I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I value different technological tools I have at my disposal, particularly those large scale online services I use. And a natural follow up thought is about contributing to those online ecosystems I actually value. For a long time, I’ve held to the stubborn notion that I only wanted to use social media if it was in promotion of my own website. That essentially boiled down to the fact that I can (hypothetically) make money from my site, whereas with social media behemoths, I am only providing free content to them that they can make ad revenue from. Not that my stuff generates much attention, but it was the principle of the thing.
I held pretty firmly to this notion for years. But, lately my thinking has evolved a bit on this topic. I do still wish that the Internet wasn’t completely dominated by a small handful of companies, and that blogging and niche websites returned to prominence somehow. But that is incredibly unlikely – not to mention kind of pointless to dwell on. When I started painting six months ago, I also began recording the complete process for every portrait. Eventually it became part of my routine, and I found myself with dozens of time-lapse videos. My website isn’t well-suited to video sharing, and I was finding myself gravitating towards short form video hosted on Instagram and YouTube. Conveniently for me, leaning into these platforms also made video easier to share on this site.
I’ve realized over the last few months, I’ve actually gotten quite a lot of value from a Instagram and YouTube. So much, in fact, that it’s made me want to commit more fully to developing my artwork presence on these sites, sometimes even at the expense of my own website. Which is something I would have found completely objectionable last year. There’s also an element of making things “right” or leveling the “give and take” of the universe (or something to that effect). As I mentioned at the top, these sites benefit because they can serve advertisements around content that I provide. And I benefit in specific ways I’ll describe in a bit – the balance between those things feel fine to me. It makes me feel like I can put some moderate amount of time into these things and it would be worth it for both parties.
So, getting to some specifics. There are three main sites that rise to this level for me – Instagram, YouTube, and Unsplash. I’ll go through each and talk about what specifically I value, then I’ll wrap it up with some online ecosystems that I haven’t invested in.
One of the things I’ve grown to like the most about Instagram is simply the massive presence of artists on there. Since it’s centered around images and short video, and text is somewhat of an afterthought, it seems all types of portrait artists and painters gravitate towards sharing their work there. Aside from cat memes and friends/family, art is what I want to see, so it’s great from that perspective. It’s a popular platform, so it’s great to see such active art-centered sharing.
Another positive to me is that performance and traffic seem to mostly make sense. Of course, the algorithms are still mysterious gods that sometimes I apparently displease…but generally, I can get a sense for what attracts eyeballs on Instagram (even if that’s not necessarily what I have to offer). If I share content regularly, I can actually see that growth happen, even if it is relatively small. Expanding your reach as an artist is possible there, so that’s also useful.
I also like that Instagram has surprisingly friendly website integration. Initially, I didn’t like that it didn’t allow links, so I couldn’t backlink my website posts for SEO purposes. But now, I actually appreciate that aspect, because it prevents my feed from being flooded with nonsense like on Facebook. It keeps things clean and focused on images/video, which is nice. But despite not being link-friendly, Instagram does integrate well with my WordPress site. I’ve incorporated a great widget on my home/welcome page that showcases the latest paintings (since I’m so far behind on blog posts). And, the individual embedded Instagram posts look quite nice.
There are a couple of huge positives to YouTube from my perspective. I think the biggest is related to how useful a resource it is. I have no formal art training, so I’ve had to find non-traditional ways to learn how to paint. A very significant part of that instruction on portraiture and oil painting has come from videos on YouTube, especially from folks like Chris Fornataro, Alpay Efe, Mark Carder, and many others. It’s hard to put an exact number on the value I’ve gained from all of these resources, but I know I want to “pay it forward” if I can. The best way I know to do that is to share my own experiences as an amateur, which I hope could help another person on a similar path.
Another important one is a more tangible, concrete benefit; it’s simply the massive amount of free video storage YouTube provides. Google hosting these large 4K resolution videos for me, which are in turn quite easy to embed on my website, is a fantastic cost savings. These huge videos would eat up the available storage space WordPress gives me, but I can host these at no cost to me on YouTube. As with all of this, Google benefits by gaining more content to serve ads through. But for a low traffic page like mine, I’m really not sure they’re coming out ahead on the deal.
There is a downside to YouTube though. I find their algorithms absolutely bizarre and impossible to decipher. It feels like a total guessing game as to how or when something will actually get some views. Like with their short form vertical videos (Shorts), I get a batch of views within the first 30 minutes, then a slow trickle. Because views are so front loaded, it’s heavily dependent on when you post it, despite youtube explicitly saying that’s not true. But then, the traditional videos don’t work like this at all. It’s very unpredictable compared to Instagram.
I’ve talked about Unsplash before in a dedicated post and again recently when I discussed hiring portrait models. One of the biggest challenges when you’re hungry for portrait drawing or painting practice is actually just finding subjects. I am constantly building a repository of ideas, as I learned long ago the benefits of being proactive about planning. That becomes especially difficult when you start to consider references images you can use for commercial purposes. What constitutes a “transformative work,” is murky, and may change completely pending a Supreme Court decision this spring (Warhol v Goldsmith, regarding a Prince photo). In my opinion, it’s safest to have clear authorization on this topic – either licensing the image, which costs money, or using a royalty free image resource.
There are a few royalty free image resources out there, like Pexels, Pixabay, and my most frequently used Unsplash. Essentially, as they spell out in their licensing FAQ pages, you are free to use images for commercial use – Unsplash even specifically mentions selling artwork based on photos. Because Unsplash has been so useful to me in that sense, I decided to contribute to its ecosystem in the same way I have for Instagram and YouTube. And that is by creating content for other users. In the case of Unsplash, that was a bit more difficult than just sharing paintings. Since it’s a photography site, I had to find some good photos that I took that others might want to use.
I do want to say a few things about the other side of this coin – the platforms, apps, and sites that I don’t value. Or at least, I don’t value them enough to meaningfully contribute to their ecosystems in the same way I do with the above platforms. Essentially, the value they provide me is not enough to warrant becoming more invested. So, instead with these, I either don’t participate at all, or only do so in furtherance of other efforts (like linking to my website, instagram, youtube, etc).
When I think of Facebook, a great article from Wired describing the “enshitification” of social media platforms comes to mind. The original article is worth a read, but Facebook is the end stage of what a social media platform looks like when its value to the user becomes minimal and everything about it has become monetized to maximize profit. In my opinion, Facebook is a bloated, spammy mess. But since it’s so ever-present, I do still share links to get more eyeballs directed to other sites. Otherwise, I’m ready for it to go the way of MySpace.
Twitter and Reddit are strange beasts from my perspective, because they are very interesting from a content consumption standpoint. But I’ve never really been able to crack either in terms of gaining traction on my own content. I might value them a bit more if I could ever figure out how to participate in them the “right” way. But there is only so much time in the day, and to this point I haven’t found the “juice to be worth the squeeze” to quote a colleague of mine. Although I don’t have a big enough audience on either platform, theoretically I could eventually monetize on YouTube or Instagram, which is a nice long term incentive. Twitter and Reddit don’t offer the same incentives – with Twitter now even pushing money to flow the other direction.
I do still share links on both platforms though. And I’m sure I’ll continue to mindlessly scroll both from time to time as well, at least until Twitter collapses after all of its recent nonsensical changes. Maybe one of these decentralized Twitter clones will eventually replace Twitter in terms of consumption, but I feel like I’d probably end up in the same place in terms of not really making it a focus of creating content.
This is an interesting one because I might actually find value if I tried it. Tik Tok is well-suited to the short form painting time lapses I’m already sharing on similar platforms (Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts). And they seem to reward content creators fairly well…although I don’t really know to what extent. But there’s too much uncertainty regarding this platform, both in terms of its connection to China’s government and whether it will become blocked in the US. I would hate to invest time into building something just for it to become inaccessible.
There are other, much smaller platforms that I also haven’t invested any time or effort into. This includes old platforms that are still hanging on, like Tumblr or Blogger, and newer things like Mastadon or BlueSky. As I’ve said above, there’s only so much time in a day, so I have to triage what’s worth exploring. Perhaps if any grow significantly, I’ll check them out. But for now, I haven’t seen anything else that inspires me to invest more heavily into it.
This post is broadly about reference images and where to get them, but really the purpose is to discuss my first experience actually paying someone to pose for painting references. Actually hiring portrait models for art reference photos, which seemed intimidating, but in reality was quite a nice experience. I’ve long relied on various royalty free image websites, such as Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay for generic references to draw and paint from. Recently, I’ve even used a few AI people generators to view some faces that don’t really exist. But I finally tried a different route, which was to pay someone, or in this case multiple someones, for a reference I could use for art. Despite my worries, this turned out to be a fantastic experience that produced hundreds of excellent references I can use in the future.
Before I get into the basics, or into the details on my experience with reference models, I’ll caveat the usual way though by saying that I am a novice when it comes to painting. I don’t have any formal training, so any advice I give here mostly comes from some degree of trial and error. Take what I say with a grain of salt and give more weight to the experts. That being said, if you’re just practicing and not going to sell the painting or any other commercial use…well, my opinion is just use whatever you want. As long as you’re not profiting from it, I think you can paint what makes you happy and don’t worry about it. When you’re just practicing and not going to do anything with it, a painting study like this should be fine. However, if you may have a commercial use, things get more complicated.
I’m not an attorney, so obviously I’m not trying to give legal advice. But I think the basics are pretty clear – if you stand to make money from your artwork, you shouldn’t use something created by someone else without permission or licensing. It does get a little more complicated when you start getting into whether it was a “transformative work”, a parody, or some other things. But when things get sticky like that, I find it’s nice to just be safe about it. For example, when I wrote a book, if there was any gray area about something, I defaulted to not including it. I ended up leaving out quite a bit that I thought may have been okay, but I didn’t want to risk it.
So, let’s say you want to find references that you can potentially use for a commercial use. And you don’t want to pay for them. Well, there are a couple paths available. One, you can look towards royalty free image websites, like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay that I mentioned before. The US Library of Congress also has a ton of free images, but they aren’t curated or organized as well as some other sites. I use Unsplash quite a bit, mostly because it’s the first one I stumbled onto. But they have some good stuff available and it’s organized pretty well. I also like how clearly Unsplash’s licensing and commercial use details are spelled out – basically, you’re free to use their images as the basis of artwork you sell, publish in a book, or whatever other creative ideas you might have.
Another great option is you can take photos yourself. If you took the photos, then you also own the rights to them. Assuming you also have permission to use the likeness of the person in the photo too. I actually have a model release form on the back of my business card, which I’ll embed here. I’ve long had in the back of my mind that it would be useful to hire someone to get a bunch of reference photos. As a hobbyist, I can’t afford a real, professional model obviously, but I thought I might be able to pay a small amount to a regular person for a small amount of their time. But the big question is, how exactly to approach this in a way that’s safe, comfortable, and convenient for both me and the model?
This has been a vague thought for years, but without a reasonable path forward, I never took action. A couple years ago though, we moved to a neighborhood that has a pretty active private Facebook group, so I posted in the group to see if this was of interest to anyone. I provided a lot of detail; that I was an amateur, why I was looking for reference photos, and that I’d probably want to sell paintings someday. Part of my pitch is that it’s not a live portrait session, just photos to use later, so I wouldn’t take up much of a model’s time. With potential models’ comfort in mind, I proposed meeting whoever it is at the neighborhood park in the late afternoon when there would be lots of people around. I ended up with three people willing to be portrait models, which was really fortunate because I wasn’t expecting anyone to respond.
We met at the park and I told them all up front that I really have no idea what I’m doing, but I had brainstormed some ideas. I made a list including different angles, facial expressions, and other things I thought might make good paintings. But I told them if they had their own ideas, to just go for it. The sessions took only took about 10-15 minutes for each person, but I ended up with several hundred reference photos! I was pretty nervous about whether it would be weird or awkward, since I’ve never done this before, but it was an excellent experience! Although they weren’t professional models, you could have fooled me, because they were able to make any expression or pose easily.
The first painting I did from these photos started off on a good track. Although I’m more comfortable now, at this stage in my learning process a couple of months ago, I was still getting used to freehand painting without using measuring tools. There were early rough stages when I was worried the painting wasn’t going to work, I was once again saved by the flexibility of oil paints. Ultimately, I was quite happy with the result and I think the likeness was solid.
Another interesting aspect to this painting is that it sort of went “viral” on Instagram, or at least relative to my usual very low social media numbers. The short video Reel I shared generated over 18,000 views and almost 500 likes, which is massively higher than anything else I’ve ever done. The kicker is that I have literally no clue why! I didn’t use trending audio or unique hashtags, and I haven’t been able to replicate that success since.
I don’t actually think this was the next painting chronologically, but I figured I’d share it next since it’s the same subject. This is my first ever freehand/no measurement figure study. Prior to this one, all of my freehand painting had been my usual head-and-shoulders portraits. But with all of these fresh new reference images, I figured why not make use of them and give it a try! After all, painting for me has been all about learning and pushing myself.
The likeness is definitely not perfect; I think you can get that sense pretty easily by comparing to the head-and-shoulders portrait of the same model, which I believe is more accurate. But I think it’s close enough that you can probably tell it’s the same person. Although it isn’t perfect, this is one of my favorite paintings that I’ve done; it’s a milestone as I mentioned, but also the painting kind of gives kind of an emotional response as the subject seems very sad. In this one, credit to the model because she just sort of tried different emotions and expressions throughout which was great.
I believe this might have been the second painting chronologically, and it was an interesting one. It actually followed the opposite path to most of my paintings. Typically, the early stages of a painted portrait will be a bit rough, and possibly a poor likeness, but as I progress it will start to come together. In this painting, I think the early stages looked a bit more like the subject, whereas later I think I lost some of the distinguishing features.
I do still think it’s a good painting overall though, and one that I like. Since these paintings are really just for my own practice, I don’t owe it to anyone to have a perfect likeness. So from that perspective, it’s a success! But if I were doing this for someone, say as a gift, it’s one I might have to take another crack at. Another aspect I really like about this painting is the color use. I thought I did a good job establishing zones of color and then not over-blending them, which is still sometimes a challenge to avoid. Blending on the canvass is pretty fun, but too much can muddy things.
And this painting was a bit of a surprise win in some ways. I think in hindsight, I was perhaps to tired to attempt it. If I’m remembering correctly, it was the second painting in a row of an extended painting session, I was arguably a bit too fatigued to do another one. But being tired rarely stops me when I’m feeling that painting spark! So, I dove into this one, and I was surprised that it turned into another one I really like. Apparently I wasn’t too tired after all.
During these photo sessions, we only used two props – one was the models’ smartphones that they already had with them. The other was a book that I brought, which turned into a nice addition to this piece. I even somehow managed to get the eyes oriented in the right way so it seems like she’s reading the book!
When we discussed the details of the photo session, I was specific about how I was going to use these photos. Basically, that I was sharing just the paintings and not the originals, and that prints or copies of the paintings (not the photos) may be sold or published in a book someday. For now, it seems none of the models want to be credited. But I told the models if any of them ever change their minds, I’m glad to tag them or add names anywhere appropriate. Overall, this endeavor turned out better than I could have imagined! I’ve got a ton of references I can use in the future and I know the resulting paintings can be used for commercial purposes and all that fun stuff. My thought is also, if I improve as a painter over time, I can also use these references for more creative things – as the basis for something, rather than just try to reproduce what I see. For example, I’m painting a character, but I need that character to be talking on the phone – I could combine these references with another person/character! I’m not that good yet, but perhaps I will be if I keep practicing.
So, that’s it for this one. Definitely glad I finally tried the “hiring a model” idea. I’ll also embed the YouTube videos related to these paintings – the first two have discussion about this same topic, while the rest are basically duplicates of the above Instagram Reels.
This post is going to be about the importance of a painting’s initial structure. Basically, how the build and forms that you start with can impact the finished product, whether you use a pencil outline, underpainting, or just rough shapes. I’m probably going to contradict myself quite a bit here though, because somehow, I also concurrently believe that the initial outline doesn’t have to be perfect. There is a huge degree of leeway granted to the artists by virtue of how adaptable oil paint can be when working wet-on-wet.
I’ve talked before about the flexibility of oil paints. The fact that you can sculpt and mold oil paints when working wet-on-wet/alla prima has saved me many times by letting me fix various mistakes. I’m about 60 paintings into this journey, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to fix the contours of a face. Not to mention the instances when I’ve had to completely reposition a nose or eye; like literally wipe something off with paper towel and just lay down the feature over again. I haven’t had much luck trying to fix a painting after it’s dried, but as long as the paint is still wet (and I’ve got the time and will to do it), many things can be corrected.
All that being said, it’s still important getting that initial structure in a solid arrangement. And it’s not just the placement of facial features – it’s also how they are in relation to each other. We’re trying to represent a three dimensional image in a 2D space, so we have to simulate that with the right angles, sizes, and other methods to make the head look like a sphere. I can usually see big issues early, but it’s hard for me to notice this more subtle type of mistake until I’ve almost finished the painting. Even though oil paints are flexible, it can be hard to correct some issues. And typically, if I’ve gotten towards the end of a painting and noticed a big issue, I’m just going to move on to the next one.
I’m going to talk more about this using two examples – the first painting is a great representation of arrangement issues, and is also highlighted on the side/above. Then I’ll also provide an example of just a single feature out of position.
Getting to specifics, one of the major recurring issues I’ve had is related to wrapping facial features around the sphere in an accurate way. The subjects of this post are great examples – the planes of each subject’s face (horizontal lines across the eyes, nose, and mouth) weren’t aligned in a natural way. I didn’t notice this at all early on, but once I got to the end and I was really studying each painting, something just seemed off.
After some pondering, on one of these I realized that the mouth and eyes weren’t on the same plane, as if they belonged on different portraits. Basically, the features were tilted incorrectly. This is actually a mistake I’ve made quite a few times and somehow continue to make. Eventually, despite the poorly constructed base layer, I was able to somewhat salvage this painting. The end result actually looks pretty nice, but if you spend too much time looking at it, it becomes easy to notice the alignment issues.
I showed some good technique and patience in later stages, with more attention to detail than I usually achieve. The eyes in particular are very expressive, and utilize really nice color variations that look fairly natural. And there’s some good subtlety in the nose and mouth that I can’t always capture in portraits. All of that actually makes it all the more disappointing that I didn’t take my time to get the facial planes right, because I think this portrait really could have been a good one if not for those issues. But even with these issues, it’s still one I like even looking back on it months later.
These two paintings are somewhat important from my perspective just because the represent a transition into portraits that I actually like well enough to consider making prints to sell (the one from the last post is included in that too). This facial planes portrait is the 30th one I did – a nice round number for a milestone. I can’t really decide if 30 is high or low in terms of how long it took to get more comfortable. But either way, it does feel like a significant point for me as a learning artist.
In this second painting, which was my 28th overall, my issues were a bit more narrow and specific. Rather than broad issues with planes and alignment, I actually just placed the eye in the wrong position. Otherwise, most of the features seemed to be on the right track. This is actually a much more common mistake for me. Even now, having gone more than 30 paintings beyond these, I still get a bit sloppy sometimes about where I place or angle an eye. Fortunately, this is a fairly easy thing to correct, even if I’ve gotten close to the end of the painting. Oil paint is pretty forgiving when working alla prima, and it’s not a huge deal to just wipe that section with a paper towel and redo it.
I think part of my overall issue is that often when I start painting, I’m in a rush to get to the meat of the painting. I am legitimately excited by the prospect of seeing what a painting will become, and sometimes it causes me to move faster than I should. I really need to slow down, take my time in plotting this stuff out. For added context, I’ve been trying to freehand as much as possible without measuring proportions or feature placement, which I hope helps prepare me to eventually try painting from life. And even if I don’t get to that life portrait painting level, I think this sort of practice is good for me. But even without measuring, I think I could still do a better job if I slowed down these first steps a bit. Take my time to really get the shapes and angles more appropriately arranged.
Of course, all of my paintings show various giveaways of me being a novice. That’s not to say I’m trying to roast myself, but I know an expert level painter would see things like what I’ve discussed in this video right away. That’s not a bad thing though – self-critique can be a useful part of the learning process. The quote from Emerson in Richard Schmid’s book says it best: “every artist was first an amateur.” It’s reassuring to know that even my favorite oil painters had to start somewhere, and maybe even went through some of the same trial and error I am currently working through.
So, that’s pretty much all I have on the topic of alignment and featuring positioning. This became kind of a bulky post, but hopefully it’s not too much on this. I’m still trying to figure out the best arrangement for Instagram and YouTube embedding within posts; I want to connect to everything I have, but I do want it to actually flow and make sense. For now, I’m going to try Instagram in the middle, then YouTube at the bottom. These two have become more important to my getting these paintings out there into the world, so I’ll try to integrate them to this site as much as I can.
With this post, I want to talk a little bit about painting composition and color. At the point in time when I did this painting, which was a couple months and almost 30 paintings ago now, I was watching a massive amount of videos from expert artists to try to learn more. I kept hearing the word “composition” thrown around in painting videos…and I’ll be honest, I had to Google it to study up on what specifically it means when it comes to painting. Such is the life of an amateur trying to fumble his way through the learning process. This conversation takes place using an interesting painting that seems to give different impressions based on how its oriented.
The short version: Composition is all the aspects of a painting added together to make the complete package. Stuff like how the color selections fit together, how objects or people are arranged, and things like that. Subtle aspects can have a huge impact in how the audience views a piece of art and the reaction they might have to it. Are their eyes drawn to specific areas of the painting? Is it balanced? Do the colors combine in a way that makes an impact or provoke a response? There seems to be so much to consider, sometimes it makes real expertise seem very far away from where I sit. Thinking about all of this really puts into focus my appreciation for what professional artists are able to do.
So, getting into those specific pieces of composition – things like spatial arrangements, color, and eye movement. One aspect I’d been pondering quite a bit around the time of this painting is that question of balance, or where your eyes go in a painting. I’ve read about several ways to arrange things to focus attention, or present subjects in an interesting or appealing way. Some involve sharpening or blurring specific areas, relying on color, or spatial arrangements like splitting up a piece into a grid. From what I’ve read, this grid method is referred to as the “Rule of Thirds,” and its really interesting to see this applied to famous paintings. I’ve shown an example here of my painting on such a grid – interestingly, although I didn’t plan it this way, it does somewhat align to the Rule of Thirds. Not completely, but if you squint just right, parts seem to.
Another arrangement I’ve seen is called “dynamic symmetry”…although I have no clue if that’s an official name for it. Basically, you draw a line from corner to corner, then another at a right angle to that one. From what I’ve read, this pattern can help frame or move your eye around the painting. Applying this vertically and horizontally to my painting is where this starts to get a bit interesting (at least to me anyway). Laying down the dynamic symmetry lines in horizontal position puts the subject eye right in the focal point, whereas the vertical orientation doesn’t seem to fit the grid at all. That goes back to what I mentioned in the opening paragraph; how there seems to be a different effect/impression based on how this painting is oriented.
I guess the orientation thing is true for pretty much any painting – if you flip a normal portrait on its side, it’s not going to look right. But with this one, I initially worked on it in vertical position, mostly because that’s what I’m used to with other portraits. But since it’s a lady laying in the grass, the intended orientation of the finished version is horizontal. It was sort of strange working on it one way, then flipping it on its side when I was done for the “real” view. I didn’t plan this at all using the composition tools/guides I mentioned, so it’s funny this ended up matching in the intended “end state” position by coincidence. Speaking of the “end state,” I’ll share that finished product now, then we can talk about color as a composition tool.
Although I’ve only given a couple of examples, there are many other ways to look at composition – so many in fact that I don’t have the space here to cover them all. In fact, I don’t have the necessary expertise either; such an overview would probably legitimately be enough for an entire class or book. I’ll leave that comprehensive view to the professionals. It might speak to my lack of formal art education that this subject feels so vast and mind boggling to me. Anyhow, putting all that aside, one more aspect to composition I want to look at here is color. Although I didn’t achieve anything of note with this one in terms of color, I was hoping a nice palette selection would make this particular painting interesting.
I started off on a good path I thought – some nice, varied blocks of color in the face. and I felt the greens I would use in the background would contrast well with the reds, yellows, and brown mixes in the subject. As I progressed, it wasn’t turning out as I planned – as I added the green hues, it completely drowned the other colors in the piece. To the point where my subject immediately began to look washed out. I was really surprised by this effect, which I think speaks to my inexperience as a painter and probably also generally as an artist. I did try to revivify parts of the face, but there’s only so much you can do without reworking completely. And I’m more inclined to just take something as a lesson rather than bang my head against the wall over and over trying to fix something.
I’m glad to report though, I think those efforts to bring back some color to this piece were largely successful. Although there is still some definite paleness in effect, the final result is actually pretty solid. In fact, looking back over the paintings I’ve done since, and the ones that came before, this painting is sort of a mile-marker for me. It’s one of the first paintings that I actually like enough that I would consider worth selling or making prints of. Not that it’s any kind of masterpiece, but it’s not as significantly flawed as previous oil paintings.
So, that’s pretty much it for this one. Although overall, I can see the improvement in my painting skills, there is clearly a long way to go in the composition realm. I’m okay with that though – I know I need to work on the nuts and bolts of technique more than anything. I can focus more heavily on the theory and academic sides of things down the road. This is a hobby after all, so I’m not in a hurry. But at least I know it’s a thing to add to my learning checklist – which is probably bigger than I even realize right now.
And an administrative note; I’m now 29 paintings behind in terms of sharing to this website. That list continues to grow, since my urge to paint hasn’t diminished at all. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I may never actually catch up to this backlog, and that maybe eventually I’ll be so far behind that the website doesn’t reflect anything current. In the short term, I’ve reconfigured the home page to be more reflective of Instagram and YouTube, which are always more current now. And I’m going to keep trying to combine and consolidate paintings within posts, so maybe that will help a bit. Eventually, I may just have to dump a dozen paintings or so into one!
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 celebrate with another custom portrait giveaway! This time though, I’m focused completely on head-and-shoulders portraits using oil paints. The winner gets to pick who the subject of the portrait is, and naturally send me references they like. But this is all about people, since that’s where I’m trying to practice my technique.
Another change for this sweepstakes is that, rather than providing a wide range of social media accounts to enter from (like Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.), I’m going to focus this one completely around YouTube. Along with my newfound interest in painting, I’m also trying to grow the YouTube channel. In fact, lately my most recent work hasn’t even made it to my website yet! But much of it is available in video form. I’m not sure why oil painting and YouTube videos have both become the center of my attention at the same time, but it certainly helps provide a theme for this giveaway!
I’ve had some good experiences with these sweepstakes, with winners who really liked their portraits. That positive feedback has naturally made me want to host more of them. I hosted two in 2020, one in 2021, and one other in 2022 – so I think it’s prime time for another! The summer 2022 giveaway winner has not yet decided on their portrait subject, and I believe they may give the prize to a family member. As I’ve mentioned in previous giveaways, these prizes don’t expire, so it’s okay to take your time. And I also have no problem with giving it to someone else, if that’s what the winner prefers.
If you participated in previous giveaways, this work basically the same way. Once again, the contest itself is hosted via Gleam. The prize will be one custom piece of artwork done by me of a person the winner requests. If you’re curious about the artwork style, I’ve included some recent oil paintings in the gallery on the right. You can also see more drawing examples on this site’s home page. You can enter by subscribing via YouTube, and I’ll verify the entries via the name you subscribe under. Gleam has expanded the Terms and Conditions section. Now, in addition to my written “rules” (also provided below), Gleam has their own lengthy section. It covers a lot of the same ground, but in much greater detail, and with a link to Amdall Gallery’s Privacy Policy. Here’s the entry form, and I’ve included details on the rules below:
Basic rules, disclaimers, etc:
Good luck to everyone who decides to give this a shot!
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, I’m not going to go wild talking about it again. In brief though, obviously I’m a huge fan of the game. It’s essentially an open world hybrid, combining the deep, intense combat of Dark Souls with the sprawling world of games like Skyrim and the Witcher 3. It’s also one of the rare games that I was actually interested enough in to stick with until defeating the final boss. That actually says a lot about this game, because there are so many very good, quality games that just couldn’t hold my attention all the way until the end. But Elden Ring pulled me all the way to its conclusion, and even left me wanting more.
So, I’m not going to talk more about Elden Ring here. But if you do want to explore more about the game itself, I’ve actually written quite a lot about it in five separate previous posts (which included artwork in each). Those posts are embedded here if you want to check them out; some of the topics explored in depth include the characters, stories, tragedies, and complicated lineages.
Moving on, what I would really like to discuss with this post is my continued learning experience with painting. As I mention often, I am quite far behind in sharing these paintings, so the discussion of how I’m progressing is usually weeks (or longer) behind where I actually am in this learning process. At this point in the timeline that coincides with the painting I’m sharing, I had recently learned about a tool called a proportional divider and used it in a couple of paintings. I was so enthusiastic about trying it out that this Elden Ring piece actually ended up being the third in a row during the same day.
After having used the proportional divider a few times, I knew it was a great tool that I would always keep in mind. But I also know what one of my long terms goals is – to eventually try painting from life. Perhaps not creating anything amazing, just being able to accomplish it in a basic way with satisfactory proportions. Essentially, to feel like I can step up to the canvass and not embarrass myself in a room with more refined painters. To do that, I would need to be able to assess and form shapes without so many guides. Of course, it’s great to have goals, but this hobby is supposed to be for fun, so I figured I’d allow myself some leeway to play around with these calipers. I used them a couple more times before finally trying to go freehand again.
I had done a couple recently that turned out pretty well without measurement (this person and Andre the Giant), so I figured it wouldn’t be a huge stretch. As it turns out, the artists’ road isn’t always a straight line! I tried to freehand a painting that was really quite bad. Bad enough in fact that I tossed in the garbage, which is something that I almost never do. Several days later, I went back to the proportional divider and produced a horrible portrait. This had me absolutely perplexed. I’m no Rembrandt, but I should at least be able to output something that looks like a human being. Bizarrely enough, I tried this same painting again the next morning, this time freehand, and it turned out fine. See what I mean by that winding artists’ road? Sometimes, you just can’t explain these things. One thing is certain though, I need much more general painting practice. To keep things in perspective, it took me over 150 colored pencil drawings to actually feel comfortable…and I’m only about 25+ into this painting thing. As they say in boxing, I need much more roadwork before I’m ready to actually get in the ring.
So, getting back to this painting of Melina from Elden Ring. As I mentioned, this is a character that I’d done previously, but in my more comfortable/familiar colored pencil mode. I really like covering similar ground again in paint – I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it’s because it’s fun to compare the different effects achieved using oils done in the same artistic style. And this was done “on rails”, which is to say I measured the facial features to make sure the proportions were solid. The final version is shown above, which I think was a success.
Despite the fact that this painting for some reason was a bear to try to accurately photograph, I think the final result looks great in person. Although the colors are very gray, somehow aspects still pop out really well. At least, that is the effect in person (I think getting that to show in photos was the real challenge). Measuring using the proportional divider worked well, and everything landed right where it should. Amdall Portrait Evaluation Test #1, which is the usual “does it look like the person”, I believe was passed. Obviously this isn’t a real person, but at least it does resemble the game character.
I’m even kind of proud about how I did the background here. That’s often an issue for me, but this time I went with a golden hue to match the Erdtreee, which is a massive luminous tree that is almost always visible in the game. I think it’s really appropriate, and fits logically but also works aesthetically. Looking at this painting, I really can’t think of anything that I would have done differently. And that’s something that I don’t think I’ve ever said about art that I’ve done!
In fact, I liked this one so much I used it in several YouTube videos, which I’ll embed here. First, I’ve got the usual high speed progression set to music. But because the video quality ended up being pretty solid, and it followed a similar process, I rolled it up with the previous two paintings (Mustache Man and Morrigan from Dragon Age) and added some narrated discussion. Then I even used this painting for a third video, which was a video product review of the proportional divider itself.
Above: Videos related to Melina Elden Ring Oil Painting (high speed time lapse, discussion and comparison, and review of proportional divider used during this painting).
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 have progressed, I think those art photos have improved thanks to technology. Although there’s still significant room to improve, I think I’ve made strides in terms of choosing better lighting conditions as well.
The challenge I’ve bumped up against with oil paint though is – it seems to be quite a bit more reflective than pencil. My favorite lighting conditions are outdoors on a sunny day, but that is much harder with paint. Many of my recent paintings are thick with oils, and end up with areas of reflective glare even after I’ve let them dry for weeks. At that point, they are dry to the touch, but somehow still don’t photograph well in direct sunlight. And if I try other photography solutions, such as taking shots without sunlight, I end up with different color effects and hues. Even a little glare would seem bad for prints that I’d have to pay to make.
So, I thought the best thing to do would be to put this question out to the world – how do other artists digitize their artwork? An additional consideration is that I’ve been mulling over the notion of selling portraits at an art fair. I recently found that I work with a very skilled painter who does this, and she recommended getting professional prints made and selling them as well. But to do that, I’ll need some very high quality images. The resolution is high on my photos, but I’m not sure if they’re up to that level. I’m definitely curious to hear from anyone who has experience in this realm.
Poll Question: How do you digitize your artwork?
Photograph using smartphone camera.
Scan using professional or retail services.
Photograph using high end camera (mirrorless or DSLR).
Use multiple methods/have no preferred way/other.
Scan using home device like a flatbed scanner.
