Never paint wrinkles!

I taught a portrait workshop over the weekend which was, as always, a delight.
I love being in a room full of painters, watching the many different styles and aesthetics emerge on their canvases. A busy studio has such great energy!

My demos were of different faces and ages with my favourite one being of an elderly face. I’ve seen so many portraits of older people in which every wrinkle is engraved into the skin with brutal precision and they make me wince every time.

When I talk to a person I don’t even notice if they have wrinkles. I don’t think that many of us do unless we happen to be in the skin industry. We look at peoples’ eyes to see if they’re paying attention to us, or if they’re happy or angry. We look at their expressions. I love how a smile bunches up cheeks and squeezes eyes into happy crescents, and we may notice things like rosy cheeks, full lips or a particularly interesting nose but we don’t spend our time gazing at those things because that would be weird.

So when I paint people, I paint them the way that I see them. I have a broad, general view of faces in which eyes matter most and that’s what I paint, despite the extra information that’s available in a photo reference. Hence: don’t paint wrinkles! If you’re a dermatologist who paints, I think you might notice and paint lines but the rest of us can easily ignore them. What I paint is light, colour and form.

The portrait above is from a creepy AI image that I found on Pinterest as I was looking for just the right elderly face. I wanted the head to be in 3/4 view, to have a clear separation between shadow and light and to show flesh that has been subject to gravity for many decades. After an hour of scrolling not-quite-right faces, I came across this one. It’s disturbing - one painter said it had elephant-like wrinkles - but it generally fit the brief.

I adjusted it in Procreate using the Gaussian blur tool and came up with what I consider to be an ideal photo reference:

Notice that no wrinkles are visible but we can still tell that this is a person of 80 or 90 years old. (Or she would be, if she were human).

We know her age because of where her volumes sit. As we age, our cheeks lose their round firm structure and slide down to soften our jawline and create jowls. As with all of our bones, we lose bone mass in our faces leading to a sunken appearance around our eyes and mouths.

Fun fact: our noses aren’t growing with age, as we’ve been led to believe, our faces are shrinking, making our noses look more prominent.

It’s such a delight, this aging thing.

But, all of this means that painters have plenty of ways to depict age, none of which require us to carve wrinkles into the faces we paint. We can paint what we would notice in life and create portraits that clearly show any age group and we can stop the cruel practise of carving up our sitters’ skins. The world of portraiture will be a kinder, gentler place.

Happy painting!