How long will the artwork take?

Depending on your requirements, the level of detail, or the size of the painting, these times will vary dramatically. I will try to give you a fair estimation when you contact me, but expect delivery anything from 2 weeks to 6 months. 

To give an estimation: Pencil drawings range from small (A5) 2 hours to large 20 hours. Paintings range from (small) 5 hours to (large) up to 160 hours, but for oils this excludes the time for the paint to dry in between layers. 

Pencil, pastel and ink on paper tend to go more quickly than on canvas. Works on oiled paper in coloured pencils are time intensive, but oil paintings with intricate background details or more than one person in them are likely to take the longest. 

For pure sitting portraits: Plan for 8 weeks, even up to six months for delivery. What could possibly take so long? In a lot of cases, it is a matter of co-ordinating the sittings and letting the oil paint dry. If there are layers upon layers of oil paint or intricate detail required this also extends the delivery date.

Hybrid sittings: a combination of live sitting and working from photographs tends to fall somewhere in the middle. 

What if I live in Cape Town, Joburg, Sandton, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Stellenbosch, George, Pretoria or somewhere like the Drakensberg?

Honestly, this question is here for the google bots. That said, your deliverable can be digitally sent over WeTransfer or physically couriered to a physical address.

What do the terms gouche, grounds, medium and scale mean?

The grounds: What structure the artwork is on. Usually Paper, Oiled paper or Canvas

The medium. What is used to capture the image. eg. pencil or oil paint.

The scale. The size, in this case, before framing.

The level of detail. No detail would mean a plain background and a high level of detail might include two persons, personal objects, pets or flowers etc.

Gouache: A thicker and brighter version of watercolours.