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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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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;
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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
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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
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As I continue on clearing my backlog of paintings that have yet to be shared, now I’ve come to the fourth of five paintings done during a holiday weekend in October. This one in particular was focused on really pushing for a high contrast/heavy shadow challenge. Last year, I did a colored pencil sketch of some characters from the movie
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This post continues the discussion of a wild painting weekend I had in October, during which I somehow churned through five paintings. As I’ve mentioned, this is not at all something I set out to do specifically; I just finished one, found I wanted to paint more, so I kept rolling. The subject of this painting is Eric Andre, a
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This post will be an interesting one, at least from my perspective. If you’ve browsed this site, you can see pretty quickly that I’m all about portraits. Usually head-and-shoulder views of people, but sometimes animals or other scenes featuring a human being in some way. But this writeup is actually about my first fully committed, no-people-at-all, landscape attempt! It’s kind
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A few weeks ago, I finally made the leap to attempt painting for the first time. I’ve long admired the “painterly” look across the different mediums, particularly the textures and qualities produced by oil paints. It’s been a long term goals to learn, but had always seemed like something I’d try some far-off, unspecified day. So, I surprised myself greatly
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I’ve talked about my affinity for stock photos on many occasions. In previous posts, I’ve written about royalty free images, photo spamming on social media, and my general love of memes (which tend to lean heavily on stock photos). I just find these images to be very appealing from a portrait study perspective. The facial expressions and/or subject positions are
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