As with my previous poll, there are a few hiccups when it comes to sharing this. The first is that apparently these polls or survey widgets don’t always seem to show up. Specifically, they don’t really play well with the WordPress Reader or when using an adblocker. Both of which I use frequently! So, the actual poll questions might be difficult to see for some readers. A quick test to see if this impacts you is to just look at the top of the post – in theory though you should see the poll right at the beginning. If there isn’t a poll right up top, I have included links in this post which should work.
The second challenge is also the same as with the last poll, which is a visual/aesthetic one. I’m so accustomed to having artwork associated with every post at this point, it’s sort of difficult to figure out a good thumbnail without it. I figured I’d take a similar path to last time; basically, do a quick little portrait of a person holding a blank sign, then paste a screen capture of the poll onto it. Last time, I did a colored pencil sketch…but since I’m all about painting now, I decided to roll with a basic oil painted piece. Here’s how it looks:
Since I started painting, I believe this is now the first time I’ve shared paintings out of the actual chronological order. I’m not sure why I’ve been trying to hold to that so strictly; I guess just being able to write about what I learn in the proper order feels right. But I should worry too much about the presentation, because I’ve always got the Art Timeline page that shows everything in the correct order. Anyhow, my thought with this one was to do a “quick” and “easy” painting, in a similar fashion to the previous survey post.
This endeavor did not turn out as I planned, though. In my hasty planning, I forgot that little detail of my multiple years of colored pencil experience. Of course I could whip up a drawing quickly; I had tons of experience to pull from. On the painting side of things, I’m still learning very basic aspects. And I hadn’t considered how difficult it would be to render facial details in a smaller area than I’d ever attempted. I should have had some idea though, because my previous attempt at something smaller was pretty rough. I simply wasn’t ready for the precision control needed here.
Overall, I think it did turn out fine…but it was a rollercoaster to some extent. It started okay, then became a disaster, but ultimately the forgiving nature of oil paints saved me. It’s not a masterpiece, but it does look enough like a person to be considered a satisfying result.
I also did a quick little progression video. I don’t know why it took me so long to finally bring this out, but I did use a softbox lighting kit to try to help the quality of this recording a bit. I bought one of these softbox things a couple years ago, and with all the chaos of moving back then, I had it stored away and forgotten. I’ve been struggling to some extent with lighting in these YouTube videos, so I thought I’d give this a try. I basically unattached/unscrewed it from the stand and placed the light on a shelf. The result was okay, but even with the cover designed to diffuse the light source, I could still see my shadow. Once I increased the speed on the video, the resulting effect was sort of disorienting. I need to experiment with some other positions.
I think with my next post, I will return to the normal chronology of paintings. More specifically, I’m going to continue exploring the proportional divider I started using for measurements. I do have an idea for another detour post though; it might be fun to share an all-encompassing survey post. Since the beginning of this site, I’ve done all my polls through the same service. So, I’ve got some older surveys that have actually generated quite a few responses (on art videos, Star Trek captains, characters, advertisements, etc). It might be fun to aggregate all of them and talk about those results. I still need to ponder how that might look, but it’s something that may be on the horizon.
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 “Witch of the Wilds”, from Dragon Age Origins and Inquisition. I’ve done a ton of portraits related to series like the Witcher and Elden Ring, with more to come soon for both. But historically, the Dragon Age series is right up there with the others. I think Dragon Age’s primary disadvantage is simply that it just isn’t front and center in my consciousness, since it’s a somewhat older series that hasn’t had much activity in recent years.
Despite the sometimes painful load times on consoles, Dragon Age Origins was one of my favorite games 10+ years ago. It’s hard to believe it’s been so long, but sure enough, it came out in 2009. It was somewhat unique for its time, in that this was a big budget party-based RPG with the usual skills, magic, and stats, but it had some action elements baked in as well. This was before games like Skyrim, Dark Souls, and the Witcher brought action-oriented gameplay in fantasy games to wider audiences. I’ve long since abandoned consoles in favor of PC gaming, mostly via Steam. Unfortunately, although I’d love to replay Origins, this is one that I can’t really come back to. The developer, EA/Bioware, made the disappointing decision not to include controller support on the PC version at all. I could probably take another crack at it using a Steam Controller or Steam Deck, but my game backlog is deep enough that I don’t need to bang my head into a wall just to play game. Hopefully someday, Bioware will do a full remake/remaster that includes the same controller support they implemented in the most recent release Dragon Age Inquisition.
The Dragon Age series games also had a fascinating story and game world, alongside a very compelling cast of characters. The premise to the first game is that there are periods called “blights,” when monsters emerge. Warriors called “Wardens” can save the world from a blight, but they themselves are tainted and die soon after. The first game is built around a new blight, but also involves a continent wide war. And the other games touch on these themes as well. The characters in the game are thoroughly entertaining and come from a variety of backgrounds. One particularly compelling character is Morrigan, the Witch of the Wilds. Although Morrigan is an ally in Origins and Inquisition, her motivations and true goals are often unclear. Her voice actor, Claudia Black, did a tremendous job bringing her unique personality to life.
Although there are many Dragon Age characters worthy of painting, I thought Morrigan would be a fun one to start with. Here’s the final version:
I will talk more about this over the next couple of posts, but this was my first use of a tool called a proportional divider. Prior to learning about this tool, I had used a basic ruler to measure proportions and feature spacing. You can see the basics in one of my previous drawing videos, but basically the idea is to measure the reference, do some rough math (usually X1.5 or X2) on the artwork to mark where everything should be. Using a proportional divider is so much easier! You can quickly and easily go from reference to art surface, and utilize the a size setting to avoid having to do any math.
I think the proportional divider deserves its own blog post, which I’ll try to write next. It’s a great tool though, and this painting of Morrigan was the first time I’ve ever used one. As I discussed in the previous two posts, I’m trying to make an effort not to sketch pencil outlines. I want to get better at loosely painting, with an eye on the long term goal of possibly painting from life. Honestly, I think measuring at all (like with this proportional divider) goes somewhat against this goal. But it’s an interesting new tool regardless, so I wanted to get some practice in with it.
This painting ended up being really fun. Since Morrigan obviously isn’t a real person, there weren’t really constraints or strict likenesses I had to try to align with. I like the freedom and lack of self-imposed expectations that allows for. I decided to make this a very colorful painting for some reason. I thought I remembered a cut scene or something where Morrigan was surrounded by fire, so I thought that might be an interesting thing to try to depict. And it seemed like flames might look vibrant with her sort of purplish color scheme.
Although I need to work on my lighting solutions, I do still think my improvement continues on these progression videos. I’ve got a decent angle down, so you can follow how the paintings come together without having the back of my head block everything constantly. You can get a feel for how the proportional divider helped space things out right…but at the same time, it wasn’t a cure-all. I still took some weird angles on certain portions; the head has an odd tilt, and eye is slanted unusually downward, and I didn’t push the mouth far enough horizontally. These are all mostly small matters though, and hopefully practice without using pencil will work them out.
Interestingly, I had a devil of a time trying to photograph this one. I find the best situation for photographing my pencil drawings is outside in bright sunlight. But with paintings, bright sunlight isn’t always my friend. I had so much paint on this Morrigan portrait that it took a long time to dry, which meant the paint was still pretty shiny and reflective to sunlight. Even after drying, I still struggled a bit with reflection. This experience has really made me consider investing in a scanner. Perhaps I need to start a poll about how people digitize their artwork.
Overall though, as I mentioned, this was a very fun piece to work on. I got to experiment with some vibrant colors and the end result was a solid piece. Somehow, these “not a real person” paintings seem to remind me of specific people still. This one for some reason makes me think of actress Laura Dern. Not that she’s famous for playing a character like Morrigan or anything; it’s just a slight resemblance that’s maybe just due to my weird brain. So, next up I do want to talk more about that proportional divider, and I’ve got just the painting to pair that conversation up with. Beyond that, it might be wise to share this survey about digitizing artwork as a separate post. Plus, I wonder if it would be interesting to share all of my surveys? I have a few old ones that I looked back on that ended up with a surprisingly high response count!
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; although I enjoy drawing, I can see that I had become somewhat stagnant in a sense. Yes, I was getting practice. But I really wasn’t trying to learn anything new with it. I had a process that worked for me, and I followed that pretty much every time.
