Chris Fornataro – Paint Coach – The Basics of Portrait Painting

I enjoy painting all subjects but being able to paint portraits is like having a super power of some kind. In the digital age we live in most people won’t look twice at a photo but a painting will bring people to tears. I’ve seen it happen many times.

My skill set as a portrait painter has benefited me more than any other painting skill. It helped me make extra money through commissions, give the best gifts, and most importantly it allowed me to capture those I loved forever.

This is a portrait I did of my grandmother for my mom when she passed away. That portrait was displayed at her funeral. My mom is one of four sisters and the old saying goes “if you give one sister a painting of her mom the others are going to want one too.” I ended up painting my grandmother three more times for each one of my aunts.

In 2020 I took on a student who wanted to get better at portrait painting. It was a great learning experience for me as a teacher. In that year I figured out first hand what worked and what didn’t in terms of teaching portrait painting. My student improved more than what I even thought was possible in a year. Keep in mind this was done all online. I never met the student in person. Having gone through this experience I felt I knew exactly how to build a portrait course to give the rest of my students the same breakthroughs.

This is one of his early portraits of Al Pacino that we now call “Alien Pacino.” He went from that to being able to capture an exact likeness as seen in the Bill Murray portrait. Now he has family and friends asking him for portraits!

The hardest part about learning to paint portraits is figuring out what to focus on learning. What works and what doesn’t. I must have spent thousands of dollars on materials, instructional videos, and workshops to learn how to paint portraits.

I took fifteen years of portrait painting experience and taught it to a student through a lot of trail and error in one year. Now I have boiled portrait painting down into its most essential concepts, ideas, and exercises in a 6 day course.

Portrait painting is a complex skill and the best way to learn a complex skill is to break it down into sub skills and focus on one at a time. That’s what I have done with this course. Each section focuses on one key aspect of portrait painting and at the end the student puts it all together in a final portrait painting.