100 Portrait Project Custom Portrait Giveaway

 

This giveaway is happening on Instagram, so go here (to my Instagram post about it) for more details. Entry deadline February 10, 2026.

Portrait 100/100!

 

This journey of 100 portraits has taken me a month and a half beyond a year, and I will take the win of completion. This last portrait is of my husband. He wasn't that happy about the reference photo (messy hair!), so I don't know how he will like the portrait. But I have to go with my own sense of inspiration, and I felt it with this particular reference. I took this photo on a vacation, and that blue pattern is  from the light outside at night, falling on who-knows-what on the front porch of the rental.

This 8x8" oil painting is a paint over of a bowl of soup. And that soup was a paint over. I like paint overs! 

Although I don't plan to add more portraits to this blog, I am hatching other ideas about painting things I want to get better at, mostly trees. They are often the main characters in the landscape, and some artists make lovely portraits out of trees, and I would love to make that my next painting journey. Although I won't be posting more people portraits here, I will still be painting them, because I have come to love it. You will be able see any people-portrait additions in the future on my instagram or daily paintworks or my official website at tracyhurleyart.com. Thank you for following me on this 100-portrait blog!

Here are some process shots:

Portraits 98 & 99/100

 

Thank you to Jacob Palmer for uploading the reference of Marty on the Museum app. I can see why he is such a popular muse on that app. He is such fun to paint! Both of these are paintovers, as you can see from the process photos.

Portrait 97/100

 

This is an 8x8" oil painting based on a photo of my son from a few years ago. I think his hands are beautiful in the reference, and I was more than challenged trying to replicate them here in the painting. I'm back to using my limited palette of ultramarine, pyrrole red, and hansa yellow medium, plus titanium white. I had been adding in burnt umber recently, and that is a very handy color for mixing a rich black, but it also takes forever to dry, and I'm not convinced it ever fully dries. Maybe I'm using an unfortunate brand.

This is another paintover. Here are some process shots:

Portrait 96/100

 

This is a 6x6" oil painting of my daughter, and another paintover. You can see in the progress shots below that I painted over another portrait. The underpainting made it very challenging to get the features of the new painting in the right place. I definitely relied on that grid. 

I really liked having some of the purple shine through, and I liked leaving everything except the face as big shapes. The face is also a bit more graphic than I normally paint, but I like that, too!

Portraits 87-95/100

 

Step 1, paint a garden of cone flowers on a 12x16" panel, let it dry, make many edits, let it dry, sand it down.

Step 2, use a reference photo purchased from Stephen Bauman of the model Ingvild and paint it 9 times. At first I brought each one along at the same rate with a sketch and a color block in. Then I used different brushes/palette knife and brought up the portraits separately to different levels of finish and different looks based on the tool chosen. 

What was my aim? Mainly I wanted to make some progress on this 100-portrait project. But this strategy also forced me to do things I don't normally want to do, because I'm terrible at it, such as paint with a palette knife (bottom left) or a really big round brush (top middle). But I kind of like the double-vision effect of the 9 frames.

I put a process video (in which one stage fades to the next) on instagram. If you want to see that, go here.

Otherwise, here are a few of the in betweens used in the video:

Portrait 86/100

 

Here is the 3rd in my series on Ingvild, photographed by Stephen Bauman. I think I could really mangle the portrait painting and this model would still come out lovely. So thank you to both of them for the excellent reference material.

On my palette, I mostly used these five: pyrrole red, Hansa yellow medium, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, and titanium white. I also had phthalo blue, phthalo green, and yellow ochre available for the occasional color need.

I took some process shots: