Portraits 68 and 69

 

I am very excited to announce here that I will be one of 30 teachers in the online course Let's Face It 2026. 

 

If you enroll in this course, you will see how I painted these two portraits. In each lesson, I’ll walk you through color mixing, sketching, blocking in big shapes with average colors, and refining with smaller color patches as the portrait develops. You’ll see it all—from those rare moments of perfect paint application to the inevitable missteps and fixes along the way.

 

Sign up for Let’s Face It 2026 and receive a brand-new lesson every week throughout 2026 (50 weeks total!) from one of 30 incredible guest artists. The course offers a wide range of mediums and techniques focused on portraits and figures, plus a welcoming community of artists who support and inspire one another.

 

Join the fun—you won’t regret it!

 

Registration opens Monday, October 27, but the link above will get you on the waitlist. An early bird discount of $129 is available for the first 1000 signups.

 

 

Portrait 67/100

 

This handsome guy is a commissioned piece, so thank you to Karen for asking me to paint her son. In the reference photo, I believe it is Karen standing behind him in a shirt of a gorgeous blue (lots of phthalo!), and that made a wonderful background color for this portrait. This painting proceeded pretty smoothly, except at the end, when Karen noticed that I had made his nose too bulbous. A mother can see everything, and she was absolutely right! So I fixed that and brought the likeness closer to him. And now she is happy and so am I!

I put some process shots, including the painting before the requested edits, below. This painting is in oil paint on a 6x8" mdf panel.

Portrait 66/100

I’m still following along with the week of online lessons called Creative Jumpstart, LFI 2026, that finished on Friday. This portrait is from Kara’s lesson, which she did with a big brush and acrylic paint, and she ended up with a very expressive portrait. I’ve gotten attached to oil paint, so that’s what I used, and my brushes were probably too small for anything that expressive. Even though I deviate a lot from the materials and instructions, I enjoy the company of the teachers and am eventually going to get to the last two lessons.

Here are some process images:

Portrait 65/100

 

I’m still following along with a week of online lessons called Creative Jumpstart, LFI 2026. This is installment 2 of 5. I didn’t have all the supplies to follow along exactly—instead of a nib ink pen and black ink, I used micron pens and black gouache. This was fun! And adding the shading lines was a meditative task and was so relaxing. So-- fun and relaxing. Based on lesson by Dylan Sara.

Here are some process photos:

Portrait 64/100

 

I’m following along (loosely) with a week of online lessons called Creative Jumpstart, LFI 2026. Today’s lesson focused on working with charcoal, but I ended up finishing my piece in colored pencil. I really enjoyed the lesson and learned a lot from watching it, though my attempt in charcoal was trickier than I expected. I may try charcoal again later when I have the recommended paper. As you can see below, I started with some charcoal lines and smudging, but eventually partially erased that and switched to colored pencil. Colored pencil brought its own challenge, though, because the reference photo was in black and white.

Portrait 63/100

This is a paintover (can you guess what is under the portrait? Okay, the answer is grapefruits in a bowl). I painted over a still life that I liked, but did not love. So goodbye to that still life and hello to portrait #63. 

This lovely woman is wearing a patterned dress that I totally screwed up pattern-wise, but also was intrigued enough to repeat a similar pattern in the background in two places. What do you think? Would the background be better blank? I tend to fiddle with the backgrounds somewhat just to add more visual interest, which was my aim here. And I had made the whole painting so orange that I wanted a touch of blue somewhere other than the highlights in her hair. Perhaps it's too much blue and leads you too much away from her face? Anyway, the reference photo for this painting comes thanks to Bryce C. Liston and model Nadia S. So thank you to those two for the inspiring reference!

8x8" oil paint on linen panel.

Here are some process shots:

Portrait 62/100

I included another selfie on my progress toward my 100 portrait challenge. I made this painting using a photo reference that I manipulated color-wise. It started out with a very yellow lamp light, and I didn’t like how jaundiced it made me look, so I manipulated the colors using affinity photo (a great alternative to photoshop, by the way, requiring only a 1-time payment). I recently painted my parents at this same size, and now I'm waiting for my sisters to send me their photo references so I can complete our family portrait (without the family expansions, yet).

Oil paint on 8x8" mdf panel. Process images below: