SkipsPortraits portraits from photographs and attachments | Home | Oil Portraits | Pencil Portraits | Photographs | Pricing | About | Contact | About Like most kids, I fell in love with comic books even before I was able to read them. I liked the pictures, and became a big fan of Blackhawk, Superman, Gangbusters, and even the Archie and Veronica series. It was probably my first exposure to anything related to artwork, and inspired me to tape comic book pages to my bedroom window, cover them with a sheet of white paper, and trace my favorite characters. On sunny afternoons, and Saturday mornings, if I had nothing else to do, I would color them in on a small drawing table my father had made for me. It took me a while to trust my ability to do an accurate, free-hand drawing, but once I began to see that accuracy was not the issue, and settled into the process, drawing became one of my favorite things to do. The pen-and-ink drawing above was my first serious attempt at doing a portrait. I am not sure how old I was, sometime in my 30's, but I did it as a gift for my sister, using a photo I had taken of her dog, Molly. Until that time, I never thought that I would enjoy doing portraits, but there is something that happens while working on them that is very compelling: it is possible to bring out the essence of a subject, and to transform a two-dimensional photo into a person or a pet with character. This is especially true when working with oil paints on canvas, and there have been times in the final stages of an oil portrait, when I felt as if I was applying make-up to someone's face, rather than painting it. I have no formal training in art, and it is still something that I can only do in my spare time, but since I have nothing to fall back on in the way of technique, each drawing or oil portrait becomes a lesson in problem solving, from beginning to end. It makes me have to think, but as soon as I know where I want to go, I can settle back and watch it unfold while my hands do the work. After I got married, my wife was gracious enough to allow me to have a small room in the house where I could occasionally retreat to work on a painting. It helps to have a quiet space, and to be able to come back to something left in progress, and now that I have moved on from tracing comic book characters, all of my attention is focused on doing oil and pencil portraits, and an occasional landscape or still-life. | Home | Oil Portraits | Pencil Portraits | Photographs | Pricing | About | Contact | skip@skipsportraits.com