I’ve talked about my affinity for stock photos on many occasions. In previous posts, I’ve written about royalty free images, photo spamming on social media, and my general love of memes (which tend to lean heavily on stock photos). I just find these images to be very appealing from a portrait study perspective. The facial expressions and/or subject positions are
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In conversations with acquaintances, colleagues, and other various newly-met people, occasionally my drawing hobby comes up. Although not everyone is particularly interested in art, usually I can expect a follow up question or two; something along the lines of “what do you draw” or “using what?” People are usually somewhat surprised to hear that I consider my comfort zone to
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Way back in April (which feels like it was years ago now somehow), there was a healthcare worker “portraits for heroes” thing going around on social media. The gist of it was, as a small way to show appreciation for people on the front lines as COVID-19 raged, artists were doing free portraits. Although I don’t have a large social
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A bit of a delay writing this one, but this post is going to be dedicated to Mother’s Day and sharing some related artwork. It’s naturally been a bit different than previous holidays; I certainly can’t remember navigating a pandemic quarantine. Despite that fact, I think we were able to make do the best we could. We all went for
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As I was browsing through some old photos looking for something fun to draw, I came across one that gave me a good laugh. It’s a photo of me and my wife from back when we were dating; I’m making some ridiculous face, while she’s giving me that patient look I’ve seen so many times. I’m really not sure what
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Writing about artwork during a global pandemic really isn’t something I expected to be doing at all. Yet here we are in an escalating health and financial crisis and I’ll probably be sharing some art over the next few weeks. I have lots of thoughts on this situation, but I’ll try to keep them somewhat organized. My wife and I
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It took longer than I thought to finish this write-up, but welcome to part two of a series I started with last week’s post about drawing my way through a setback. Without retreading the all the details, basically there is an art show that I found to be inspiring early in my return to art as a hobby a couple
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I wrote a couple of months ago about an art show called the River Oaks 5x5x5, which I often refer to as the “tiny art” show. It’s one that I entered two years ago and surprisingly had a sketch accepted for the exhibit. That was really early in my return to art, and the quality of what I was doing
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Lately, I’ve been in a bit of an art re-visitation phase. I have been back into the drawing hobby for over two years at this point, which doesn’t seem like a tremendous amount of time on its face, but feels significant to me. The style of artwork and techniques used have changed a lot, and in my view, continue to
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I had to double check because it didn’t seem possible, but it looks like it’s been almost a month since my last drawing. Time really flies sometimes. Okay, not sometimes – pretty much all the time. My last post was about using models and figures to help with portraits, which in my case was some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As
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I still feel that overall I am improving as an artist, which is nice to realize after two years of becoming re-involved in this hobby. As I’ve mentioned before, I took a (mostly) ten year break, so it makes me happy that I’m still at it and still learning. It’s not a rapid improvement and I don’t really experience any
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I try to be as forthright as possible on this blog about my experiences with art. The site didn’t really start with a focused goal in mind, but over time, writing has become as much about sharing the struggles as the victories when it comes to this hobby. I hope it helps someone else to see my learning process along
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Following my brief foray into digital artwork, it felt like time to get back to my usual comfortable pencil-and-paper mode. At this point, I’ve got a pretty substantial computer folder full of ideas, many of which are inspired by Unsplash photos. But before tapping that reservoir, I found myself with a portrait request! Actual subject requests are somewhat rare for
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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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Since getting back into drawing in 2017, I’ve generally been under the impression that most of my artwork has been of my family. I also had a feeling that the most frequent subject was probably my wife. Because data is fun, I decided there was no point in just assuming or guessing – better to crunch the numbers and find
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