It’s hard to believe it’s already been three years since I started learning to paint! I first picked up a brush back in September 2022, and since then I’ve painted 260 portraits. Although my pace has slowed considerably from that somewhat insane first year pace (averaging more than 10 a month), I’m glad I’ve continued to steadily continue this hobby.
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This post features a step by step walkthrough of my portrait oil painting approach. Although I’ve shared a few walkthrough videos on YouTube of my process, I wanted to create something that was a bit more sequential and organized, as well as a bit longer, to really capture how I approach these alla prima portrait oil paintings. It just so
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One of the painting highlights of 2024 for me was getting to participate in the Postcard Art Exhibit (PAE). It’s a charity event that is hosted in different locations, and the one last year was fairly close to me in McKinney, Texas benefiting the Millhouse Foundation. I don’t have much experience with art shows, but this was a ton of
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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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As you may have seen on the front page or my ongoing forum thread, I published a book recently! It’s something that I’ve vaguely wanted to do for a while, but never actually attempted until this year. Although I’ve written about the book’s content, I have not really discussed much of the actual publishing experience. While I was working on
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It feels weird to say this, but I finished writing a book…and it’s actually published and available now! The book is called Pencils and Process, and it’s available via Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It may be coming to some other retailers like Books-a-Million too, but I’m not sure when. For the non-Amazon angle, I’m using Ingram as my distributor
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A few days ago, there was a comment asking about which medium I use. This is a simple question, but a really great one – especially considering I never talk about that! I think from time to time, I may mention the types of pencils I use or answer a question in comments about paper. But, I don’t think I’ve ever
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As a huge Excel fanatic, over the years I’ve amassed a nice collection of spreadsheets; if you’ve explored this website much, I’m sure you’ve seen graphs from some of them. As part of that data crunching, I’ve also utilized a wide variety of functions and formulas to process data. I keep a master reference list of these Excel functions in
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