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
Read more
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,
Read more
My painting journey has taken a learning-oriented turn towards trying to abandon some of my most loved crutches. The most significant of these crutches has been using pencil to sketch outlines before painting, which is how I got my feet under me with the first dozen paintings. But recently, I decided if I wanted to truly develop my skills, I’d
Read more
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
Read more
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
Read more
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;
Read more
A couple of specific things are at the forefront of my mind right now when it comes to painting. The first is that, in a general sense, I need lots of practice. Over the course of around five years and 150ish portraits, my colored pencil drawings improved noticeably. I can see major areas where my painting skills need to develop,
Read more
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
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
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
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
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
Read more
When I shared my last custom portrait giveaway, I mentioned that I had somehow let a year go by between these artwork raffles. I thought that was sort of an aberration due to the pandemic and all. Yet here we are again, almost a year later, and I let time get away from me again! I’ve had some good experiences
Read more
In my last post, I wrote a bit on the fact that my posts are often a bit delayed from when the artwork is actually finished. As I said previously, it’s probably a fairly common phenomenon for many artists to delay sharing something by a month or two. But there have been times when those delays stacked up quite a
Read more
I’ve finally beaten Elden Ring, which feels like quite a milestone for someone who isn’t a particularly skilled gamer (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally rolled myself off a cliff). Since I’ve finally beaten the final boss, or really “bosses” to be more accurate, it’s given me some space to reflect on the full experience Elden Ring
Read more