Hobbies can be hard to predict exactly – sometimes, life gets busy and certain plans might get delayed or derailed. But, at this moment in time, I’m really interested in learning more and getting better with paints. I watched a video by Chris Fornataro (“Paint Coach” on YouTube) where he talks about painting from life and how it can be difficult if your typical flow isn’t conducive to it. It sounds like his routines had brought him to a place where he couldn’t easily adapt to different scenarios. I realized that if a skilled professional like him could fall into a rut like that, it must be orders of magnitude more limiting for a hobbyist like me. The video I linked was really illuminating for me, and made me start to ruminate on growing and developing artistic skills.
So, after some pondering, I determined painting from life is one of my long terms goals now. And I think there are a lot of ways to get there. But, as I’ve said, my routines and usual methods won’t work. Fortunately for me, there are literally thousands of videos on YouTube available to browse on this topic. One method that it seems many artists follow, which coincidentally also seems to be the Paint Coach’s approach, is to create an underpainting first. The basics of this process, as I see it, follow this general path:
So, that is essentially the short explanation of underpaintings, at least as I understand them. At first, I had some difficulty conceptualizing the notion of being able to paint over an underpainting. Pencil is far less forgiving than oil paint, so it’s almost like I didn’t believe that I could easily make that first outline layer disappear. But does literally just fade away as you add your colors. This is one of the things I love so much about painting – that you don’t have to worry so much about getting everything right at the beginning.
Immediately after finishing the painting from my last post, I launched right into the subject of this one. I had a head of steam going from trying a freehand painting, so I decided to do another. I first purposely avoided trying to paint someone real/recognizable, but after one loose portrait, I had banked a small degree of confidence, so I randomly decided to try Andre the Giant. I’m a big Princess Bride fan, and have done a few pencil sketches before. Here’ how the painting turned out:
All in all, this was not a bad effort. I feel that it’s right in line with my own personal expectations for something done without measurements. Meaning, that it’s not a great likeness, but still somewhat recognizable as that person, and not too bad in a general sense as a painting. As I’ve mentioned before, for portraits that are supposed to be of real people, one of my first questions after finishing is typically, “does it look like the person?” I think this one broadly checks that box…although I don’t think this is something Andre Roussimoff’s family would frame and hang anywhere.
One aspect that has become a recurring struggle with this loose style is trying to get the placement of features right. With this one, I was close, but I think the nose was somewhat out of position. In later portraits, you’ll see I start trying to lay down more horizontal and vertical planes in the underpaintings. I imagine this is probably something people usually learn early in art classes…but since I’m an untrained amateur, just trying to “learn by doing” (and by watching YouTube), I’m coming by some of these lessons more slowly. But I imagine some more of those planes/dividing lines could have helped a bit here.
You can perhaps see some of what I mean in terms of feature positioning in the above progression video. Even if I have a good eye at the beginning, paint does have a habit of shifting position to some extent. This is true even when I use pencil to sketch an outline at the beginning. I believe this might be something that just takes time to get used to and compensate for. There’s a lot that seems to fall into the realm of “better with experience”, so maybe I’ll be able to work the beats out after a couple dozen more paintings.
Again, this one certainly has it’s flaws. But perhaps most importantly? It was a lot of fun! And that’s really what this is all about. And the fun continues, because even as I’m posting as frequently as possible to this blog, I’m still backlogged as I continue to churn out paintings. I have no plans to slow down though, because I can’t stop thinking about painting. I am making progress though, as I’m now only six paintings behind! Hopefully more to come in the next couple of days.
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 much always looking for a reason to draw (and paint nowadays), so I naturally I jumped on board for this. My co-worker initially asked about commissioning me for this project, but I decided it would make more sense to consider it more of a donation of time when it comes to something like this. Not to mention the fact that I’ve really never done a paid commission. Anyhow, basically the game plan was for me to do a couple of portraits, while she would put together the booth and write-ups/biographies.
I had a ton of help in terms of brainstorming ideas. There are quite a lot of Holocaust survivors with impressive accomplishments and contributions to art, science, and other fields. Fortunately, I know a couple of people who know quite a lot about these survivors, particularly those survivors who published books (one co-worker in particular majored in literature). We came up with four names, and my initial thought was to pick a couple of them. I first planned on doing pencil portraits, since I’m still far more precise and accurate in that medium compared to paint. But, as I’ve discussed often lately, I am borderline obsessed with painting nowadays…I really wanted to try to do one of them in oil. The next chance I got, I decided to paint one of them. It went pretty well, so I said “why not another.” I stopped myself at two, and did two more in pencil. I didn’t intent to, but ended up with portraits for all four ideas.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, it was time for Unity Day. I had never attended this specific event, so I didn’t entirely know what to expect. But it was really a fun experience. Basically, there were different cultural, historical, and interest group booths set up, with interesting displays and artifacts. One was centered around African American step-dancing, another featuring armed forces veterans, Hispanic foods in different regions, Middle Eastern clothing types, etc. It was very impressive! There were even performances by several groups, including great dancing by an Arabic group, hip hop crew, and a solo step-dance demonstration.
Our Holocaust remembrance display was definitely one of the simpler, more understated booths, but we got some good foot traffic. I wasn’t at the display the entire time, but I did find that there was some interest in the artwork and I got to answer lots of questions. Although I think people did like the pencil drawings, to my surprise (and excitement), it seems the oil paintings were the most popular. I have always loved the look of oil paintings – part of the reason I wanted to learn to paint in the first place. Even though I do not have confidence in my ability to capture a likeness with oils yet, I was glad these at least had an interesting look from an artwork standpoint.
I started this project almost immediately, my first day off after discussing it. My thoughts on the path forward started with pencil only (to capture the best likenesses), but eventually I convinced myself to paint one and draw two. Naturally, I wanted to start with paint because that seems like all that’s on my mind lately. I painted Hannah Arendt first, which I think turned out well. Although it doesn’t look exactly like her, in isolation as a painting of a person, I think it’s pretty solid. At this stage in my learning process, I was still not getting a very wide array of color hues. That’s still something I’m working on, but I think I’ve gotten a bit better. I felt encouraged after completing the Hannah Arendt portrait, so I decided I’d do a second painting while I had everything set up.
With the second painting, I continued the theme I started with Arendt by trying to paint the younger version of Primo Levi, rather than the more famous images of him older with a beard. One aspect I didn’t plan for was that I couldn’t find any more of the textured paper I bought that was designed for oil paint. This paper is very thick and mimics the feel of canvass…but since I couldn’t find another, I just went with my usual Strathmore drawing paper. It’s not as thick, but still pretty substantial and held the paints pretty well. It doesn’t have the same rough texture though, so the paint seems to look different using similar approaches. But overall, I liked the end result as much as the first. Again, not a perfect likeness of Primo Levi, but still a painting that I like.
For the next two, portraits of Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl, I was very tempted to keep going with the oil paints. After all, I was feeling inspired and the supplies were all set up. But I decided it would be good to stick with some aspects of the original plan and work with pencils for at least half of them. I am really not a good, objective judge of my artwork. So at this stage in the game, I honestly couldn’t tell if the paintings were strong enough to display. But I have some confidence that I could make some good likenesses using pencil, so I figured I make sure the person running/organizing this Holocaust remembrance display had a choice about what to include.
Again, I’m a bit surprised at how good I felt about all of these portraits. The Frankl and Wiesel portraits looked solid too, and I ended up with a collection of four pieces that I was actually proud to share. As I discussed at the beginning, the event went really well and I enjoyed talking with people about the artwork, display, and the subjects themselves. I had several noteworthy conversations, leading up to and during the event, that I think could lead to other things. Some people expressed interest in portraits, but I also talked with a very talented watercolor artists who gave me some great information about setting up at art fairs. Setting up a booth at an art fair (or other event) is not something I’d ever given much thought to, but getting to talk with someone who has experience with it was absolutely fascinating. It’s got my wheels turning for sure – could be something to plan for when spring comes around.
I didn’t capture any progressions except for the first painting of Hannah Arendt. Once I got into the flow of things, it just fell out of my mind to record or take photos. But with the one progression video, I think it shows I’m starting to get slightly better on these videos. The camera angle isn’t perfect, as I kept getting my head in the way. But at least it’s reasonably clear and not completely off center. If you view the latest videos on the Amdall Gallery YouTube channel, you can see that gradual improvement in action – in the latest, I’ve even managed to keep my head out of the shot.
So, that’s all for this very interesting project. I’m thankful I was considered for participation and for all the information and contributions from everyone involved. This is obviously a heavy topic, but it’s important to keep such aspects of history in our awareness. And valuable to look at people who survived such atrocities and appreciate their contributions to the world.
