Oil is the traditional medium for portraits for one practical reason: it stays workable for days. You can put paint down, come back tomorrow, and still blend into it. Skin is all soft transitions, and no other medium gives you that much time to get them right.
The same property is the drawback. An oil portrait is a project measured in weeks, not evenings, and the layers have to go on in the right order or the surface cracks later. That order is most of what this guide is about.
What you actually need
Less than the shopping lists suggest.
- Paint. Four colors will paint any face. See the palette section below. There is no need for a tube labeled flesh tone, and buying one is the fastest route to skin that looks like plastic.
- Brushes. A few hog bristle filberts in medium sizes for the block-in, and one or two soft synthetics or sables for blending and detail. Filberts — flat with a rounded end — suit faces because there are almost no straight lines in a head.
- A surface. Primed canvas board or a stretched canvas. For a first portrait, smaller is easier: something like 12 by 16 inches, big enough for the head to be near life size.
- A medium. Refined linseed oil, plus odorless mineral spirits if you want a fast-drying first layer. You can also work oil-only with no solvent at all, which is what many painters do now.
The two rules that stop a painting cracking
These are not stylistic preferences. Ignore them and the painting fails physically, usually a year or two after you finish it.
Fat over lean. Oil paint dries by oxidation, from the surface inward, and an oilier layer stays flexible for longer. So every layer must contain at least as much oil as the layer beneath it. If you put a lean, solvent-thinned layer on top of an oily one, the top skin dries and shrinks over something still moving underneath, and it cracks. In practice: thin the first layer with solvent, then add progressively more oil and less solvent as you go up.
Thick over thin. The same idea by volume. Thin films underneath, thicker paint on top. Impasto highlights belong at the end, never in the underpainting.
If you remember nothing else technical, remember that the first layer should be the leanest and thinnest thing on the canvas.
Step 1: tone the ground
Do not start on white. A white canvas makes every value you mix look too dark, so beginners consistently paint faces that are far too pale and then cannot find their shadows.
Wipe a thin, solvent-heavy layer of a neutral mid-tone over the whole surface — raw umber, or a gray-green, or a warm earth — and let it dry. Working on a mid-tone means you judge both directions from the start, adding lights as well as darks, which is how you actually see.
Step 2: the drawing, and it is about proportion not features
Draw the head in charcoal or in thinned paint, and get the following right before you draw a single eyelash: the tilt of the head, the shape of the whole skull including the part hidden by hair, the line of the eyes, the line of the nose base, and the line of the mouth.
Advice to start with the eyes is common and it is bad advice for a beginner. Eyes drawn beautifully in the wrong place cannot be rescued, and you will have become too attached to them to move them. Likeness lives in proportion and in the shape of the jaw and the skull, not in the detail of the features. Get the big shapes true and the likeness usually appears before you have painted an eye at all.
Check it by turning the reference and your canvas upside down. Errors in proportion jump out immediately once your brain stops reading the image as a face.
Step 3: block in the shadows
Mix one dark, lean, transparent color — raw umber or burnt umber thinned with solvent — and lay in every shadow shape as a flat mass. No blending, no detail, no highlights. You are looking for where the light stops.
Squint at your reference. Squinting collapses the mid-tones and shows you the two-value pattern of light and shadow, which is the structure the whole painting hangs on.
Let this dry before going further. It will be touch-dry in a day or two because it is lean.
Step 4: mid-tones, then lights
Now mix skin. Work in the mid-tones first — the large areas of the cheek, forehead and neck that are neither in shadow nor catching direct light. This is most of the face, and getting it right is most of the job.
Then the lighter planes: the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the top of the cheekbone, the chin. Use slightly thicker, more opaque paint here, because light areas want to sit forward.
Blend where skin genuinely is soft, and leave edges crisp where the form actually turns sharply — the edge of the jaw against the neck, the line where the lips meet. Blending everything equally is what makes a portrait look like an airbrushed photograph rather than a person.
Step 5: features, last
Eyes, nostrils, the corners of the mouth. These are small dark accents in a large light structure, and they are the last thing to go in for the same reason you sign a letter at the end.
Two things worth knowing. The white of an eye is not white — it is a mid-value gray, cooler at the edges, and painting it white is the single most common giveaway in an amateur portrait. And the darkest dark on most faces is inside the nostril or between the lips, not in the eye.
Step 6: highlights
A few small, thick, opaque touches at the points that face the light directly: the tip of the nose, the ball of the cheek, the lower lip, and one catchlight in each eye. Placed identically in both eyes, from the same light source.
Highlights are the last paint on the canvas and the easiest thing to overdo. Three or four is usually plenty. A face covered in highlights looks wet rather than lit.
