Getting near the halfway mark! I am proud of my stick-to-it-iveness on this project. I might need to pick up my pace to get 100 done in 1 year, but I'm happy to have painted so many portraits already.
I think doing a lot of painting really helps improve skills, but I also recently noticed that my enjoyment of painting portraits has also increased. What a gift! I remember this happened to me once before when I started practicing making portrait sketches on my iPad. I initially did that practice as a kind of medicine, because I didn't enjoy it and I wasn't any good at it, but I thought that it would be the best way to learn to learn to see and draw. So I started by making 20 a day (a bit extreme), but then dropped it down to 10, then 5, then 2. These were all very quick sketches, just focusing on line and proportion, not shading or finishing. I did 10 a day for a long time, keeping track of the number until I got to around 5,000. Somewhere on that journey, I found a lot of relaxation and pleasure in making those sketches. Anyway, the whole point of this story is to say that during this portrait painting project, I'm starting to get that same shift in my own pleasure in the painting process. So yay for that!
Here are some progress shots from painting 49:
Thank you to Alison Murnaghan on the Museum app for the inspiring reference photo.
Oil paint on 6x8” mdf panels.
No comments:
Post a Comment