Portrait in oil

I started my first ever oil painting this afternoon. Want to do good portraits so I started out with a picture of my Da in his navy days which recently came to a close. Here he is on guard of honour duty for president Robinson sometime in the 90's (It was shortly after he got back from his tour in Lebanon is all I can remember)

So I started off sketching onto the canvas paper... stuff. It was a pain, mainly due to me not being happy with it no matter what I did, but the material finish of the paper is hard to draw on, all you can really do is mark and smudge

I started off with a brown wash thing going on

My main problem was that I had no idea how to mix a medium with the oils to get desired effects, so I stuck with the white spirits for a while and then randomly switched to a bottle of liquin I bought for just such an emergency

And thats just about where I left it I think, I did do a little more, but nothing of note, I think I played with the tones and planes of the face more and added some colour to the cap brim. All in all a hell of a fun day, im high as hell from the white spirits, gonna have to get some odourless stuff for sure.