Mixing skin: four colors
There is a well-known limited palette for exactly this, named after the Swedish painter Anders Zorn: yellow ochre, a red, a black, and white. Zorn used vermilion and flake white; the modern substitutes are cadmium red light and titanium white, because vermilion is mercury sulfide and lead white brings its own problems.
What makes it work is that ivory black is slightly cool and slightly blue, so it does the job people usually reach for a blue tube to do. Black with yellow ochre gives you a subtle natural green. Black with white gives you a cool gray. Between those and the red you have everything a face needs.
- Warm lights, cooler shadows is the usual pattern for skin lit by a warm indoor light — but it depends entirely on your light source. Under cool north-facing daylight it reverses. Paint what is in front of you rather than the rule.
- Shadows on skin are transparent, because light travels a short way into it before bouncing back. Keep shadow mixtures thin and let the ground show through. Opaque, chalky shadows are the other classic tell.
- Do not use black to darken skin in the sense of deepening a shadow. It kills the color. Deepen with a transparent earth or the shadow's own hue, more saturated.
On complexion: the crude rule that cadmium reds are for fair skin and earth colors for darker skin is not how this works. All skin sits in the same narrow band of hue and varies mostly in value and saturation. A wider range of deep skin tones is reached by adding transparent earths and burnt sienna, not by swapping the palette.
One note on shopping. Alizarin crimson appears in almost every skin-tone recipe online. Most manufacturers now sell a permanent alizarin alongside the traditional one, because the traditional pigment has a long-standing reputation for fading. If the painting is going to hang in daylight, buy the permanent version.
Choosing a reference photo
Most of a portrait's success is decided before you pick up a brush.
- One clear light source, from the side. Side lighting gives you the shadow pattern that describes the form. A camera flash flattens a face into a mask and there is nothing to paint.
- Shoot at eye level and from a step or two back, then crop in. Close-up phone photos distort the nose and the forehead.
- Avoid a busy background. A plain wall lets you invent the background rather than copy it.
- Print it large, or use a second screen. Working from a phone means you cannot see the mid-tones, which is where the whole painting lives.
- Match the scale. Keep the reference the same size as your canvas if you can, and put it beside the canvas rather than below it, so comparing the two does not involve moving your head.
Two safety points that get left out
Solvents. Turpentine and mineral spirits give off vapor you should not be breathing in a closed room. Work with a window open, keep the jar lidded when you are not dipping, and consider working oil-only or with water-mixable oils, both of which avoid solvent entirely.
Rags. Cloths soaked in linseed oil generate heat as the oil oxidizes and can catch fire on their own in a bin. This is a real, documented hazard rather than a theoretical one. Spread used rags out flat to dry, or put them in water in a sealed metal container.
If you want the painting more than the practice
Worth saying plainly, because it is a fair question and we do sell something adjacent.
Painting a convincing likeness in oil takes real practice. If what you want is a painted portrait of someone on the wall rather than the skill of making one, a numbered canvas made from your photo gets you there in 10 to 20 hours with no drawing and no color mixing. It is acrylic rather than oil, and it is printed in the USA from a photo you upload, in 12x16, 16x20 or 18x24.
Two honest caveats. It will look like a painting of the photo rather than a photocopy of it, which is the point but is worth expecting. And faces get small quickly, so choose the largest size, and a photo with one or two faces rather than a group. There are finished ones in the customer gallery.
We do not sell oil paints, and we do not have a portrait range among our stock designs — those are landscapes, florals and wildlife.
Common questions
How long does an oil portrait take to dry?
Touch-dry in a few days per layer, depending on the pigment and how much oil is in it. Earth colors dry fast, some reds and blacks are slow. Fully cured is six months to a year, which is how long to wait before varnishing.
Can I use acrylic underneath and oil on top?
Yes, and only in that direction. Acrylic under oil is fine on a properly primed surface. Oil under acrylic will fail, because acrylic cannot bond to an oily layer.
Should I paint dark to light or light to dark?
Dark to light in oil. Start with the transparent shadow block-in and work up to the opaque highlights. That order matches thin-to-thick and lean-to-fat, so it keeps you out of trouble structurally as well as visually.
Why does my portrait look like a stranger?
Almost always proportion rather than rendering. Measure the distance from the eyeline to the chin against the distance from the eyeline to the top of the skull, and check the width of the head at the cheekbones. Beginners routinely make the top of the skull too small and the features too large.
Do I need to varnish it?
Not immediately, and not for months. Varnish evens out the sheen and protects the surface, but applied before the paint has cured it traps solvent and can bloom.
