Jay, 6″x6″, oil on paper, 2025
This is an exciting way to end 2025: my first realistic portrait. This is, by far and so far, the best painting that I have completed in my journey to becoming a full time painter, and I am very proud of it.
I actually finished it a few days ago, which puts us back in November ’25, but the holidays disrupted my studio time and routine, so I am late posting it, but that’s ok: it won’t make any difference to you.
The above portrait started out as a base layer of deep purple acrylic on a gold background:
I was stuck here for many months, not knowing enough about the practical, technical aspects of painting (color, temperature, value) to feel confident moving forward. After I posted my worries on TikTok, a commenter said, “Just paint!” And she was right: not doing anything wouldn’t help me learn what I needed to learn, so I slapped some pinks on there and the rest pretty much took care of itself!
A note about the paints: For some reason, I thought that oil paint could only be applied over gesso or rabbit skin glue. Gesso, as you may know, is basically white acrylic. Unless you use black gesso. Gesso has a different formula than paints sold as white acrylic artist paint (titanium, lead, flake, etc), so don’t go using gesso for white not understanding this. Anyway, my point is that I didn’t realize that I could use oil paint over the acrylic paint with which I’d started. How wrong I was!
As always, thank you for being here.
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