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 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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One of the early pandemic projects I started was to transition from progression .gif slides of my drawing process into full time-lapse videos. I created a YouTube channel to host them, rather than take up my precious WordPress hosting storage space with large video files. I’ve had the YouTube channel now for about a year, and in that time, I’ve
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Apparently, the beginning of April is book publishing time! Last year, I released a book called Pencils and Process. That one took months to write, and was a 150ish page personal account of my experiences returning to art after having been away from it for a decade. This year, my April book release is a kids book called Robot Family
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My free time has been pretty well monopolized recently, first with writing a book, and then with figuring out the ins-and-outs of independent publishing. Now that the book is out and that’s mostly off my plate, I hope to have a little more time for drawing. Because I have been somewhat less active on the artwork front, I’ve accumulated a
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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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