Going back in time to March 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. Let’s go back then and see what I had to say about this painting…
March 2023: Purple hair portrait, oil on paper. I finally received a fresh batch of art supplies! Including my long awaited strathmore oil paint paper, which I’m incredibly relieved to have. The last couple of paintings were on drawing paper, which feels like having my brush stuck in the mud.
The subject here is actually a hybrid of a couple different references – I’ve still been messing around with AI face generators, which is pretty fun and a nice source of fresh faces to paint. I also saw an article on Maya Hawke from Stranger Things, who I think released some music. I took some inspiration from that photo as well, but I think this portrait probably looks more like the AI people.
(Looking at this from my current perspective, this one still looks pretty solid to me. My current portraits are certainly better technique-wise, but it’s a very solid one that I’m still fond of)
Going back in time to March 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. Let’s go back then and see what I had to say about this painting…
A saved portrait, oil on paper. This is one painting I really thought was going off the rails in early stages. The initial underpainting and outline were good, but as I started filling in details, I really wasn’t liking what was going on. But somehow fortunately it came together in the end and turned into a result I feel good about
This was the last painting before my supply order came in…so it was on smooth drawing paper, which is really unyielding and difficult with oil paints. Glad to report I’m fully restocked with textured oil painting paper again!
(Looking at this from my current perspective, it has really stood the test of time. The painting itself looks pretty good even today. Sometimes, these don’t hold up material-wise or conceptually – this one is still kicking on both counts)
Going back in time to March 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. Let’s go back then and see what I had to say about this painting…
Yellow Shirt Guy, oil on paper. I ran out of textured oil painting paper, so for a couple of paintings I had to use regular drawing paper. When I first started painting back in October, I sort of thought it was all similar. But now, I realize how far off base I was!
The Strathmore oil paper I use has all of this great texture which mimics canvass, whereas drawing paper is much smoother. The oil paint paper must be coated in something too, because paint applies so much more smoothly. Painting on drawing paper is such a weird sensation – like a dream where you can’t do something no matter how hard you exert yourself. The paint just stops, like the brush is in concrete that just dried. I have to use much more linseed oil than I’m used to.
So, I did this one and one other before I finally got my paper shipment this morning! Relieved to have supplies in more comfortable with again. I do actually like how this painting turned out though. The unyielding surface has one positive – it forces me to add individual sections of color instead of being lazy.
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It’s kind of interesting to look back at this portrait. It was my 49th oil painting, which at the time of writing this, was 64 paintings ago. It’s kind of wild to think I’m that far behind in blogging – this was done in February, and I’ve painted more in the time since then than I had in total when I did this one. So, it’s becoming an fascinating exercise in trying to imagine what I was thinking at the time, and what I’ve learned since.
This one started out with some promise, but sometimes paintings just don’t go the way you thought they would. At some point, I felt like I lost control of the piece. In particular, I think I moved the eyes, hand, and mouth into an awkward place, and then tried to smooth things over in a less than successful way.
Once it went sideways, I also started to lose interest in it. Based on what I wrote on Instagram, I did this one on a Sunday – as it became time to get ready for the workweek, I just sort of came to end of the painting mentally. Putting it in perspective, it was certainly an improvement over some I’d attempted a month or two prior. But it’s never been a favorite. Despite that, for some reason the YouTube Shorts version became my most popular video of all time. I have no idea why, but I guess it hit their algorithm just right.
I’ve embedded the YouTube Shorts video below. I didn’t make a separate one for the “Painting to Music” playlist this time, so no classical music video to share.
The latest time lapse videos are available on the Instagram page:
I’m so incredibly far behind now in sharing paintings, and it seems like there’s not much I can do to address it. I’ve tried batching multiple into one post, and I’ve tried simplifying my posts as well. But it just seems I am vastly more interested in painting than I am blogging. Not really a problem exactly – I am enjoying myself immensely. But I feel bad paying for website hosting that I’m not using much.
Anyhow, to this specific painting. It’s from about 6 months ago, which frankly is an eternity in this context, because I’ve gotten so much practice since then. I just finished painting #105, whereas this one is number 48. Maybe you could call this a bit “meta,” but from what I recall, I was pondering what to do next and came across a photo on Unsplash of a guy pondering his chess moves.
With this one, I kind of left it a bit unfinished. I essentially ran out of time, because I had to head out for dinner. And I’m not really one to return to a painting later – that was true six months ago when I did this painting, and it’s still true now. I have fully settled into alla prima mode, and if I can’t paint wet-on-wet, I am much more likely to just drop the project and move onto something new. I recognize that this sort of impatience probably won’t work long term as an artist though, because the necessary leap in quality if I ever want to actually sell anything will probably come from those details that get worked through in additional painting sessions.
