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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This post continues the discussion of a wild painting weekend I had in October, during which I somehow churned through five paintings. As I’ve mentioned, this is not at all something I set out to do specifically; I just finished one, found I wanted to paint more, so I kept rolling. The subject of this painting is Eric Andre, a
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This post will be an interesting one, at least from my perspective. If you’ve browsed this site, you can see pretty quickly that I’m all about portraits. Usually head-and-shoulder views of people, but sometimes animals or other scenes featuring a human being in some way. But this writeup is actually about my first fully committed, no-people-at-all, landscape attempt! It’s kind
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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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One of the many unexpected questions that arose as I started learning to paint was, what do I do with extra paint on my palette when I’m finished? I’m about 10 paintings into it now, and I still don’t have a great sense of how much paint I’ll need. But that was especially true with the first few paintings –
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A few weeks ago, I finally made the leap to attempt painting for the first time. I’ve long admired the “painterly” look across the different mediums, particularly the textures and qualities produced by oil paints. It’s been a long term goals to learn, but had always seemed like something I’d try some far-off, unspecified day. So, I surprised myself greatly
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I’ve talked about my affinity for stock photos on many occasions. In previous posts, I’ve written about royalty free images, photo spamming on social media, and my general love of memes (which tend to lean heavily on stock photos). I just find these images to be very appealing from a portrait study perspective. The facial expressions and/or subject positions are
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This is going to be yet another piece of artwork dedicated to Dallas Mavericks legend Dirk Nowitzki. Considering this is now the fourth drawing I’ve done of Dirk, I guess it’s safe to say I’ve long been a huge fan of his. I grew up watching the Mavs, and especially remember watching those difficult 1990s seasons with guys like Jamal
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This post is about my very first attempt at oil painting. Well, really first ever attempt at any type of painting, which to my surprise was actually done this past weekend. I feel like I’ve been talking about this for years, but I’ve had “learning to paint” in my back pocket as a long term goal for quite sometime. It’s
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As with my original post from a few years ago, I am once again a bit late in writing about Stranger Things. This time though, when it comes to Season 4, at least I’m only a couple of months behind the actual release and pop culture/meme frenzy. As I’ve previously discussed, I am a huge fan of Stranger Things. I
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This write-up covers some tips and thoughts regarding European travel, specifically when taking a Mediterranean Cruise. Like a lot of the world, we haven’t traveled much over the last couple of years. Some small voyages occasionally, but my wife and I are fairly cautious people so we’ve been hesitant to take any major trips that couldn’t be avoided. However, this
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Somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade ago, my wife and I took a honeymoon trip to Europe. To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to make another voyage overseas – this time with a couple of little ones along for the ride! I am planning a full write-up on this trip, to include some lessons learned…but I think that post
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When I shared my last custom portrait giveaway, I mentioned that I had somehow let a year go by between these artwork raffles. I thought that was sort of an aberration due to the pandemic and all. Yet here we are again, almost a year later, and I let time get away from me again! I’ve had some good experiences
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In my last post, I wrote a bit on the fact that my posts are often a bit delayed from when the artwork is actually finished. As I said previously, it’s probably a fairly common phenomenon for many artists to delay sharing something by a month or two. But there have been times when those delays stacked up quite a
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There was a point in time, just a few years ago, when I typically referred to Amdall Gallery as both an art and data analysis blog. In fact, I still even have it in the sub-title at the top of the site. I’ve been consistently writing posts every month since August 2017 (almost five years running now), and at the
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