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 that this sort of straight line progress was not in line with my colored pencil experience. When I was learning to use wax-based pencils to draw, overall there was improvement as I practiced and learned, but I had plenty of pieces that just didn’t work out. More of an “up and down line graph” with a trend line overall in the right direction. That’s normal in my opinion – so I figured I was probably due for something I might not be totally happy with.
Well, that “not happy with it” painting did come along in the form of a scene from the Princess Bride movie. I actually went back and forth over whether to even show this one, or to just skip to the next one. Ultimately though, I decided to keep in line with my previously expressed sentiment, which is to share both the successes and struggles. Not everything an artist does is going to work. It’s okay not to share them of course, if it’s something that you really dislike so much. But there can also be value in sharing the rough spots with others too, especially if you learned something from it.
And in this one I did learn something useful. Sometimes with pencils, because the degree of control is so fine, I could get away with suggesting detail and making small things look okay. I am not an expert at such a thing, but it’s at least in the realm of possibility. With oil paint though, I simply don’t have the skill at this point to maintain precision control in a small space. When I painted my kids, I ended up almost bumping into this limitation, as there were two in the scene and they naturally ended up smaller than my other subjects. In this Princess Bride scene, I attempted something even smaller. I didn’t even consider that this would be an issue, but I found out quickly that it was.
This painting came as the last of five during the frenzy of holiday weekend painting I’ve been writing about. At this point, having completed four paintings that I was feeling pretty good about, I think maybe I overestimated myself or something. I was also probably spent creatively/artistically. I was still buzzing from the excitement of painting, but it wasn’t the same level of energy I had earlier in the weekend. I get the sense that perhaps I overdid it? It was incredibly fun, but maybe that 5th painting was akin to having a delicious pizza all to yourself and eating the entire thing even if you aren’t hungry. So, combining these two factors (small subjects, plus possibly overdoing it a bit) brought me here. I attempted one of the scenes from the Princess Bride when Peter Falk’s grandfather character was reading to Fred Savage the sick kid:
As you can see, the detail just isn’t there. I was able to piece together some shadows, but there just wasn’t room for satisfying color variance or interesting combinations. The Princess Bride being a 90s movie, I didn’t exactly have stunning high definition detail to lean on, but that should not be a deal breaker. “Filling in the blanks,” or creating interesting colors and details myself, is a skill that I aspire to get better at. I hope that I could have at least made a passing effort to that end if I had more real estate on the page. But in this case, it just wasn’t to be.
Looking at the positives, at least I can say this does look like a grandpa reading to a kid. And it’s probably recognizable to fans of the movie. But, in isolation, I really don’t think this looks like Peter Falk at all. Perhaps it’s his mustache and mouth area that doesn’t form accurately? It’s just overall a rough looking painting that doesn’t look “good” to me in totality. As I said previously, I think this comes down to a combination of small space and a painter not yet skilled enough to handle it, and possibly just fatigue of painting so much in the span of three days.
I actually even came back to this one later to see if I could remedy some of the issues, but didn’t have much success. Even after the painting was dry, any detail I tried to add just looked like another version of the same general thing (a painting that doesn’t look right). There came a point where I just said to myself it was time to move on. As someone said (Primus? Neil Hamburger?), “They can’t all be zingers.”
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 Pandorum. It’s an entertaining movie with an interesting twist, but the primary reason it captured my interest from an art perspective is the interesting lighting. Many scenes have very pronounced shadows, but without making the actors hidden in darkness. Painting has made me much more aware of good lighting, and this movie sticks out in my mind for how it treated light and darkness.
My previous colored pencil sketch on this topic turned out okay; I think it captured the actors’ likenesses (Ben Foster, Antje Traue, and Cung Le) fairly well. But my attempts to depict those deep shadows didn’t work as well. Somehow I washed out the entire piece and made it into a drab, gray mess. I wanted deep shadows, but still with some color to it. So, getting back to “Jon the Aspiring Painter.” As I was churning through a massive painting weekend, I randomly thought about this drawing. Although oil paints are wily, with properties that take time to fully understand, in some respects they are more forgiving than pencil. Why not try to capture that shadowy element again, this time with oils?
This would certainly not be the first time down the path of redoing old artwork. Sometimes, a piece that I’ve done just “sticks in my craw” in terms of how it turned out. It might be one of the reasons I’ve drawn Dirk Nowitzki so many times (aside from the fact that I’m just a huge fan). A solid example is related to the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. When I first started drawing again five years ago, I also happened to be reading and thoroughly enjoying that series. I did a few drawings, but one in particular of Susannah, Jake, and Oy never sat well with me. So, once I got some additional experience under my belt, I gave it another shot! The same goes for some drawings I’ve done of friends. And of course, the common artist mainstay of self-portraits.
Anyhow, back to this specific piece. Oil paint gave me exactly what I needed to make this work; some vivid colors and darker shadow hues. Oil really pops off the page in ways I can never get colored pencil to. Here’s the final result:
Off the top, the first question is did I accomplish my overall goal here? Which was to successfully depict deep shadows and high contrast without losing all of my color. I think the answer is yes – especially compared to the previous effort. As I hoped and anticipated, the properties of oil paints were definitely conducive to this goal. The contrast is strong, the likeness is mostly on point, and overall I consider this to be a successful portrait.
I think one of the issues I had with colored pencil last time around comes down to my typical approach. My technique usually involves layering colors, blending with white, then layering more details. The white blend helps depict skin texture fairly well, but if I don’t supplement by blending with the colorless blender, sometimes things get washed out. If I come back again with dark colors after the first blend, usually it works out okay.
But paper only has limited capacity to grip pencil wax, so I think I ran into that limit and couldn’t do much else to adjust. It worked to my benefit with this oil painting that oil is much more forgiving; it seems like you can layer and blend paint to extreme degrees. Or at least much more than colored pencil.
Another aspect of this particular portrait worth mentioning – I can see tangible results as I continue to practice painting. This piece is my 8th painting, and I feel like there’s definite improvement along the way. The next painting after this one actually feels like a slight step backwards, but otherwise all the ones that have followed seem to continue that slow but steady build. I think I’m on painting 14 or 15 now, and I am very excited to talk about those as well. But I need to take these one at a time, as tempting as it is to jump ahead!
I may have also finally figured out a good solution for filming these paintings. It’s still not my favorite thing in the world to have a camera right next to me in my peripheral vision, so perhaps I will still do some progressions similar to this one, which is more of a slideshow of still photos. But people do seem to like actual video, so I’ll keep trying to get some of them going at least.
So, next on tap…I need to decide if I want to completely skip a painting that I’m not a huge fan of and instead show a self-portrait painting. Or just go for it and share something that isn’t much of a win, but still maintain the correct chronology of this learning effort. Either way, something else is coming soon.
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 comedian who has created some of the strangest and most surreal skits/sketches I’ve seen on television. This was the third painting I completed that weekend, which immediately followed my early Saturday morning Bob Ross-style landscape.
If you aren’t familiar with Eric Andre, it might help to provide some context to where and when his show airs. The Eric Andre Show fits perfectly into the wild world of Cartoon Networks “Adult Swim” block. Although I haven’t watched it in quite some time, Adult Swim is still around, and includes the popular Rick and Morty series. Back in the day though, some of it’s biggest hits were shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, and going back even farther, Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Time and Eric, by the way, still find themselves into current pop culture via memes – I have a good chuckle whenever I come across one.
Although my prime time for watching this type of show was years ago, the Eric Andre show is right there with it’s predecessors, perfect for that style of absurdist humor and absolutely wild sketches. I know it’s very much a niche that not everyone finds funny though. My wife for example, who loves a good laugh, isn’t really a fan of any of these shows (although she does appreciate a few of the related memes and inside jokes we have). The show always starts off with Eric destroying the set, which is somehow still funny even after seeing it so many times. And many of the skits would sometimes just leave me in fits laughing and I’m not even sure why exactly – perhaps the combination of Eric Andre’s delivery/approach and the fact that you never knew what was going to happen. I also really enjoy the interviews. Although I’m sure many people being interviewed were “in on the joke”, I got the impression that not everyone was.
