With my 9th painting, I ran into a bit of a conundrum and drove home a good lesson for myself. To this point, I feel like I had shown a pretty steady improvement in my paintings. They certainly weren’t masterpieces, but I was encouraged by the practice showing tangible results. The other side of this coin though is the fact
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As I discussed in my last post, I’m making an effort to push myself more when it comes to artwork. A huge part of that obviously is trying oil painting for the first time around two months ago. But I am also trying to flex some artistic muscles that I haven’t used much. I described this in some depth already;
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Where does the time go? It seems like I ask myself that a lot. It’s probably on my mind so much lately because I’m rapidly approaching four decades of stumbling around on this planet. My kids seem to be growing faster than ever, and I’m trying to capture and appreciate everything that’s happening as it happens. But it’s hard to
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Over the last week or so, I went on a sudden Princess Bride artwork binge. I started outlines for three different scenes! I’ve only finished one so far, but I was surprised by the sudden surge of Princess Bride-related activity. I think it was partially inspired by our recent move. As we’ve been slowly getting things unpacked, I found one
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Lately I’ve been discussing my recent journey into the world of oil painting, having shared my first attempt, a portrait of my kids, and an effort to use up excess paint. Now, we come to my 5th painting, in which I attempted to paint a portrait of my wife. I say “attempted” because I did experience some challenges along the
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The question of what to do during a long flight is much easier to answer than it used to be. Our kids have been on planes a few times, and we’ve been fortunate that they handle flights pretty well. Of course, we have to thank the existence of kids’ tablets and the practically unlimited number of apps, games, and shows
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My habits when it comes to artwork typically involve sporadic bursts of motivation. I often tackle one drawing at a time, spending a couple of hours on the project before I move on to something fresh. Sometimes though, I become so inspired about a topic that I work on multiple pieces concurrently or in succession. There are quite a few
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If you’ve read many posts on this site, it’s probably apparent that I do a lot of drawing with my kids. They have desks set up right next to mine, and on the weekends, we’ll often all sit around and draw. They are quite adventurous with their art; creating pure imaginative scenes, drawing what I draw (such as the Bob
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Despite wanting to put pencil to paper, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve drawn anything. I’ts been on my mind, but life/work has been busier than usual lately, so I haven’t had much of a chance. In the interim, I was able to finish up a subscriber thank you post and one on website stats, but I was traveling
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I’ve been home sick for a few days, and felt a bit like drawing…unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything, so I just lounged around instead. Last night I finally had an idea, inspired by my previous sketch of Fezzik and Inigo from the Princess Bride. The Princess Bride is one of those all-time favorites that I watch pretty much any
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It seems like I haven’t posted much lately, which is confirmed when I look at the monthly archive counts on my sidebar. Over the last year, I think I’ve averaged 9-10 posts per month, with some peaks and valleys. But June and July have been huge valleys, with only six and then three posts! This does make sense though; summer
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In the comments of an Instagram post I made on my last sketch (Fezzik and Inigo from the Princess Bride), one of my longtime friends responded with “Sam and Frodo.” This comment was pretty exciting, because I thought it was a request for another sketch! As it turns out, he was joking (which should have been obvious in hindsight), but
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