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Susan,
Invariably the hardest, most complicated portraits will be among the first that you do. I am amazed at the complicated composition problems we get ourselves into. One of my first portrait commission refusals was a commission of nine people with Grandma in a wheel chair...oh!...and they wanted it 14 x 20 inches. I regretfully told them they were thinking of a photograph, and sent them to a competent photographer.
In our zeal to make a sister, mother-in-law, neighbor happy, we end up biting off more than Rembrandt could chew, and usually on our first drive around the block.
In one of my classes, the class hadn't filled, and there were many stations around the model stand. I told one of the students that it would be easier to paint the model on the shadow side rather than the lighted side, and she might want to move. She said she liked the challange. After 20 years, I told her, I'm not looking for challenges. Putting together a portrait is hard enough without PURPOSELY making it harder.
If you want to do a Renoir, impressionistic piece, this could be quite fun. If you are planning to actually doing a by-the-book, make everyone look like themselves, take photographs with the correct lighting, you are looking at 20 miles of bad road.
Stanka and I have been there. I told an artist at the PSA conference, after she explained a compositional horror to me (something about a horses, a driver, and a wagon full of kids...), that she would be better off turning down the commission and painting a slew of head and shoulders portraits to fill her portfolio. She could easily spend the better part of a year in the frustrating stuggle of making this painting work. (Remember, she had painted few portraits, no horses, no wagon, no landscapes...what was she thinking?)
Spend your time wisely. There is far less of it than you can imagine.
Peggy
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