Going back in time to May 2023, here is an oil painting I did around that time based on when it was shared to the Amdall Gallery Instagram. This post will include a static image of the piece, an embed of the time lapse video, and then some verbiage from when I wrote about the painting on social media at the time. So, keep in mind what’s written here is a bit of a time capsule.
At this point, I’m comically behind on sharing paintings to this website – 110 paintings that I haven’t shared here! There is zero chance I have time to actually share them all unless I quit my job or something, so I’m going to have to start skipping more. I’ve leapfrogged over a couple of months for this one, and I’ll start jumping more soon. Let’s go back then and see what I had to say about this painting…
May 2023: Redoing an old portrait, oil on paper.
Redoing an old portrait, oil on paper. This was a fun one! Occasionally, I like to redo an old portrait to gauge how I’ve improved. If I’ve given it enough space, 2-3 years or so, the difference is pretty significant. It’s fascinating to actually visually see what I’ve learned, rather than just broadly estimate. I’ve done this exercise previously comparing pencil drawings, but never comparing a painting to an old drawing.
The thought crossed my mind to try this, and I had the perfect old drawing in mind. This is one from late 2020, which I was not very satisfied with. I didn’t like the spatial arrangements (head tilt, feature placement) or colors (too dull and muted) in the pencil version. I tried this again with oil paints – the result was so much better! The colors are much more vibrant and match what I wanted but couldn’t achieve with the original. And with all of this “no measuring” freehand painting I’ve been doing, the feature placement was much better.
In this time-lapse video, I also tried to do something a bit different. I usually just share the high speed progression video as-is, but this time I also added a comparison at the end with the drawing and painting side by side. Hopefully that adds something useful to this one!