So, getting back to this artwork. I had the notion to draw a portrait of Eric Andre quite some time ago, but never really got around to it. In the middle that painting frenzy weekend, I completed (for the most part) two interesting projects. Yet somehow I was still all fired up to paint. I mulled a few things over and figured why not this one from their “Who Killed Hannibal” skit. Here’s how it turned out:
I feel like this portrait showed some tangible improvements in my painting skills. One aspect of photo images that has become more noticeable now that I’m using paints is good lighting. I find myself really critically evaluating photo images now, looking for light sources that aren’t washed out and more solid color balance and differences. The reference I used here, which was directly from the show, has great color representation. I was able to apply a good variety of blends; reds, yellows, whites, and browns all mixed and balanced to varying degrees. I even added some cooler tones where I could lean towards shadows.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the strong reference photo allowed me to push the learning process better than I would have with something more washed out. My old litmus test for pencil drawings was always “does it look like the subject?” I think with paints, my test is becoming more along the lines of “do the colors and shapes work together the right way?” In some ways, I can’t completely define “right way” though…I want it to look natural, but I also want it to be visually interesting or appealing. So I guess “right” is very subjective. But it seems I’m not looking at this through as narrow a lens as I did with pencils.
So, the color array and blends are something that I feel works. As a bonus, I did mange to make it look like Eric Andre. With painting, I’m finding that even starting with an outline, it can be easy to lose a resemblance over the totality of the project. A little shift here, a little shift there…suddenly it all adds up to something that isn’t quite right. But I minimized the shifts I think. Long term, I want to try some techniques I’ve seen painters use wherein they don’t even outline. A painter whose videos I’ve been watching, Chris Fornataro (“The Paint Coach”), refers to it as “molding the paint.” That makes sense. I’ve made note of it as something over time I want to work towards.
Although it’s a small thing, an interesting aspect to this is the paper. On many of these portraits, I used a very thick, textured paper designed to be used with oils. But, this time I just used plain old Strathmore drawing paper. I also used this type for the informal, unplanned paintings I did to use up my extra paint. I had some vague worries about how it wouldn’t handle the paint well, but it turns out that was mostly unfounded. I do prefer the thick textured paper, which more closely resembles a canvass. But drawing paper isn’t terrible; paint just flows a bit differently.
Unfortunately, since I was so pumped up about painting, I forgot to take progression photos. So I don’t have a video to share this time around. I have so many more paintings to post, I just need to get some thoughts together to write about them. As I said, this is only the third of five from this particular weekend. I was actually doing a good job of keeping count of how many paintings I’ve done until recently – but I’m to that tipping point when I don’t know how many it is anymore. Possibly 15? And I’ve only shared a few here, so I’m way behind!
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 of funny to put it in perspective, but it’s taken me five years of creating art to finally get comfortable enough to try something without a person or animal in it. This particularly painting was my sixth overall, and was the second in the frenzy of five painting I did during a long weekend in October.
I’ve spoken often about my appreciation for Bob Ross and his old show the Joy of Painting. I even did a sketch of him painting to frame a more lengthy discussion of why I am such a huge fan. Even before I started painting, I’ve enjoyed watching his calm demeanor and welcoming approach to art. His perspective was always that anyone can create art; as a self-taught hobbyist, that really resonated with me. He made being an artist something that seemed approachable and achievable, and that it’s okay to just try it and have fun. I think part of the reason I felt comfortable enough to just “dive in” and try oil painting is that same overarching message of accessibility.
All that being said, it’s probably not surprising that when I started that whirlwind of holiday weekend painting that I mentioned, much of it happened with the Joy of Painting on in the background. In fact, early that Saturday morning, as I sat on the couch sipping my coffee and watching Bob Ross do his thing, I was struck with a notion to try and paint along with him. He sometimes encouraged viewers to do just that – well, I finally listened. On Friday, I had gotten most of the way there on a portrait of my wife. I didn’t really know what else to paint, but I knew I still had that spark to do it. So, I started a fresh episode on PlutoTV and tried to emulate some of the basics.
At this point, I don’t even know how many hundreds of hours of his painting I’ve watched. I have it on so much at home it’s ridiculous, even if it is mostly on in the background. But I’ve seen the basics many times; the color components, light crisscross strokes for the sky, horizontal conjoined swipes for reflective water, palette knife for mountains, hard pressed bristles for trees. I’m over simplifying of course, but the techniques are there for all to see. And so, I gave it a shot! With a much smaller canvass, and vastly inferior tools. But, it was not the complete disaster that it easily could have been. Here’s the final landscape scene:
I’ll go through the process and “good vs bad” that I usually do below the art image, with an eye towards challenges with this one. To start, the sky was mostly fine. I did not have any magic white/liquid white to prime the canvass (used to facilitate that awesome wet-on-wet blending), so instead I coated it with some titanium white thinned down using linseed oil. I still have no clue if that was an okay thing to do; did I make life hard on myself? Was it basically the same? I’m too inexperienced to know for sure. I think my sky and clouds looked okay, but I also did not have any large, thick brushes…so another difference from the Bob Ross path. I think he used a 2.5 inch brush for this, whereas my biggest brush is probably not even a half inch.
Another materials issue was the fact that Bob Ross always used a large, rigid palette knife for mountains. I have a small, poorly angled, flimsy plastic one…it was not up to the task. So, I had to reform my mountains quite a lot, and even ended up having to utilize a brush. In the show, he typically used a brush only to smooth out the downward slope and create a misty fog effect. I wasn’t able to get to that point. Once I got to the trees, things started working out better. I followed the guru’s advice, putting light on top of dark, to pretty good effect I think. I pressed the brush right into the canvass/paper like I was trying to squish a bug, which did well to simulate leaves. Then I used my flimsy palette knife to gouge some branches.
Unfortunately, one significant area that was a bit of a misstep was my poor planning. I initially wanted a lake in my scene, but I ran out of room! My lake ended up getting covered almost completely by trees, whereas it was supposed to be right in front of the mountains. Not a huge deal, but that did not end up as I originally imagined. Overall though, I feel like this was a surprising success! I can’t believe I actually finished a landscape painting…and it looks just fine somehow. Very odd development. So, big “thank you” to oil paints for being so friendly to work with!
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 when I suddenly got a wild hair to just go for it. The first result was surprising in many ways; first at how much pencil blending skills translated to paint, but also in how much I actually enjoyed it. I felt invigorated by it! So much so that I’m already ten paintings in, with an 11th likely started soon.
That being said, I’ve got a lot of writing to do now to catch up to all this artwork creation. In logical fashion, this post carries forward to painting number two. Since they are historically such frequent art subjects anyway, I figured it would be quite natural to try to paint my kids. Unlike the first painting, which was done all in one sitting, this one ended up as quite an extended project. I started on the same trajectory, seeming to be headed for something in the realm of a few hours of painting. Since it consisted of two subjects, I certainly expected more time than the first one.
But, I found that I wasn’t satisfied with the result after the first extended painting session. Then again after the next shorter touch up. Then again, and again. I kept returning to the painting and retouching a feature here, then adjusting colors and shadows, and so on. Part of the way through this painting, I also acquired some additional tools that made a huge difference. I finally got my hands on a solvent to thin paint when needed; some non-toxic linseed oil. And I purchased some liner brushes on Amazon, which I think were greatly needed for hair and some finer details.
I returned to this painting so many times, I really lost track of how much total time I spent on it. It was significantly more than my first painting though, that much I can say for sure. Here’s how the final version of this painting turned out:
Using solvent was somewhat of a revelation. Although I was still learning how and when to apply it in this painting, I definitely think it contributed greatly to some of the additional paintings down the line. In this one of my kids though, being able to more easily lay down the background color was definitely thanks to thinning the paint with linseed oil. There were times when I added too much though, which I can see had an impact in how the end result looks.
The other major new thing was trying to utilize liner brushes for finer details. I didn’t have such small brushes in the first painting, but this time I had this new tool at my disposal that I deployed particularly when it came to their hair. I admit, I may have gone overboard. You can probably tell where I was learning/experimenting with my new brushes and figuring out how much solvent to use. For some reason, I also got it into my head to paint a background; my kids both love purple, so I thought that would be a good way to go. I was likely partially inspired by how easy Alpay Efe, a painter on YouTube, makes it seem.
Speaking of YouTube, I’ve also embedded a time lapse progression video above. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on perspective), on most of the ten paintings I’ve done to this point, I forgot to capture anything for progression videos. I took some photos for this one and perhaps one or two others, and captured live video for the first painting and the tenth (a self portrait). But otherwise, I was just too fired up to be bothered! That level of inspiration is quite thrilling indeed – who has time for trivial things like taking photos when there’s fun stuff to paint?
This was quite a fun one, as all of these oil paintings so far have been. As with the very first painting, at times in the beginning I did feel as if this one was careening away from my control. I think it’s just the looseness of paint compared to pencil, and probably very attributable to the fact that I’m still learning and getting used to it all. I think in the end I did a solid job of wrangling in the details. I think I can learn a lot from this one – in fact, I believe I already have!
