Painting Harrison ford in oils and this isn't a great photo but it is what you make of it. The canvas board I am using is quite wide to accommodate his wide hat and here I am using Windsor and Newton oil paints on box canvas .
Here I mixed a burnt umber with a small amount of turpentine to dilute the umber paint making it thinner, it also makes the paint dry quicker. I started to put paint on around three to five inches from the top of the canvas and positioning is very important here. Mr Ford is looking left in the photo and we need to make him looking into the canvas so we need to place him just off right centre

Here the light is coming from the left so using the same burnt umber colour I block in the dark tones mostly on the right and underneath his hat.

Most of the tone has now been added and all that is needed here is to fill in the right side of the face with tone.

Earlier when I said that positioning was important here I made a mistake in that I didn't place the portrait far enough to the left, there was too much white space on the left so I used a rag and a little turpentine to rub out the right side of the hat and moved the portrait further to the left, the original lines are left in and will be covered up later in the painting.

Normally I would add the middle tones by adding more turpentine to the burnt umber but I decided to go straight into the portrait by adding the middle tones with colour mixed with cobalt blue, yellow ochre, cadmium red and white with more cobalt blue added.
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