I created two studies of this precocious child and I believe I was finally able to catch her smile with the second one. It was a challenge to paint the first because it had two light sources. It was taken from a pic that gave the photographer her ready smile. I then saw another pic of her this weekend – she was...
Lorraine’s my classmate in high school. She requested that I paint a portrait of her family and I was actually delighted with the challenge. What made this challenging was that this is my second largest painting [the first one was 3ft by 4ft]. I learned a few things again while doing this. The best paper to do this...
Taking an hour break from painting by doing another painting. In remembrance of Dada De la Cruzg. You will always be a part of our lives. Thank you for all the laughter and memories.
This is the last of a series. I also enjoyed doing this the most because I found it more expressive. This was the original photo. It was a small thumbnail that I had to blow up in photoshop and edit a bit to bring out the shadows and highlights. Yes, it’s old. Given the challenge that it was blurry and the colors...
How much can a person change throughout the years?
This is a commissioned piece for a friend. Three paintings of the same person throughout the years. This is the first.
I’ve been wanting to do a painting of Sari for some time. With her father’s permission, I did a few studies and once I had some free time, I finally started it. What makes this study different is the style. I focused on the eyes, nose and lips. The rest were mostly washes. Compared to almost all the portraits...
Yes, her name is Boo. Her portrait was a challenge because as simple as it looks, it came from the photo on the right. My challenge was how to make a memorable photo look interesting as a portrait. Not all photographs are meant to be portraits. Some pictures are more beautiful in pictures. Her photo on the right...
Alfred and I have been friends since high school. He was visiting our neighbor when we ended up talking. We both wrote for our own school’s publication and did illustrations. So technically I got a few tips and tricks from his end. We’d meet up once a year to catch up on stories and when the story was too good to wait,...
She is his sunshine. When she walks into the room, his eyes light up and this is mirrored in her eyes when they fall upon him across the room. After years of planning, Alfred, Jean, Billie and I finally got to have that lunch date. As we told our stories, Jean would steal casual glances on Alfred. Her look reflected...
Good old friends are like old shirts – you keep coming back because of the comfort they bring into your life. It doesn’t matter how bad you look or how rotten you feel, old friends don’t care. They’ve seen you through you worst. Alfred and I go waaaaaay back – like high school. He knew me when I was just skin and bones...
Children grow up so fast. I know – when they’re whiny and all, you can’t wait for them to grow up so you can talk sense into them. But when you step back and watch them, engrossed in their own world of wonder, you gasp and wish you could tell time to slow down. You want to hold them and listen to their laughter...
I’ve never met her in person. Often times we’d leave comments on a common friend’s post until our posts would regularly appear on each other’s feeds. What I do know is that she’s a photographer and a very good one at that. She was wondering what to give her mom for her birthday, when one of my paintings appeared on her...
Yes, he’s Blogster.com’s resident World Lit. Professor teaching at Chico State University (CSU). In an effort to teach his students more about world culture he also introduces them to blogging with a reasonably mixed community coming from different parts of the globe. It opens his students’ minds to lives, opinions and...
This is a second painting of Bastian taken from one photo. The challenge this painting gave was that half of the face was dark and in shadows. Yes, I still need practise but I think this is better than the first one [below]. This was the first one painted last December. One of the things I learned was to keep on...
