This oil painting of a skeleton pirate was a commission earlier in the year (or maybe it was even at the end of 2024) that I thoroughly enjoyed. I tend to stick with specific themes and subjects, mostly in alignment with both things I enjoy creating and specific concepts I want to practice and improve upon. So, most of my
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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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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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The vast majority of my oil paintings are done on Strathmore 400 series oil paper, which is a treated linen that feels somewhat rigid like canvass. I am very much a creature of habit, so part of it is that I’m used to how it feels and how paint acts on it. But it’s also pretty cost effective, and storage
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Perhaps I’ve finally found the solution to my massive blog post backlog. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m almost comically behind on sharing art here – about 8 months and 110ish paintings at this point. It’s such an odd notion, considering how much of a proponent of blogging I once was. But, as an experience artist once advised,
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Going back in time to May 2023, here is an oil painting I did around that time based on when it was shared to the Amdall Gallery Instagram. This post will include a static image of the piece, an embed of the time lapse video, and then some verbiage from when I wrote about the painting on social media at
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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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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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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 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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The subject of this post is an oil painting I did of my all-time favorite musician Mike Patton. Patton is a man of many bands and projects, including Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk, and quite a few more. I’ve drawn him in colored pencil a couple of times, and in those posts I discuss why I like his
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The subject of this post is an oil painting I did by request of my kids – it’s a portrait of one of their favorite musicians Dua Lipa. She has a couple of songs they really love, specifically Don’t Start Now and Levitating are two they most often belt out at high volumes. After I painted one of my favorite
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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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