This post is all about light and my struggles with it – I want to give my thoughts on lighting for a studio/workspace, but also a bit on lighting within a painting itself. In the past, I might have considered writing separate posts about these topics, dedicating one to a discussion of depicting light sources and another for actual physical
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This post is all about messing up artwork, which is something I have a decent amount of experience with. I’m going to share some of my thoughts on fixing mistakes in drawings and paintings, and redoing artwork when it’s just beyond the point of repair. And to go with this discussion, I’ve got a great example of a painting that
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In this post, I want to take a step back and compare the different types of art videos I’ve shared on the YouTube channel. Basically, comparing art video time-lapse lengths and styles. I’ve really been making an effort over the last couple of months to get some varied content onto the channel. And one of the motivating questions at the
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This post is basically about how far behind I am on blogging. I came across a great quote from the artist Richard Schmid who said to “paint like a pig eats.” Well, I have been doing exactly that over the last couple of months. I counted all of my paintings to this point, and to my great surprise, I’ve done
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My last custom portrait giveaway was several months ago, but a lot has changed for me in the art realm since then. With previous giveaways, these portraits have all been done using colored pencils. But a couple of months ago, I started trying to learn how to use oil paints. It’s been quite an invigorating experience, so I thought I’d
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This post is centered around an oil painting of a character from Elden Ring named Melina, who acts as a guide for the player during the course of the game. She’s a fascinating and mysterious character in one of the best games I’ve ever played. But, since I’ve already discussed the game itself in great detail through four previous posts,
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My painting journey has taken a learning-oriented turn towards trying to abandon some of my most loved crutches. The most significant of these crutches has been using pencil to sketch outlines before painting, which is how I got my feet under me with the first dozen paintings. But recently, I decided if I wanted to truly develop my skills, I’d
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Buried at the end of my last post, I posed the question, “How do you digitize your artwork?” I embedded a crowdsignal poll with some options that came to mind, which actually represent things I’ve considered. Since I started back into the art hobby about five years ago, I’ve been taking photos of portraits using my smartphone. As the years
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The next artwork in my recent parade of oil paintings takes us back to the topic of video games, which is not an unusual one for me. However, this time I’ve painted something related to the Dragon Age series, which hasn’t been a topic of any of my fan art that I can recall. This one is of Morrigan, the
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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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A couple of specific things are at the forefront of my mind right now when it comes to painting. The first is that, in a general sense, I need lots of practice. Over the course of around five years and 150ish portraits, my colored pencil drawings improved noticeably. I can see major areas where my painting skills need to develop,
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Recently, I was approached by a co-worker to ask if I would help out with a display featuring Holocaust survivor portraits for an event called Unity Day. She had heard through the grapevine about my art hobby, and thought it might be good to team up for some portraits and biographies at the table she was planning. I am pretty
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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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Perhaps this post will trigger a bit of deja vu, as it’s a topic that I’ve already covered somewhat recently. This is all about self portraits, but with the added twist of a medium that is still quite new to me. As you can tell from the barrage of recent posts, I am all about oil painting these days. I
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As I continue on clearing my backlog of paintings that have yet to be shared, now I’ve come to the fourth of five paintings done during a holiday weekend in October. This one in particular was focused on really pushing for a high contrast/heavy shadow challenge. Last year, I did a colored pencil sketch of some characters from the movie
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