Amdall Gallery

Way back in April (which feels like it was years ago now somehow), there was a healthcare worker “portraits for heroes” thing going around on social media. The gist of it was, as a small way to show appreciation for people on the front lines as COVID-19 raged, artists were doing free portraits. Although I don’t have a large social media presence, I offered up my services as well to any nurses, doctors, or other essential workers. I got one request right off the bat from a nurse in the United Kingdom. Some time later, I ended up getting another request from a nurse here in the United States – the subject of this post!

It’s taken me quite a while to finish the process unfortunately. Although I completed the portrait in August, I haven’t been able to get to sharing it until now. I think I’ve mentioned in other posts, my family and I recently moved to another state, which has kept me very busy. Once we get into a more permanent home, I hope to get back into art and so forth more frequently. But for now, I just have to do my best to keep up with that long term goal of at least one post per month. Somehow I’ve kept that going for over three years now! Kind of surprising, but I guess time does fly.

So, on to this drawing. This subject is a nurse who reached out through the Amdall Gallery Facebook page. We discussed some ideas, then ended up going with one of her and her daughter. As usual, no names here, but the subject seemed happy about how things went. I’ll share the usual way; the finished product, some discussion, then the embedded progression video.

I feel like this one was a pretty good success! Naturally, as with the other healthcare heroes portrait, this is a person I’ve never met in real life. But based on the photos she had, I do think it’s a good representation. As I mentioned, the subject had a positive reaction when I sent the digital previews of the drawing. I think that’s the most important aspect of the end result. In terms of positive things, I really like how the skin color hues and shadows turned out. I also feel good about how the hair looks. I don’t always have good results with the teeth/lips/mouth area, but in this case it’s not too bad of an effort.

On the “still needs work” side, I might as well copy/paste from all of my recent portrait write-ups; I did not do a great job on the clothing colors/shading. I like where I am at skill-wise on skin blending and color matching, likewise to some extent on hair. But I just have such a long way to go and much to learn about blending in shadows and color variants for other things. Clothing and objects are just not something I’ve caught on to yet. Once we get settled in a new home, whenever that may be, perhaps I need to dedicate some time to improving there.

As promised, I also uploaded a YouTube video that shows progression for this drawing. This one is at 4X normal speed set to royalty free (public domain/creative commons attribution) music.

This was admittedly a somewhat short post compared to others this year. But, I do hope to find more time for drawing and this website generally at some point soon. In the mean time, if anyone has any requests or ideas they’d like to see, definitely let me know! It’s been a while since I could say this, but I’m actually getting close to being done with the art post backlog. So, I’m looking for new ideas and things to try.