How long does it take to paint a great, detailed, portrait?

July 1, 2020 7:37 PM

About how many hours does it take to paint a detailed, realistic, life-sized, half-length portrait with a detailed background using oil paint? I would love to know how long it takes to create a portrait similar in quality to an old master painting. If you are a painter, feel free to speak from experience. If you are not a painter but have thoughts about how to estimate this, that would also be welcome.
posted by mortaddams to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Best answer: I would give it ~64 hours ... starting from a prepped canvas, and assuming your colors are ready? 6 hours of drawing, 6 hours of underpainting, 40 hours of painting-painting, 12 hours of tempura detailing and varnish.

I am not a practicing painter, but I did take a class in Fa Presto, an old masters’ technique, and that is the framework I’m basing this around. It is a fast-drying technique because there is a fair amount of varnish mixed in with the color.

As to how many hours of paid sittings one should schedule the subject of the portrait for ... is another matter entirely!
posted by Rube R. Nekker at 8:13 PM on July 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

What size painting? I know several portrait artists and a big part of their pricing is the size of the canvas. The physical part of the subject - head and shoulders, torso, full-length - is one part, as are the number of subjects included. Single person, entire family? Also pets. Pets and other animals like horses are included more often than you might think. I think you might need to be a little more specific to get realistic costs.

You might peruse the website of the Portrait Society of America. They also have a publication that might offer more specific information or the ability to contact portraitists.
posted by citygirl at 8:14 PM on July 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

The phrase "old master" is too vague. Some painters that are historically revered painted very quickly, like Caravaggio, and some painters, Rembrandt and VerMeer are often associated with the term "Dutch masters" were known for being some of the slowest painters of their cohort. Both Rembrandt and VerMeer built up their paint layers in a series of transparent glazes---Leonardo daVinci is another example---to get very subtle color and value transitions. Michelangelo was a slow painter, Raphael Sanzio a rapid painter.

Traditional oil paints take a very long time to dry, depending on the colors used, the attending media or the surface of the paint film will crack as it oxidizes or dries; you can observe this in a lot of historical Spanish paintings, for example, as there was a fashion for poppy oil primers which cause the upper layer to crack as it dries in a fish eye pattern.

All this to say that you should identify the artist that you would like to copy and learn more about their painting style technique from conservation articles on their painting style.

Van Gough painted in a single frenzied sitting, and you can see that many of his paintings have a crazed surface from his use of colors with different drying rates all together.

Anyway, I love copying VerMeer, Rembrandt, Raphael and Van Eyck as they are some of my heroes. I would say it would take me at least three months from primer to top paint layer, and then a good six months to a year for the painting to properly dry.

I hope this is helpful information.
posted by effluvia at 9:21 PM on July 1, 2020 [8 favorites]

Reproductions of such paintings made using (what are described as) similar techniques take a few weeks to a few months to complete, though I think a simple portrait would be on the lower end of that. Serious hobbyists tend to take longer. As for the original artists, in some ways the answer is that it took as much time as they had, as they worked at widely varying rates depending on their individual circumstances.
posted by notquitemaryann at 9:26 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Pretty much what Rube says, but for old master style that time would not be continuous as the painting would be painted in those gauzy, translucent layers, often many layers and require drying for a few days in between. After an oil painting is completed it must be dried thoroughly, for up to a year, before the varnish is applied (usually in thin layers, one a day) to avoid cracking as it ages.
These older paintings may have taken under 100 hours to paint, but they would have been painted over a much longer period. Stuff like Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks though, yeah, that's hundreds of hours of painting, most of it finger-painting (sfumato style, you make brushstrokes, but then blur them with your fingers), again, in just tons of layers, but they would be thin and probably dry overnight. Layers are very important in paintings because of the physical nature of how they interact with light. The surfaces between layers reflect light too, like the internal layers of skin. This is what makes paintings done like this look so luminous and flawless. Go look at Mona Lisa's skin...there's no brushstrokes, and it glows. Hours and hours. Oh, and it would probably be a few days-week for drying between the painting steps Rube mentioned. And back then there would also be all the time making your paint, out of things like crushed malachite and lead and everything would be super toxic and you'd be touching it all and most likely, being driven mad by it.
Also on preview, what effluvia says.
posted by sexyrobot at 11:55 PM on July 1, 2020 [6 favorites]

Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals is known for his fast, almost impressionistic, brush strokes, and he was extremely productive. This short video explains his style and shows a portrait that he made alla prima, probably in one session.
posted by elgilito at 4:20 AM on July 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Some painters use assistants to do part of the work as dictated by the artist. There are lots of opinions about this practice.
posted by theora55 at 7:14 AM on July 2, 2020

You can watch the process of a self-taught polymath recreating a Vermeer in Tim's Vermeer (I enthusiastically recommend this movie). To spoil the ending, it took years, but a lot of that was spent on background details.
posted by adamrice at 1:46 PM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]