Is this progress?

Well, progress of a kind.  I’m told he looks like a Roman emperor, and I think she now looks like a Red Indian, but at least they both pass as people.

As far as my brief is concerned, it is a bit like the curate’s egg.  There are places where the textures are driven by the underlying collage, though overall there is too much reliance on paint.  They both look rather menacing too, which was neither the original intention nor in character.

I’m considering whether I can learn any more from this experiment.  Maybe portraits were beyond my capabilities at this stage, given that I have not succeeded in painting a satisfactory portrait in oils as yet (much greater success rate in pastel) and a landscape or townscape would have provided  a better result.  I’m sufficiently intrigued to try the technique again, to see if I can take it past the  stage of working with someone else’s methods into something I can acknowledge as my own.