our The height of the head sign again will with comparative measuring, you basically replicate that proportion on your canvas. So we'll just replicate that and that looks like a similar sort of apportioning ratio, maybe this could just slightly come out. Next are the three equal thirds from the bottom of the chin to the bottom of the nose, the bottom of the nose to the eyebrow line, and then the eyebrow line to the hairline.

And the hair at the very top is about three quarters in this case of one of the one third measurements, I'll start to put that on my canvas and it sometimes takes a little bit of shifting around to get this accurate. Yeah, so this will just move down with it that one third is going to be slightly smaller than my initial One and that looks good. So now we've got a lot of information here, we've got the eyebrow line here, the eye line here, the bottom of the nose here, and the chins here. Next, we want to get the width of the face itself. And I remember that that's basically two of the one third measurements wide. So the eyebrow line is to one third measurements.

So the hair will come out here and the hair itself was just under one of the one thirds. Okay, so now we're starting to get a lot of information in just with a few lines and dots. I also want to take a moment to mark some of the key body features and make sure that we get them accurately proportions as well. So I'm going to do a horizontal plumb line from this point On the shirt here and extended across to see what the space looks like below the chin. And I think that my line will, I think that this will work we're going to come at it from a few different ways with a horizontal plumb line, I can see that the shoulder at the back shoulder is a little bit higher than this point here, which mine is. So next we're going to start to measure angles to further delineate this portrait.

If we know this is the eyebrow line, we can start to put in the shapes of some of these features. Looking at the geometric shapes that they're forming, the eyebrows get a little bit wider at the front. Look at the space between the place where the nose is into the skull right near the tear duct and the outer edge of the face, it can be common to make this space a little bit too wide. I'm just going to use my rag to wipe out some of the lines that we don't need as we go. So we're breaking curves down into angled straight lines, it gives more structure to the face and helps solidify the precise shape of the curve. So I also refer to apexes, which are the outermost point along a curve as the place where the two angled straight lines meet.

So at the cheekbone, there's a bit of an apex and then there's a new angle that starts as we come down the face and just going to So you can see how you can really use these measuring techniques to fairly easily get a well structured and well proportioned painting. The mouse, the center of the mouse sits slightly higher than the center of this one third measurement. So if this is the center of the mouse, although you can put just an imaginary sort of center line going down the face, which will help make sure that you're centering all the features on the face well And we remember that the tear duct of the eye is at, it's just actually slightly in from one of the one third measurements. So I'll just put a little dot there. And then you can measure the angle that the eyelid makes as it comes out from that dawn.

So breaking the eyelids down into angled straight lines, again, that just gives more structure and solidity to the feature. I don't want to go into tons of detail with the eyes yet or with any of the features we're still looking to first get the big the main shapes and So looking at the mode here, we're going to start by blocking in the lip as a darker shape that's in shadow. Because the lights coming down on the face, the shading on the lips have the upper lip as a little bit more in shadow. And in the lower lip, I'm going to do nothing through the lower lip but just define the lower lip with the shadow underneath the lower lip. And this is going to give a lot of form to the features and and it's going to look really appealing rather than if you put like a sharp outline on the lower lip which will actually flatten out the features.

So as I continue along with