I tend to practice and repeat specific themes when it comes to portrait painting. This seems to manifest itself most often with concepts or features that I view as weaker areas. Earlier in my painting journey, probably for the first 150 or so oil paintings, I honestly really needed to practice everything. So, I didn’t narrow in as much on
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Sometimes I just paint without any specific reason or goal, but with this piece I actually had a couple specific things I wanted to practice. I was talking with some colleagues about my appreciation for John Singer Sargent’s paintings, particularly Lady Agnew of Locknaw. I love the way Sargent captured the nature of light on fabric, and a nature instinct
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Almost from the start of my quest to learn to paint with oils, I’ve been captivated by expressive eyes in portraits. It’s something I’m drawn to just when I’m admiring paintings by other artists, so I naturally gravitated to wanting to learn how to emulate the same effect. Unfortunately for me perhaps, I learned quickly that it requires a subtle
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My latest painting is another figure study on 12 x 12 oil paper. With this one, I tried to really emphasize a bright light source behind the subject. I think I was able to accomplish this for the most part, but I can see it’s something I need to practice a bit more. I’ll follow my standard format here, which
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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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I am often thrown for a loop about the passage of time. I’ve written in many posts here about such and such amount of time flying by since drawing something, and how it never feels like so long ago. I’ve had a similar feeling when I started writing this one. Although it seems like only a couple weeks ago, it
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