I’ve also got a couple of YouTube videos embedded below. One is from my “Painting to Music” playlist, this one featuring the Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. And the second video is a YouTube Shorts time lapse, which is probably the exact same one I shared via Instagram (embedded at the top).
Around the time of this painting, I was thinking about how often I paint similar things. As you can tell from a quite browse of this site, I pretty consistently share head and shoulders portraits of people. Occasionally, I’ll branch out into a figure study, a pet, or even a rare landscape. But usually, I practice similar styles and types of artwork. I enjoy it of course, so it makes sense that I follow paths that are fun to me. And I like being able to see progress as I practice similar things – it certainly makes it easier to compare and to get those repetitions. But I do want to learn and try new things too, which is one of the reasons I tried painting in the first place after so many years of colored pencil sketching.
I’m trying to branch out with more figure studies, which I’ll continue since it pushes me out of my comfort zone. But I also realized a lot of my portraits are similar facial expressions – smiles or neutral expressions. And if I’m being honest with myself, I also think I gravitate towards closed-mouth expressions fairly often. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I need to try to render some different facial expressions, perhaps to practice conveying different emotions. I often ramble on about thoughts like these to my family – my kids suggested angry and sad faces. Since I’m not really sure painting angry things aligns well with my using painting to relax, I felt like trying a sad face might be a good one.
So, I gave this one a shot. As with most of my paintings, I have mixed feelings about this one. I really like this painting in a broad sense and as a portrait, in general, it’s one that I really like. This painting was done four months prior to the time of me writing this blog post, which in the context of learning and practice is a fairly long time. I think my painting has evolved a bit since then. But even with that in mind, this is definitely one I’m proud of and feel good about the details. All that being said, I’m not sure if I quite captured what I set out to do here. I wanted to depict a sad expression, and I did achieve somewhat of a subtle sadness. But I was actually trying to be more obvious. I think an uninitiated observer might be able to look at this and interpret a more neutral expression, which means I didn’t accomplish everything I’d hoped with this one.
I will say this though; if I can achieve this sort of result with every painting (something I genuinely like, but doesn’t quite achieve every goal)? I will definitely take that! To me, that would be an overall victory in terms of motivating me to continue with this hobby. I’ve also got a couple of YouTube videos embedded below. One is from my “Painting to Music” playlist, this one featuring the Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, G Major Prelude. One thing I’ve learned from creating all of these classical music videos is that I apparently like Bach quite a lot. I think Bach and Haydn have become my two favorite classical composers. Anyhow, the second video below is a YouTube Short.
This painting of a woman in a dark room is another portrait study in my efforts to practice specific areas that aren’t my strongest. There are a few aspects of portrait painting that come to mind, but one in particular goes back even to my colored pencil days. I’ve talking about this before in more depth, but for a long time I’ve relied on measurement for portrait proportions. I have a long term goal in mind to eventually try to paint from life, so as a step towards that, I want to get accustomed to painting freehand and trying to visualize spatial relationships better. I think if I can get more comfortable with that, I might find the leap to live painting sessions slightly less daunting.
There are other areas too though. I also still need practice when it comes to contrast, deep shadows/dark areas and color selection. I’ve gotten more repetitions on this lately, so perhaps this is a less urgent need now, but at the time of this painting in the early spring, I definitely needed more experience with it. I think this portrait of a lady in a dark room checks several of the boxes that I needed at the time, and really still need time and repetitions with. Certainly this is true when it comes to the freehand and dark color value questions. There are other things to work on as well that this doesn’t touch on, such as figure studies. But a project can’t be all things at once, particularly for someone like me who has so much yet to learn.
One aspect that makes me laugh about this particular painting is how it played on social media. I typically share all of these time lapses to both Instagram and YouTube, but I can never predict how they’re going to do. I literally have no clue what people like on each platform, and if I try to predict, I’m nearly always wrong. With this one, I thought it was exactly the type of thing that would play well on both platforms. I picked trending audio, had a solid painting, and structured everything how I thought would work out the best. Yet it pretty much failed on Instagram and YouTube! I have no idea why…but clearly I do not know what I’m doing. Every time I think I’m starting to get it, these platforms are glad to show me how wrong I am.
