Tag Archives: portrait

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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Oil Painting Blog Catch Up – Two Paths

I’ve mentioned on a few blog posts over the last few months how far behind I am sharing artwork. This has been a continuously building situation since I started painting in October – but I’m not sure I could say it’s necessarily a terrible thing. I’ll explain what I mean by that, but first I want to give some more

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Hiring Portrait Models for Art Reference Photos

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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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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Composition and Color in Portrait Painting

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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Melina Elden Ring Oil Painting

This post is centered around an oil painting of a character from Elden Ring named Melina, who acts as a guide for the player during the course of the game. She’s a fascinating and mysterious character in one of the best games I’ve ever played. But, since I’ve already discussed the game itself in great detail through four previous posts,

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Underpainting Practice – Andre the Giant

As I discussed in my last post, I’m making an effort to push myself more when it comes to artwork. A huge part of that obviously is trying oil painting for the first time around two months ago. But I am also trying to flex some artistic muscles that I haven’t used much. I described this in some depth already;

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Holocaust Survivor Portraits, Remembrance Display

Recently, I was approached by a co-worker to ask if I would help out with a display featuring Holocaust survivor portraits for an event called Unity Day. She had heard through the grapevine about my art hobby, and thought it might be good to team up for some portraits and biographies at the table she was planning. I am pretty

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High Contrast Challenge – Antje Traue Portrait

As I continue on clearing my backlog of paintings that have yet to be shared, now I’ve come to the fourth of five paintings done during a holiday weekend in October. This one in particular was focused on really pushing for a high contrast/heavy shadow challenge. Last year, I did a colored pencil sketch of some characters from the movie

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