I have always loved drawing and painting people. It is a particularly challenging genre. If you paint a tree or even a house or a flower and the proportions are a little off no one cares. If you use artistic license with the colors, again no one cares. But if you make someone’s nose a shade too long or too red, see what a reaction you will get! Capturing a likeness is a whole other ball game. It also hones your technical skills in a way that other subjects cannot. You must mix an exact color correctly, get the shapes right, and stretch your facility with brush and paint to get texture and edges to look like the appropriate texture and edges.

Models are rare and hard to get, so I practice a lot using photographs of relatives and magazine covers. Look carefully! You may see someone you recognize.

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Note: I struggled with the color adjustments in photoshop to get the scanned images as close to the original oil painting as possible, but in some cases the skin tones are still a little pink or yellow.