I did try something new with this one – I trimmed the length down to less than 20 seconds. I’ve now heard/read in a couple of places that there is some value to shortening these vertical videos down to very brief lengths. Social media algorithms are a complete mystery to me, so we’ll see what happens with that. According to some people, 6-7 seconds is the longest you should go without something happening (camera change, graphic, caption, etc). In my videos, really nothing happens aside from painting! So I figured maybe I needed to work on that. But who knows? It didn’t seem to change anything.
I’ve also got a couple of YouTube videos embedded below. One is from my “Painting to Music” playlist, this one featuring the 1st Movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. The second is a YouTube Short.
It might be sort of weird how I’m phrasing this title – a “Jon Amdall Self Portrait”…painted by Jon Amdall…written by Jon Amdall. That’s a lot of weird third person references. But, since it’s the latest painting I’ve done of myself, and I’d kind of like to index this thing and let search engines pick it up, I figured I’d better actually have my name listed. Update: For some reason, I keep getting traffic on this post even years later. I’ll add a couple more of my self portraits to this just to make it more comprehensive! So, here is a collection of various self portraits over the last couple of year.
Anyhow, that’s exactly what this is – more self portraits. I don’t do a ton of these, but I find trying to portray yourself is a pretty useful measure of how an artist is progressing and learning. I did a couple over the four or five years I was doing a lot of colored pencil drawings, and could see some definite progress as I moved from graphite to color and got more practice. Early in my oil painting journey, I think my 10th or 11th one, I attempted a self-portrait. It wasn’t great; actually not the worst likeness, but not really a good painting. And I had to lean on graphite pencil to give myself some guiderails.
At this point in time, around the mid-40s of my oil paint portrait tally, I was fully invested in freehand painting without using measuring tools. And since I know my face better than probably any other, I figured this might be the ultimate test. Could I capture my own likeness without any proportional divider or ruler? As it turned out, yes I could! The likeness was pretty well on point, much more so I think than the previous one. I was able to accurately depict many of the traits that make me look like myself, such as my deep set eyes, long face, and prominent nose. The time-lapse video distorts the image to some extent because of the angle, but I think in a still image you can get a good sense.
I’ve found that my self portraits have kind of gone up and down to some extent – in fact, I think the most recent one I did was a bit worse than the previous. I’m not sure why that is though. Maybe I have a distorted view of my own features? It’s definitely harder to be objective about yourself. Or, another possibility is that I just don’t spend as much time on these self portraits, since they’re less important to me than other subjects. That’s not intended to be mean to myself, it’s just a fact – if I’m painting a commission, or even something else that I’m creatively charged up by, I just have much more focus and interest.
When I started this painting, I had some vague notions of treating it sort of like a capstone project. Although I’ve done over 80 paintings now, at the point in time when I painted this one, I had done somewhere in the mid-40s. I really felt like I was starting to get into the groove of things, and was seeing tangible improvement in technique, color selection, and just generally making human beings actually look human. That’s a fair amount of painting in four months, almost like a painting boot camp in some ways. Through all of that, I learned quite a bit by forcing myself to practice specific areas of weakness. Things like freehand outlines without measurement, figure poses, using different brush types, and color blending and application of discrete color zones or areas.
At the time, I started thinking that if I really had improved at these things, maybe I should try to put some of the lessons together. Could I put my best foot forward and sort of “show what I know?” As it turns out, the answer is…”sort of.” Overall, I would give myself mixed reviews on this effort. Although it’s not a bad painting, I would certainly not describe it as one that resulted in a “best effort” type of painting, or one that I could say I’m particularly proud of. I do have quite a handful of paintings that I’m sentimental about, and that I value. Sadly, this capstone effort did not turn out to be one of them.
I try to finish most paintings in 2-3 hours, but I wanted to give myself some space to attempt to culminate all of these lessons and learning experiences into a unified, good effort. So, decided not to rush and gave myself an unusually large amount of time, somewhere between 4-5 hours, which is still one of my longest paintings. The only one I can think of that took longer was a multi-character larger pieces that I did. As I mentioned, the end result is okay. There are specific things I am doing better than even a month ago, but there is definitely a lot of room for further improvement and growth. In particular, shadows and areas where dark and light areas meet gave me lots of trouble. And there are areas I see that I’m still having issues with, such as clothing and hands. So, from the perspective of treating it like a capstone project, I would say it was a bit of a letdown. Even so, it’s certainly not the worst painting I’ve ever done!
