Amdall Gallery

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The subject of this post is an oil painting I did of my all-time favorite musician Mike Patton. Patton is a man of many bands and projects, including Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk, and quite a few more. I’ve drawn him in colored pencil a couple of times, and in those posts I discuss why I like his music so much – so I won’t go into depth again here. But I will say at least that, in my opinion, his vocal talents and diversity of styles are peerless.

I’ve posted all of these musician portraits out of order; really, this painting of Mike Patton was the first of the series. It got my kids asking about my favorite musician, and then naturally talking about their two favorites Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa. It’s fun to see their little minds develop – it doesn’t seem like that long ago that they were too young to articulate the “why” of things they like. Since seeing my painting of my favorite, they were excited about the idea of also memorializing theirs.

I think this painting turned out pretty well – the first test for me is always whether it looks like who it’s supposed to be. I based this on the Last Cup of Sorrow video, which is really a great one. Although not a perfect likeness, I think it generally looks like Patton in the music video, which is a nice start. At this stage in my learning process, which was a few months ago, I was trying to practice freehand painting without using pencil outlines. But I wasn’t confident I could achieve any sort of likeness without a pencil sketching first, so I did that here. I think now I might be able to get this close without relying on sketching.

I do want to try painting Patton again eventually, this time though just using a loose painted outline style more similar to the recent stuff I’ve shared on Instagram and YouTube.