Around the time of this painting, I was thinking about how often I paint similar things. As you can tell from a quite browse of this site, I pretty consistently share head and shoulders portraits of people. Occasionally, I’ll branch out into a figure study, a pet, or even a rare landscape. But usually, I practice similar styles and types
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This painting of a woman in a dark room is another portrait study in my efforts to practice specific areas that aren’t my strongest. There are a few aspects of portrait painting that come to mind, but one in particular goes back even to my colored pencil days. I’ve talking about this before in more depth, but for a long
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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
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When I started this painting, I had some vague notions of treating it sort of like a capstone project. Although I’ve done over 80 paintings now, at the point in time when I painted this one, I had done somewhere in the mid-40s. I really felt like I was starting to get into the groove of things, and was seeing
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I might say this too often, but the oil painting featured in this post seems to represent somewhat of a milestone for me. It’s of a lady with sunflowers behind her, and is another attempt at a partial figure study rather than the usual head-and-shoulders portrait I tend to roll with. It’s noteworthy to me because right around this time,
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The subject of this post is an oil painting I did of my all-time favorite musician Mike Patton. Patton is a man of many bands and projects, including Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk, and quite a few more. I’ve drawn him in colored pencil a couple of times, and in those posts I discuss why I like his
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The subject of this post’s oil painting is the second of two requests from my kids. This time, it was an attempt at a portrait of Taylor Swift. She’s one of their favorites, even more so since her recent album came out. Their mom went to the concert associated with this new album, and the kids definitely got caught up
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The subject of this post is an oil painting I did by request of my kids – it’s a portrait of one of their favorite musicians Dua Lipa. She has a couple of songs they really love, specifically Don’t Start Now and Levitating are two they most often belt out at high volumes. After I painted one of my favorite
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I’ve mentioned on a few blog posts over the last few months how far behind I am sharing artwork. This has been a continuously building situation since I started painting in October – but I’m not sure I could say it’s necessarily a terrible thing. I’ll explain what I mean by that, but first I want to give some more
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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
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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
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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
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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
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This post is all about light and my struggles with it – I want to give my thoughts on lighting for a studio/workspace, but also a bit on lighting within a painting itself. In the past, I might have considered writing separate posts about these topics, dedicating one to a discussion of depicting light sources and another for actual physical
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This post is all about messing up artwork, which is something I have a decent amount of experience with. I’m going to share some of my thoughts on fixing mistakes in drawings and paintings, and redoing artwork when it’s just beyond the point of repair. And to go with this discussion, I’ve got a great example of a painting that
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