In addition to all the above, I’ll also share a time lapse set to classical music – the featured piece this time is Mozart’s Alla Turca Piano Sonata No. 11. Here’s the video:
I might say this too often, but the oil painting featured in this post seems to represent somewhat of a milestone for me. It’s of a lady with sunflowers behind her, and is another attempt at a partial figure study rather than the usual head-and-shoulders portrait I tend to roll with. It’s noteworthy to me because right around this time, I started feeling proud of the paintings I was creating. Of course, I will always have rough attempts that don’t work out the way I wanted…but I believe I started becoming a bit more consistent in making something I feel solid about. Basically, that thought of, “hey I think I’m getting the hang of this.”
I believe this is my fourth or fifth figure study (or at least partial figure) with oil paint, and it’s still something I want to keep pushing myself to do. My comfort zone or “happy place” is still doing head and shoulders portraits, but I know I need more practice zooming out a bit and attempting things I’m less accustomed to. It might be true for all artists that it can be easy to fall into a rut, but it’s very true for me – I am a creature of habit, so sometimes I need to make that extra effort.
This painting was quite a fun one, but it did start of a bit rough. Trying to continue painting freehand without measurement, sometimes things get a little crazy. With this one, the head shape was a bit out of control, so I definitely had to do some reshaping to get things back on track. I certainly appreciated the flexibility of working alla prima on this one – it saved the day. I was able to push and mold the paint into the right shapes, and even achieved some nice textures and distinct color zones. I had never painted a sunflower, or really any flowers at all (I think), so I’m glad that aspect seemed to work!
I’m also continuing on with the “painting to music” videos on YouTube with this one. As it stands right now, I’m really running out of royalty free classical music. But at the point in time when I shared the lady with sunflowers painting, I still had plenty of pretty famous symphonies to choose from. In the near-ish future, I may have to start reusing tracks.
The subject of this post is an oil painting I did of my all-time favorite musician Mike Patton. Patton is a man of many bands and projects, including Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk, and quite a few more. I’ve drawn him in colored pencil a couple of times, and in those posts I discuss why I like his music so much – so I won’t go into depth again here. But I will say at least that, in my opinion, his vocal talents and diversity of styles are peerless.
I’ve posted all of these musician portraits out of order; really, this painting of Mike Patton was the first of the series. It got my kids asking about my favorite musician, and then naturally talking about their two favorites Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa. It’s fun to see their little minds develop – it doesn’t seem like that long ago that they were too young to articulate the “why” of things they like. Since seeing my painting of my favorite, they were excited about the idea of also memorializing theirs.
I think this painting turned out pretty well – the first test for me is always whether it looks like who it’s supposed to be. I based this on the Last Cup of Sorrow video, which is really a great one. Although not a perfect likeness, I think it generally looks like Patton in the music video, which is a nice start. At this stage in my learning process, which was a few months ago, I was trying to practice freehand painting without using pencil outlines. But I wasn’t confident I could achieve any sort of likeness without a pencil sketching first, so I did that here. I think now I might be able to get this close without relying on sketching.
I do want to try painting Patton again eventually, this time though just using a loose painted outline style more similar to the recent stuff I’ve shared on Instagram and YouTube.
The subject of this post’s oil painting is the second of two requests from my kids. This time, it was an attempt at a portrait of Taylor Swift. She’s one of their favorites, even more so since her recent album came out. Their mom went to the concert associated with this new album, and the kids definitely got caught up in all the excitement. It seems like they love her entire catalog of music and frequently sing little verses while they’re playing.
After I painted one of my favorite musicians (Mike Patton), they asked if I would do a couple of their favorites. My painting of Dua Lipa went pretty well, and I think was a good likeness of her. Unfortunately, this painting of Taylor Swift didn’t quite get where it needed to be. The subtle details that make someone look like them can sometimes be hard to pin down. I feel like in this painting, I just came so close to a likeness…close enough that I can’t quite figure out how it’s off. When I look at individual features, they all seem pretty close, but taken together they don’t look right. Perhaps the biggest issues are the eyes and possibly the nose? But I couldn’t say for sure. Regardless, I feel like overall, if I didn’t tell you this was supposed to be Taylor Swift, you might not guess that it is. Which means it definitely does not pass my standard primary test for portraits (i.e. “is it recognizable as the subject?”).
