The first half of #MaySketchaDay this year

May 15, 2023

I’ve done #MaySketchaDay a few times now and I’ve always managed to generate a lot of ideas for potential paintings to finish. I also like to set special challenges for how I’m going to do the sketches. Last year I did imaginative figures, to push my figure painting skills. Another year I did them all based on Blender renders.

This year I’m using Midjourney to generate images and then painting over them to make the sketches. It’s a controversial approach but I think it’s good to learn how to use these tools. We’ll see what the future holds for all of us. I’m still hopeful.

Studies in oils

April 20, 2023

I’ve been working in oils a lot lately and have been very lax about actually scanning them. So here we go!

I’m really enjoying working traditionally again. There’s something so uniquely real about this work. It’s both incredibly unforgiving (in that you can’t easily make big changes, move things, etc.), yet also oddly easy (brushwork automatically looks better).

I used a couple different surfaces for that. Most are done on oil paper and a few are done on gessobord. I’m meaning to get back to doing some work on linen, so I think that’ll happen this coming week. I’m a sucker for working on unstretched linen, ever since I watched a demo by Greg Manchess back in the day.

Nudes in my sketchbook

April 13, 2023

Working on my figure study skills in oils, in my sketchbook. Prepping for a new Art Camp course on oil painting and seeing if my skills developed in Paint Figures Better translates over to oils (they do). Reference from Rachel’s phenomenal Vine-Covered Nude reference pack.

Figure Painting in Oils

March 28, 2023

Back to oils

February 7, 2023

Sometimes I think my art journey is one of painting in oils, loving it, slowly straying away from it into digital work, and then rediscovering oils and how much I love them. I’m in the rediscovery phase, once again, and loving the hell out of oils.

Portrait practice

I needed to paint some more portraits for the Paint Figures Better portrait painting demo, so here we go! Good chance to dive into studying again for a bit.

2022 in art

January 1, 2023

This is most of the art that I made this past year. There are also hundreds of figure drawings not seen here. There was also a little bit of traditional drawing/painting, but not very much. That’s something I’d like to do more of in 2023. Hold me to that if you don’t see me cranking out oil paintings soon.

Across the Universe

December 30, 2022

Rosetta

December 22, 2022

A study of Rosetta from our new reference pack, Figure Drawing: Rosetta. Felt great to be back to painting figures. It had been too long since I did any of these and I was certainly rusty at first. But I think the time away from them taught me a lot.

Thinking about mountains

September 24, 2022

I’ve been thinking about mountains (as one does). I’ve realized that I want to improve some of my own paintings of mountains by: