Practicing Specific Weaknesses | Portrait Oil Painting

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I tend to practice and repeat specific themes when it comes to portrait painting. This seems to manifest itself most often with concepts or features that I view as weaker areas. Earlier in my painting journey, probably for the first 150 or so oil paintings, I honestly really needed to practice everything. So, I didn’t narrow in as much on specific concepts or weaknesses, because arguably everything was somewhat of a weakness – I worked on broad concepts, like basic blending, building shapes freehand, and how colors interact. However, I feel like now I’ve gotten my feet under me to some extent painting portraits with oils. And so I tend zero in on certain things I want to develop.

One big emphasis lately has been natural sitting poses – I’ve had some spectacular failures (at least in my view) and some solid efforts at the end of 2024 and start of 2025. My hope is to keep working at depicting subjects in normal relaxed poses until those solid efforts mostly overtake the rough ones. I have also wanted to work on hands a bit more, and the painting featured in this post was an effort to practice both referenced concepts. This portrait study was painted on 12 X 12 oil paper and was my 236th overall. I’ll follow my standard format here, which is to share an image of the painting, the Instagram time lapse, and some verbiage specific to the piece. Then, I’ll embed the YouTube discussion video, including another brief writeup on the topic, materials used, and some other hopefully useful information. I’ll wrap the post up by sharing the YT Shorts time lapse and some other similar painting videos.

Natural Sitting Pose, oil on paper.

Shop link related to this piece:

This piece turned out to be one I really like, although for some reason I’ve had trouble getting a really exact true-to-life scan of it. I actually tried to make this the “last painting of the year” in 2024, which is apparently a difficult task for me, because it always seems like I plan everything out and then somehow slip another one in just before the year ends. The YouTube video I recorded featuring the painting’s time lapse is all about how it exemplifies a bunch of goals for things I want to practice in 2025. Of course, I ended up painting two more right at the end of the year, so it’s technically not even my 2nd to last of 2024. But, it was a good effort towards practicing (and not hiding or obscuring) hands. And I think the sitting pose turned out exactly as I planned, which made for good effort towards practicing those natural looking poses or positions.

Some other topics explored in the embedded video: As I’ve mentioned previously, 2024 was my 2nd full year of painting, and my number of paintings decreased significantly compared to the 1st year. But I averaged more time on each piece, which I think is a natural progression. I also finally invested in some painting equipment upgrades like a real easel, large glass palette, and more of my favorite brushes. And I started some new side projects, like building an artwork catalog/transaction tracking app, and started writing another book. And as I said, the featured portrait exemplifies some of what hope to push towards more in 2025 – improving composition, detail, and figure aspects that I’m weaker on.

Here are some additional details of the video I shared on YouTube, including materials used and some other information. I’ll also embed the Shorts video, although it’s kind of redundant to the Instagram Reels post, as I typically just share the same edited vertical time lapse on both platforms. As I mentioned, it was my 236th total oil painting and was originally done in December 2024. The main video I’ve embedded is about 7 minutes, and is similar in format and presentation to some of the others I’ve done (also linked after the timestamps).

Discussion Video Timestamps:

  • 01:18 Equipment Upgrades
  • 01:46 App for Tracking Art Projects and Transactions
  • 03:02 Painting Plan for 2025
  • 05:56 Book on Learning Oil Painting

Materials Used:

Colors Used:

🎞️ Here are the playlists I’ve grouped my art videos into:

🎨 Here are some other painting walkthroughs:

✏️ Here are some pencil drawing videos:

Blick Art Materials
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2 comments

  • Phoebe Sparrow Wagner
    March 1, 2025 7:45 pm

    Hi Jon,

    Your paintings are getting better each time. But you need to NOT use black for shadows when painting the human body. Try a bit of blue or crimson or even green added to your base flesh tone, but stay away from all black even to mix with other colors. If you eschew all use of black while painting the human body I think your work will absolutely shine with improvement. You should see the difference immediately.

    Reply
    • Jon Amdall
      March 2, 2025 8:06 am

      Hello Phoebe! I hope you’re doing well – thanks for checking this one out. I actually do not use any black in my paintings. I experienced what you described pretty early in my experimentation with oils, that any form of black paint did not mix well with the browns, reds, and yellows I needed for skin tones. In this painting, the darker spots you see are likely various combinations of brown/blue/red – although I probably do overdo it in terms of darker values sometimes. It’s just so fun to experiment, sometimes I can’t help myself you know?

      Reply

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