The real reason your portrait does not look like you

Features are not the problem

Beginners paint a nose, then a mouth, then two eyes, and are baffled when the assembled face belongs to a stranger. Every part is drawn well. The face still is not theirs.

Likeness is proportion. It is the distance between the eyes measured against the width of the head, and where the ear sits relative to the eyeline. What you are actually matching is a set of gaps, not a set of shapes.

Get the gaps right and a crudely painted eye still reads as your sister. Get them wrong and a perfect eye reads as nobody.

The forehead is bigger than you think

The most common error in every class: the eyeline drawn too high. Almost everybody puts the eyes above the halfway point of the head. They sit on it, or just below it.

Draw the skull as an egg, find the true middle, and put the eyeline there before any feature exists. Half the likeness problems in the room disappear at that moment.

Look at the shadow, not the thing

A cheekbone is not a line, it is the edge where the light stops. Paint the line and you get a diagram of a face. Paint where the light stops and you get a head with a skull inside it.

This is why squinting works. It throws away detail and leaves you the shapes of light and dark, which is why portraits that feel solid usually started as four flat tones.

Check it upside down

Turn the painting over. Your brain stops reading a face and starts seeing shapes, and every proportion error becomes obvious.

Do it every twenty minutes. It costs nothing and it is the most reliable trick in the studio — professionals use it more than beginners do, not less.

One last thing

Nobody knows a face like the person who loves it. If a client says something is off but cannot say what, believe them and start measuring gaps.

They are almost always right, and it is almost always the eyeline.