Catherine recently sent me a portrait work-in-progress commenting: ” It will take some further refinement, but I was wondering how to handle the teeth.”
A smiling face is invariably a tricky problem. The lip-line and general modeling is challenge enough – then trickier, are the teeth. In the annals of portraiture, there are not too many great portraits that feature toothy smiles. The Mona Lisa doesn’t show her teeth and Frans Hal’s Laughing Cavalier isn’t actually laughing.
There’s a lot of character in teeth, I look at the tooth lines – you can often see individual teeth and without some subtle indication of them, the mouth can look like a boxers mouth protector. The key is to make some vertical marks without being too explicit. I glaze a little shadow from the upper lips onto the teeth and perhaps separate teeth a tad with a little shadow too (no sharp toothy lines though). I always stay away from pure white except perhaps for a single highlight!
It’s easy to be discouraged in working on the teeth. Don’t be! It’s always a struggle to find balance: as John Singer Sargent famously remarked “A portrait is a painting with something slightly wrong with the mouth”.
Break-a-Brush!
David