>>5933118Other anon already mentioned all the stuff that delays finishing a commission, but this is not how long the actual painting part takes.
That one can vary greatly from artist to artist and depends on how careful you are, how detailed you work, what materials you use.
Take Kayke for example.
She does a basic layer of blushing and rushes through every head, which means you get dirt on them, messy paint splotches and it just looks careless.
She probably needs less than 10 hours for a face-up.
She also tends to work in batches, i.e. she gives lots of heads a round of blushing at the same time.
Then you have artists who do a lot of very careful blushing.
They use several shades and colors and blush/texturize pretty much everything to add depth and achieve realism.
That blushing part alone can take hours, when you want a good looking and smooth result.
Afterwards they carefully paint each lash and eyebrow hair, one by one, instead of just blushing a base and painting five white lines as eyebrow.
If you already have ~40 tiny hairs per eyebrow and need to paint each one at least twice it's just normal you can't rush through a face-up.
You also need to wipe away some things inbetween,or just sit back and look at the head for a moment.
It's weird, at least in my case I actually got slower the better I got.
Back in the past I was proud when I got a head in the morning and had it already finished and packed up by dinner.
I'm slow nowadays, but I also put in a lot more care and it just looks better because of that.
More experience made me realize I need to walk that extra mile.
It's pretty much like any other painting thing too. Sitting down and painting a watercolor piece takes hours too, even if the sketch is already there and ready to be colored. Some people need hours to paint their nails.
(I honestly think though most artists don't really know how long they work at something, time tends to run when you paint)
