 In drawing the portrait features of the face look at the outline shape of a person's head you will find that it is an oval shape and not circular, put your finger over the flowing hair at the left of her head in the photograph below, this will help you to see the oval shape of this person's head better.
 Here we have drawn in an oval shape of the head and also a vertical line starting from the middle of the brow and through the centre of the chin, an horizontal line has been drawn in where the centre corners of the eyes will be (Top photo). If you look at a person's face you will see it is full of oval shapes like in the eye sockets. Draw an oval shape in for the eye socket starting from where the shadow starts on the left side of the person's nose and follow through to the eyebrow and then around to the top part of the cheek and you should end up with an oval shape. Draw another one for the right eye socket although this will be smaller because this part of the face is turned away from us, draw two smaller oval shapes for the actual eye shapes.
 When you want to find the length of a certain feature of the face like the left ear from top to the bottom use the pencil by placing the top of the pencil at the top of the ear and mark off with your finger on the pencil where the bottom of the ear comes. You can compare this length to say the size of the nose or the length of the mouth from the right corner to the left corner.
 In this example we have all the features basically drawn in and an oval shape has been drawn for the bottom of the nose and one for the mouth and ear. If you look at the photograph above you will see a light area above the nostril and above that you will see the crease of the side of the nose. If you start to work your pencil from this crease and work around to the left coming to underneath the nostril and then to the tip of the nose and around to the crease again you will see that it fits nicely into an oval shape. Look at the mouth as a shape and you will see that this also fits nicely into an oval shape as does the ear.
 A bit more drawing has been added like the drawing in of the actual lenses of the eyes, the shape of the head and a bit of modelling to the mouth and this is all you need in a basic drawing if you are going to paint over it. You don't really want a detailed pencil drawing if you are going to paint over it otherwise your painting will look wooden because you will be trying to keep to the pencil lines. What you want is a free flowing full of life portrait and not a wooden lifeless paint by numbers sort of portrait.
 Now all the correct measurements have been done in the portrait we can start to paint and here we are painting in pastel. I personally haven't any particular way that I start to paint, I look at the model or the photograph and whatever hits me first is where I start to paint. Here I painted in the light pinks on her forehead, cheek, nose and ear and then painted in a dark burnt umber over the cheek area.
 More pinks have been painted in all over the face and burnt umber has been added to the features basically just to indicate that they are there. The hair has been roughly painted in with bold strokes to indicate the form and all the colours that I have painted in the face so far are just basic colours to fill the paper up.
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