Every once in a while people will ask me to do a tutorial. Most often someone has a question about how to paint a certain texture or render a peach or an orange realistically. Unfortunately, I don't often take photos of the painting process. So when I began my latest piece I thought would be good time to do so.

This model for this piece is my wife's younger sister Camille. She has striking features and a very exotic beauty about her. She's very versatile and can cover a range of different looks.
I'm painting on gessoed board and begin with a graphite drawing. I pay particular attention to measurement and proportion of the model, but am loose with the trees. Once the figure is in perfect order then everything else around her will be easier to arrange. Once a proper pencil drawing has been completed, then I do a pen drawing using Sharpie Ultra Fine Point permanent markers. After the pen drawing is complete then I will put a diluted layer of burnt umber using either Liquin, Walnut Oil or turp to thin the paint (in this case I've chosen Liquin). Now in a perfect world, I would have mapped out all the leaves before this stage, but since my brain is wired to be both impatient and confident, I figure I will just paint the foliage without an underdrawing. That's not always the smartest thing to do and I don't always recommend it, but this time I figure that things will be just fine.
Once this underlayer has dried, then it's time to begin painting! The leaves are loosely and faintly drawn in with a brush and then are blocked in as I go. I'm beginning from the left since I'm right handed so as not to run my hand over already painted areas (I am not very consistent with that though) Now this is the point where mindless drudgery starts to settle in and I begin to ask myself, 'Why in the world did I decide to paint hundreds of little leaves?" then I remind myself, "Oh yeah, because it will look great and besides, at least I'm not painting the full body shot that I had originally intended." So as to retain the interest that I have in the piece I decided to branch out (no pun intended) and work on the tree trunks and begin the shirt. The shirt at this stage is mainly just a rough idea of the darker areas, the shirt will end up being much lighter in the finished product. You'll also notice that I filled in the eyes...just so should she wouldn't look like a zombie starting back at me.
At this point I'm beginning to play around with the face a little and decided to lay down a layer of paint to begin building up the paint layers on the face (and to avoid the leaves for a while...they sure can get boring!)
Here's the closest thing to being finished right now... these tree trunks
Leaf detail...
I decided that the leaves were looking too warm, too yellow, so I sanded them over a little (as you can see in the last 4 picts) and began painting over them using cooler tones, especially the uppermost leaves. I decided to start blocking in the hair using straight Raw Umber. As you can see, I try to plan stages to the painting, but am easily distracted and am likely to skip around. This "tutorial" is a more of a travelogue than tutorial, perhaps I'll start talking about what paints I'm using or something...*shrugs shoulders*