Tag Archives: artist

A Sad Expression, Portrait Oil Painting

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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Portrait of Lady in a Dark Room

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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Jon Amdall Self Portrait

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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Relaxed Pose Capstone Figure Painting

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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Lady with Sunflowers Oil Painting

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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Not Quite Taylor Swift, a Portrait Attempt

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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Initial Structure Importance Despite Oil Paint’s Flexibility

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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Fixing Mistakes and Redoing Artwork

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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First Attempt at Oil Painting

This post is about my very first attempt at oil painting. Well, really first ever attempt at any type of painting, which to my surprise was actually done this past weekend. I feel like I’ve been talking about this for years, but I’ve had “learning to paint” in my back pocket as a long term goal for quite sometime. It’s

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