A portrait makes its argument through a handful of decisions, and the trick is that none of them feel like decisions at first — they just look like "how the picture is". But every one was chosen, and once you can name them, you can read any portrait like a sentence and write your own.
The Six Choices That Do the Work
The first is pose — is the body upright, square and formal, or relaxed and slouched? An upright pose signals importance and control; a relaxed one signals ease, honesty, ordinariness. The second is gaze, and this one's powerful. When the subject looks straight at you, they confront you, they're in charge of the encounter; when they look away, they become someone you're allowed to study, more vulnerable, more thoughtful, sometimes more lonely.
The third is setting, the background. A plain, empty backdrop strips everything away and says look only at this person; a grand setting — columns, curtains, a sweeping landscape — borrows that grandeur and lends it to the sitter. The fourth is props and symbols — the objects placed in the frame on purpose. A book says learning, a crown says rule, a tool says work, a flower says something fragile. Nothing in a serious portrait is in the picture by accident.
The fifth is clothing — the same person in robes, in a suit, or in paint-stained overalls is three different arguments. And the sixth is scale — how big the subject looms in the frame. Fill the whole canvas and they dominate; shrink them into a vast space and they're dwarfed, small, exposed.
They Speak as a Chord, Not One Note
Here's the grown-up part: these choices don't work alone, they work together. An upright pose plus a direct gaze plus a grand setting plus a crown all pull the same way — pure power, no ambiguity. But mix them — an upright, formal pose with a tired, looking-away gaze — and you get something more interesting and more human: someone who holds power but is worn down by it. The meaning lives in the combination.
In the toy, change one choice at a time and watch the reading shift; then change two at once and feel how the meanings stack and sometimes fight. That's exactly what you'll be doing when you compose your own portrait this term — not copying a face, but choosing, deliberately, what you want the picture to claim.