Trying to take another view though, outside of likeness/fidelity to the subject, I actually do like this painting in a general sense. Just looking at this as a portrait of an unknown woman looking over her shoulder, it’s pretty solid! So if I pretend it wasn’t supposed to be an ultra-famous musician, then this is a fine portrait of a random person. I think my color usage and blends worked out pretty well, and I did a decent job with contrast and color values. One of my favorite things about this one is actually the way I rendered the hair, though. I have become a big fan of impressionist portrait painting – especially John Singer Sargent’s work. Along those lines, I’ve become very interested in depicting areas of light and dark, and how the hair is seen in sections of color. I have a lot to learn on this, but I’ve definitely been looking at the masters like Sargent for inspiration.
So, that’s it for this one of a not-very-close Taylor Swift impersonator. Next up, I’ve got the Mike Patton painting!
The subject of this post is an oil painting I did by request of my kids – it’s a portrait of one of their favorite musicians Dua Lipa. She has a couple of songs they really love, specifically Don’t Start Now and Levitating are two they most often belt out at high volumes. After I painted one of my favorite musicians (Mike Patton), they asked if I would do a couple of their favorites – a great excuse to try something new!
This post is my first attempt at a more condensed and shorter blog style. For years, I’ve pushed towards really long posts that are probably a bit too unwieldy in many ways. So, I hope this is easier to digest for views…and easier for me to create and share quickly. It should at least help me get through my backlog of paintings (at least I hope).
Anyhow, back to the painting – I thought I did a good job on this one overall. The other painting I did for the kids didn’t turn out as well, which I’ll share soon, but I think this was a good likeness of Dua Lipa. I based on it on one of her videos that I watched on YouTube, although I can’t remember which one now. It was one of the songs the kids love though, possibly Don’t Start Now. Defining characteristics can be subtle and sometimes difficult to render, which I find especially true with paint. This may just be my inexperience working with oils though. Regardless, I think I captured most of her defining characteristics well enough. This is probably generally recognizable as her, which is certainly a victory.
Coming up next – more musicians! Specifically, Mike Patton from Faith No More, and one that is supposed to be Taylor Swift.
I’ve mentioned on a few blog posts over the last few months how far behind I am sharing artwork. This has been a continuously building situation since I started painting in October – but I’m not sure I could say it’s necessarily a terrible thing. I’ll explain what I mean by that, but first I want to give some more context. To paraphrase Richard Schmid, I’ve been “painting like a pig eats” over the last 7+ months, just finishing my 79th painting. I’ve been averaging between two and three paintings per week, mostly done on the weekends.
I’ve talked about this before, but I keep coming back to some advice that painter Graham McQuade gave some months ago about focusing on learning to paint versus blogging. The gist was on picking which to focus on, especially in light of how much practice is needed when you first start something new. These turned out to be wise and highly predictive words. I found myself becoming borderline obsessed with painting, but with too little time and too many hobbies. Although I do enjoy website building and blogging, I quickly learned I didn’t have time to do both at the level I wanted to…maybe if I didn’t have to work, but bills stubbornly refuse to pay themselves. Anyhow, since I still wanted to share my art, and do it more quickly than a blog post, I also became more immersed in Instagram and YouTube (which can be their own time investments).
This is all a recipe for website neglect. I redesigned my homepage to put more of an emphasis on those social media portals, but I am struggling to keep up with actual blog posts. I have kept my streak of one post per month going, about six years strong now, so that’s something at least. I’m presenting all of this information it’s a huge problem…but is it really? Just stepping back and looking at the situation, it’s not really a bad thing; I’m doing something that I enjoy and having a lot of fun with it. That’s kind of the point of it all I think.
All that being said, it would be nice to at least somewhat catch the website up to the social media pages. And I’ve got two paths ahead of me. With this post, as I’ve done a couple of times now, I’ve grouped paintings up together that were done around the same time. I’ve also been considering continuing to post them separately, but in much smaller blog posts – perhaps only a paragraph or two of text per post. I think that option might make the most sense going forward. My blog posts have always been a bit too unwieldy anyway, so maybe this is a good opportunity to streamline my process. We’ll see which path I take there. So, let’s get to this batch of paintings:
For some reason, I vividly remember painting this one, even though it was months ago now. I was watching the movie The Crow, which was only possible because the kids were not home. I felt like the painting was going fairly well until I started working on the clothing – I had the right color at the start, but for some reason I doubted myself and changed it to something worse. Then, I did a poor job trying to represent textured vertical stripes, which really hurt the piece overall. The portrait went from good to noticeably flawed in the blink of an eye almost.
I went back later and cleaned up the shoulder weirdness, which sort of helped I think. So, overall not a bad effort in the end. And I think it’s actually a solid representation of where I was in the learning process at the time.
