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:

Portrait 85/100

 

This is the second painting I've made from a batch of reference photos I purchased from Stephen Bauman. I worked on developing the face here, but wanted to keep her hair mostly graphic, as one big shape with slight color changes. 

I have become a much faster painter from when I first started 5 years ago, but I need breaks after painting for just a few hours. In the progress shots below, the top three (drawing and color block in) happen on the first day and the rest on day two. 

The last image was taken with my scanner and is truer to the colors than the others are.

Today I will start another painting of this lovely model.

Portrait 84/100

 

I recently purchased a model pack from Stephen Bauman. This is the first painting of Ingvild that I've painted from the reference photos, and I'm planning to do a lot more, with the idea of working on the last 17 portraits of my series of 100. This way, I can keep the oil paint on my palette as useful as possible from one portrait to the next. 

Here are some progress shots. The last image was taken with my scanner, which explains the color shift (which is truer to the painting than the iPhone shots).

Portraits 82 & 83/100

 

I told my nephew and niece-to-be that I'd love to paint a portrait of them in honor of their upcoming wedding, and here it is. Thank you to Alison for the lovely reference photo. The reference photo was in a dark venue--perhaps a concert or something like that? Everything was gray or black or brown except their faces, so I decided to lean into that for the portrait. 

His black t-shirt had a reddish undertone on the right and got a darker, cooler black toward the left, where it was more in shadow. The lettering on his shirt was white, but I made it gray so that it didn't stand out as much and compete with their faces. I also made the gray lettering slightly greenish to complement the reddish aspect of his shirt. I took a workshop from the wonderful painter Erin Raedeke on color and light, and she often pushed adjacent shapes into more of a complementary color relationship, which I thought was really interesting. So here I did that as a choice with the red-green relationship. Yay to me for making artistic choices!

You can see some in-between process photos below. The last photo was taken with my scanner, which shows a truer color than the others, which I took with my iPhone. This is 9x12" oil paint on mdf panel.

Portrait 81/100

 

I went to a live model portrait session a few days ago and came away with this portrait. Oil paint on 8x10 panel. I will eventually finish this painting, but for now it will sit in spot #81.

Here are some process shots. The last image is captured with my scanner, which explains the lighting difference.

Portraits 79 & 80/100

Many thanks to Karen for asking me to paint her family. I almost feel that I know them! These are the parents in oil paint on 8x10 panel. We settled on this background color so that the portrait would fit with the 3 others, all of which have colorful backgrounds.

And here are some process shots:

And here are more process shots. I attempted to varnish this one before it was dry enough. With Gamvar, the painting can be touch dry in order to varnish, but I misjudged this one. Lesson learned! So I removed the varnish, which had picked up paint and ruined the portraits, and I also removed any other paint that would come up with mineral spirits. I used this same board as a starting place for repainting the portraits, this time with a different background color:

Portrait 78/100

 

I have been asked to paint all three of a client's children, and am really happy with how the portraits are coming out. All of the reference photos have toothy smiles, so I'm getting more and more practice doing teeth and can declare that I no longer have a "no teeth" policy. :)

I gessoed the panel with an unbleached titanium color gesso. I liked the brown/taupe overall look of it and was even thinking that the dark underpainting on the hat and shirt should be left alone to provide a contrast in texture with the rest of the painting. In the end I decided against it, because the other two portraits have colorful backgrounds, so I needed to keep them more visually consistent.

This is oil paint on an mdf panel.

Portraits 71–77/100

I found the reference image for this series of portraits on Pinterest. My apologies to the photographer—I don’t know their name—but the subject is the actor Alba Rohrwacher. I’m using the reference photo for practice rather than for profit, so I hope that this falls within acceptable copyright use. I painted these on ungessoed, unprepared Kraft paper, so I expect the paintings to disintegrate eventually anyway!

In the main image, I did my usual thing, trying to pin down specific color patches for different areas of the face. In the panel of smaller, quicker paintings, I used a monochromatic modeling system that I recently learned about from an excellent video by Kerry Dunn. His demos were far more impressive than you might guess from my attempts here.

I’d like to keep practicing this method, as I think it will be especially helpful when painting from live models. In the videos, Kerry uses thick and thin passages of burnt umber for the shadows, and then another color (usually orangey, mixed with various amounts of white) for modeling the light side of the face. In its simplest form, this is the only color added, but he also demonstrated how and where he begins to introduce other colors into the face. I may not have interpreted his method correctly, so if you’re interested, I recommend following him to see his videos. He has offered videos periodically on instagram, and you sign up in the comment section when he makes these offerings. @paintkerrypaint on Instagram.

Portrait 70/100

I started this painting of a lovely young woman at a portrait session in Alhambra, and then I took it home and finished it from a photo. Most of my struggles came from the background. As you can see, I started with a beige (matching reality), then a purple, and then somehow landed on this abstract color bomb!

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.