How to plan a portrait

It can be tricky to do a portrait of six kids but planning well in the beginning makes it a lot easier. Believe me, I am not the best planner but I put my non-meticulous ways to work to ensure fewer setbacks later on. I always start with a sketch. It may not look like much but it helps me familiarize myself with the faces and the composition. The pictures I was given to work with for this portrait were fairly small so I blew them up as much as I could without getting blurry. I had to work between two separate photos to get the best view of each child so drawing out the composition in a sketchbook helps to sort it out. I often make notes in the sketchbook to remind myself of ideas and colors.

Once I am ready to tackle the canvas I start laying out the composition in pencil. I don't normally do this because I usually enjoy just moving paint around and not tainting my canvas with pencil, although when I'm painting six portraits on one canvas I have to measure and re-measure and that is a little easier in pencil. I make sure to measure every head, set of eyes, forehead to chin, ear to ear.... you get the idea. This is not a mathematical method nor is it graphed out. I use my pencil or paintbrush to measure. It's more like eyeballing until you get it right. I like this method because I am still using my eyes rather than relying on a graph. I think it just works best for my brain. After this step is done it's time to start painting! My next post will be about the underpainting.