It might be sort of weird how I’m phrasing this title – a “Jon Amdall Self Portrait”…painted by Jon Amdall…written by Jon Amdall. That’s a lot of weird third person references. But, since it’s the latest painting I’ve done of myself, and I’d kind of like to index this thing and let search engines pick it up, I figured I’d
Read more
Perhaps this post will trigger a bit of deja vu, as it’s a topic that I’ve already covered somewhat recently. This is all about self portraits, but with the added twist of a medium that is still quite new to me. As you can tell from the barrage of recent posts, I am all about oil painting these days. I
Read more
Lately I’ve been discussing my recent journey into the world of oil painting, having shared my first attempt, a portrait of my kids, and an effort to use up excess paint. Now, we come to my 5th painting, in which I attempted to paint a portrait of my wife. I say “attempted” because I did experience some challenges along the
Read more
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
Read more
I am often slightly backlogged on writing blog posts. It’s something that I’ve mentioned previously and is probably fairly common for many artists who write about what they do. Not anything too crazy, but it’s not uncommon for me to share something I sketched a month ago, or to be writing about something that isn’t even my latest drawing. In
Read more
This post is written in memory of Javier Homero Garcia. Javier, my wife’s father, recently passed away. We were fortunate that we were able to travel to see him shortly before he passed, and my wife was able to spend a solid week with him and say her goodbyes. She was close with him and loved him dearly, so healing
Read more
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2022, in addition to the usual “eat better” and “get more exercise” items, has been to enter a drawing into an art show. Several years ago, based on a suggestion from a co-worker, I submitted a sketch for the River Oaks 5 X 5 Art Show. This was very early in my return
Read more
Every once in a while, I find it’s nice to attempt a self-portrait. After all, what face are you more familiar with than your own? My kids and wife are surely very close, and I’ve drawn them all many times. But drawing my own face is kind of a nice pulse check; a way to see if (and how) my
Read more
At the moment, I am quite backlogged in terms of both finished portraits I haven’t yet written about and ideas for future drawings. I’ve written about my tendency to get behind on this sort of thing, to develop a backlog, but this feels like the most extreme it’s been in a long while. I currently have four finished drawings that
Read more
If you’ve read many posts on this site, it’s probably apparent that I do a lot of drawing with my kids. They have desks set up right next to mine, and on the weekends, we’ll often all sit around and draw. They are quite adventurous with their art; creating pure imaginative scenes, drawing what I draw (such as the Bob
Read more
I am going to share some art out of order, which isn’t my usual approach. But I thought it would make more sense to jump right to this drawing of Santa since we’re so close to Christmas, even though it skips the line a bit. I had taken somewhat of a break recently from drawing – not really by design,
Read more
A bit of a delay writing this one, but this post is going to be dedicated to Mother’s Day and sharing some related artwork. It’s naturally been a bit different than previous holidays; I certainly can’t remember navigating a pandemic quarantine. Despite that fact, I think we were able to make do the best we could. We all went for
Read more
Welcome to the part two continuation of this Mike Patton-related discussion! In the first post, the write-up was centered around musician extraordinaire Mike Patton and his bands, with a drawing of Patton himself. This post is specifically about a Mr. Bungle concert in 1999 that still ranks as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Originally, this Mr. Bungle
Read more
As I was browsing through some old photos looking for something fun to draw, I came across one that gave me a good laugh. It’s a photo of me and my wife from back when we were dating; I’m making some ridiculous face, while she’s giving me that patient look I’ve seen so many times. I’m really not sure what
Read more
This is sort of a belated part two for my last post about holiday portrait gifts. In that write-up, I discussed a colored pencil drawing I gave to my mom as part of her Christmas gift this year. There was a delay in sharing that one because I wanted to wait until after I gave it to her. I’m not
Read more