Here’s my usual progression of a close-up portrait. I start always with a very soft pencil or ink and big paint brushes. It’s the crucial part of a painting, because everything has to fall into place at one shot, it’s the first strokes that count. If it doesn’t  give a result, then for me the painting has no soul and it’s not my standard of painting. There aren’t any ways of erasing nor correcting the first lines and there on. Actually, there are no erasers in my workplace. My father banned erasers.  He used to say:”  What you meant to draw, is meant to be, there are not mistakes in painting, it’s what you put it in it: your soul that will come out, so stop erasing your soul !” Very hard for a child of 8 years old to accept that perfection is not erasing and starting over again. An excellent lesson: learn to be confident that what is coming out of your brush is going to be a cut above.