This was a relatively fast portrait study of Varric Tethras, who is a recurring character in the Dragon Age series (returning again for the upcoming Dreadwolf sequel). He’s a wise-cracking dwarf who provides some well-placed comic relief and story telling in Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition. Looking forward to seeing what role he has in Dreadwolf – I would be a bit surprised if he’s a party member again, but I’ll be glad to hear from him again however he pops up.
The painting itself is an interesting one. I actually felt pretty good about it at first. This was a second freehand attempt; the first try being quickly abandoned when I realized I wasn’t feeling it. But overall, I felt like it resembled the character for the most part (despite my slightly off-center pupil placement). However, once I shared the progression to YouTube, someone pretty thoroughly trashed it in the comments. I’m not even going to go back and look at exactly what they said, but it was harsh. I did also have some legit, useful advice from another user, specifically related to background colors.
All of that did change how I view this one now, for better or worse. I can see the flaws and mistakes much more clearly. I guess that’s a hazard of sharing art via social media. Some platforms tend to be harsher than others, and I knew that going into it.
This was my second freehand figure study, after the one I did from a portrait model. Although overall it’s not bad, I do think this one was somewhat of a step backward. One of the hardest things about figure painting is the smaller surface area for facial detail, and in this second one, I didn’t do as well in capturing those subtleties. I also kind of botched the proportions a little bit, particularly leg length and size. Again, it’s not a terrible study, but it’s also not my favorite.
I did try to do a couple unique things here though. I tried to play around with color and light a bit more than I typically did at the time. For example, the box/window framing the face is something I would definitely revisit in later portraits. And I made an attempt to get into some color value/contrast experimentation, which is also something that I’m revisiting quite a lot now. So, in a way, this painting is a bit predictive of where I determined I wanted to go months later.
As a rule, I don’t discuss my work life at all online. Similarly, I typically don’t name portrait subjects unless they are otherwise famous or publicly known people. These two rules converge when it comes to portraits of colleagues…which I’ve actually done a surprising amount of. At some point in the last few years, I started doing funny portraits as gifts to people I work with for major events (retirements, departures, big milestones, etc). Not caricatures exactly, but more so attempts at true likeness but with some funny easter eggs thrown in. I have not shared any of those portraits here or in social media. Until now that is.
One of my colleagues, who again I won’t name, has taken a great interest in my artwork and has offered a great deal of encouragement about my learning to paint. As thanks, I painted him a portrait – he gave me permission to share that here. Although I won’t name him, I will say he’s quite a skilled musician and always good for a laugh.
This was another attempt at a figure study, my third at the time. I feel I started out strong with my first one, but as I mentioned, had a bit of a regression with the second. With this one, I hoped to swing back up and hopefully show a bit of improvement. I think to some extent that is true; certainly the proportions and positioning was better here. And the face was probably a bit better too, but still not quite where I wanted to be.
One thing I really like about this one is the color use. I made some purposeful choices with the yellows, blues, browns, and grays, which came together in a way I really like. I am still not great about making good color choices, so this was a pleasant surprise that it actually seems to work now that I look at it months later.
To me, this is a very strange painting. I don’t dwell on specific pieces much because I’m all about getting maximum practice – basically, finish a painting in a few hours and then move on. But with this one I’ve sporadically thoughts about it afterward with with “off and on” regret. Parts of me dislike it because it’s a terrible likeness and has virtual no fidelity to the subject – in that respect, it shows my inexperience.
But, on the other hand, it is interesting to some extent to see the brush work, contrast, and color. It puts on display some things I wanted to practice at the time, and was somewhat successful at improving on later. So there is some good that can be found here. But flipping back again to the negative…it has substantial flaws. I’m fond of saying this is all a learning journey, and this portrait puts that fact on display.
This was not supposed to look like Nicholas Cage, but I just can’t unsee the resemblance. I actually do this quite often – somehow, unintentionally morph a portrait into various celebrities. I’m not completely certain if part of this is just in my head though. I think humans tend to try to make something recognizable even when it’s not (like seeing faces in clouds or inanimate objects).
Anyhow, this painting transformed quite a bit as it progressed, which I think you can see from the time lapse videos. For some reason, it got more likes on Instagram than my typical post at the time, which was quite surprising. I almost didn’t share it, but apparently a handful of people liked it better than I did.
I’ve also been experimenting with sharing longer painting videos set to classical music. There’s probably not a huge audience for this, but I think it could be useful if I ever decide to do a booth at an art festival. I thought I could set these videos on a loop at the booth to show my painting process.
