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I attach great importance to a tidy studio and a clean palette. An artist proposes to make a work of art, and while his work requires infinite skill, he general far behind the barber in arrangement of the most ordinary necessities. Why should a studio be a boudoir, a dream of oriental splendor to have tea in, a junk shop, a dirty place, and rarely a good convenient workshop for the kind of thought and the kind of work that the making of a good picture demands? Should a palette be crust of dirty, dust collecting, dried up paint in which little inadequate squeezes of fresh paint become confounded?

Since I have been browsing every now and then the beautiful book The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, I come across the most beautiful passages that I must remember. In the painting of light, in modeling form, keep as deep down in colour as you can. It certainly is, any paint is, if you expect to reproduce the thing in nature. Pictures which are overcharged with white paint look whiter but they do not have the look of white.”

For anyone who wants to learn portrait painting seriously, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. If you don’t want to buy this book you can search the Internet for “Planes of the head It is really important to become familiar with these standard dimensions and surfaces.”But That is precisely why it is important to understand these basics and to get the feeling of how and where they deviate from the standard.

It took a while before I could take up my project of new video tutorials, but now time has come. And on short notice other video demonstrations will follow with more information about portrait painting & drawing. In this video I demonstrate the watercolour technique, and I make clear that it is not as difficult as many of you always thought. The video has a duration of some 90 minutes and is available on streaming, in high definition and unlimited viewing.