Blog / 2026 / Painting a Portrait: From Photo-session to Finished Artwork

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

If had to explain what makes my portraits different from other painters’ portraits, I’d put it down to two choices: layering my paint in a particular way and painting from photos I take myself of the subjects.

These are some of the photos I took of my friend Joe. I usually take a couple hundred pictures over the course of an hour. Now and again throughout my career, I’ve painted people I haven’t met and photographed myself—in other words, I’ve worked from pictures given to me by the subjects—but for most of the people I’ve painted I’ve taken photos of them, like these ones of Joe.

After I take all the pictures, I go through them again and again over the course of a few weeks, allowing time away from them to help me see the pictures more clearly and evaluate which ones can help me evoke the thing about the subject that I want to evoke. Then I choose one primary reference photo, which is this one in Joe’s case.

And that’s when I get started on the painting, first by laying down a drawing in paint that places the structure of the face—where the eyes and nose are, for example. Next, I start to add highlights and layer color.

Here, I’m covering the brown I laid down for Joe’s vest with phthalo blue, straight out of the tube. That’s something I do a lot: I mix the colors visually by layering them one on top of the other instead of actually mixing the paints on a palette before applying them to the painting.

Of course I also mix plenty of paint colors, like these peachy ones for Joe’s face, which are probably a combination of titanium white, quinacridone red, and quinacridone gold. I’m using a small round brush to apply these colors. I’m building out the structure of the face. I’m looking at what’s already there—at the paint I’ve already laid down—and I’m responding to it. The question as I work is: how can I make what’s already here look more like Joe?

In this moment, I’m returning to the background. I know I want it to be orange and navy in the end, so I’m setting it up to give the orange a nice glow with a yellow underlayer.

Now I’m using darker colors to pick out the structure of Joe’s face, and then softening those brushstrokes with pink where necessary.

I’m always in conversation with the painting in front of me. It’s a little like focusing a camera, or microscope, telescope. You turn it too far in one direction and what you’re looking at goes blurry. Too far in the other direction and it’s still not clear. As I’m painting I go too far in one direction, then too far in another, little by little figuring out the right touches that will bring the face into focus.

I know the artwork is done when I don’t feel the need to explain anything about it or speak for it. Which is how I feel about Joe’s portrait here!