Acrylic, Oil, Pencil

Recreation of Jacob Receiving Joseph’s Coat by Guercino
Oil on canvas
(March 17, 2025)

This was an academic project where I was tasked with recreating a famous painting while being as accurate as I possibly could. Once I found the piece originally painted by the painter Guercino, I took a picture of it, printed out a small copy, inserted it into a small projector and proceeded to painstakingly trace over the outline of the projection onto the canvas. Once I completed that I used oil paint to match the colors or tone of the original piece. Out of everything I’ve done to this point, this was probably my most ambitious work considering the source material and the time it took to complete. The tracing alone took me the entire class time as well as an extra hour after class was over to get it done. Overall, I’m happy with how this turned out despite the imperfections I see as the artist.

Distorted Clown
Oil on canvas
(April 28, 2025)

This was an academic painting project where I was tasked with creating an abstract piece. After much deliberation, I managed to come up the idea of a “broken clown” character. This entire piece was done in oil paint as I’ve come to enjoy using oil rather than acrylic, by this point. I wanted to show off different skin colors while painting, making some exaggerated and prominent while still keeping the clown aesthetic. If someone was to look at this painting and feel uncomfortable, then I would call this piece a success. Throughout this piece I was thinking about history and current events, and I wanted this to be something that made someone think as they looked at it. “Why am I uncomfortable?” “What’s the meaning behind this piece?” “What’s it trying to say?”

Ocean
Glaze over acrylic
(January 15, 2025)

This was an academic project where we learning how to use glazing with our acrylic paints. I don’t remember if we were given an instruction to paint a specific thing or to paint anything, but I ended up recreating a picture I took of the ocean when I was still in the Navy. I drew the clouds and waves before using dark acrylic paint to color in the darker portions of the picture. Then I used a glazing compound and blue paint to gloss over the painting with different shades of blue. I like how this came out, especially since at this point I wasn’t really excited about using acrylic paint because of past struggles with it. I enjoyed the look and the way the tone came out here better than in past attempts with using acrylic paint.

Gracie
Acrylic on canvas
(November 7, 2024)

This was an academic project where we were tasked with using acrylic to paint a pet or animal. I chose to paint my pet dog, Gracie, who was lying in a very goofy position when my wife took a picture of her. I first drew her on the canvas before proceeding to paint in the colors. Once I completed that, I then outline the surrounding negative space with blue paint before adding in some purple on top of it when I didn’t like the color. Next, I covered up the portion containing the dog and attempted to splatter paint throughout the background. My few attempts to splatter paint was unsuccessful, so I opted to manually dot the remaining negative space of the background to add more color. After that, I added some modeling paste to all the white areas of the dog to give the illusion of fur. Finally, I painted over a good portion of the paste with some gray colors to try and mimic shading. Overall, I think the piece came out well, and despite my disdain for acrylics I had a fun time working on this piece.

Sleeping Dog
Pencil on paper
November 23, 2024

This was a personal drawing I did in my sketchbook as practice. I had a friend give me a prompt to draw so I could keep up my art skills and maintain or gain confidence in my art. They gave me the prompt “a dog sleeping in the snow” so I went to work on drawing it. Since this was all done in pencil it was a bit difficult to mimic snow in a way that made sense, but I feel like the dog came out well. I just searched online for a sleeping dog and tried my best in sketching what I saw. It didn’t take me very long to get the drawing done, but despite that, I’m proud of this little dog.

Descriptions are from left to right.

Skull
Charcoal on paper
August 28, 2024

This was am academic project where we were tasked to draw a skull from a model skeleton using charcoal. This was my second attempt at drawing a skull, so even though I was using charcoal, a much darker tool than pencil, I was confident in my ability to accurately draw the model. Personally, I feel as though the charcoal drawing came out looking better than my pencil drawing. There were some minor hiccups when it came to accurately aligning the teeth and the overall shape of the jaw, but overall, I’m proud of the end result. I decided to add little “smoke” details around the edge of the skull surrounding it to get it a creepier feel to the drawing. I think it allows the skull to pop out more.

Self Portrait [Bottom Center]
Pencil on paper
November 13, 2024

This was an academic project to draw a self portrait of ourselves. This was done with different types of lead pencil in order to emphasize lighter and darker shades. There really isn’t much to say about the process seeing as it was mainly just take a photo of myself and draw it as accurately as possible. The process was pretty simple, although it took some time to get it done, not accounting for the multiple adjustments I made after I finished. There was a lot of adding and erasing shadows to give the drawing a more 3D look. Pretty sure I spent a lot of time on the forehead alone because I was struggling to make it look natural. The beard also took some time because I was trying to balance accuracy and “perfection” so that the hair would flow naturally

Trance [Top Center]
Marker on paper
December 10, 2024

This was an academic project where we were tasked with designing an optical illusion. I used a compass to draw the circles but decided to not use any type of ruler for the rulers. Call it forgetfulness, or what have you, but by the time I realized that I should have used a ruler, I decided to just keep moving cause I was way too deep by that point and I was too stubborn to start over. I used pen to outline the designs and then used colored markers to fill in the triangles. I understand that me not using a ruler didn’t really hinder my progress, but it definitely would’ve been a useful tool had I thought about it sooner. The longest part of this project was mainly the brainstorming stage on what I wanted to do, so my thought was to quickly get it on paper before I ended up second guessing my own design.

Hip Bone
Pencil on paper
September 30, 2024

This was an academic project where we were tasked to draw a piece of a model skeleton. By this point we had just finished drawing the skull and the rib cage, so this was less detailed than the other parts. With that being said, I’m proud of how this came out, because of the intricacies of this hip bone compared to how my other pieces came out. The entire piece was done in pencil, however, there was a point where I wanted to make some of the shading darker, so I used a bit of charcoal in some places to try and achieve that. I don’t remember if it came out like I wanted to, but regardless of how it turned out, I ended up blending it all together, so the shading would look more natural and not so “drawn” although I couldn’t get rid of that look entirely.

Bust
Pencil on paper
October 16, 2024

This was an academic project where we were tasked to accurately draw a ceramic bust of a generic head. I believe I had more fun with this piece compared to the Self Portrait. Part of it was because I didn’t like looking at my own face so much, but most of it is probably because I prefer to draw more inanimate objects rather than people. It was also easy to see the exact areas where the light and shadows hit the bust there compared to the inconsistency of a real person, at least in my perspective. This was all done in pencil, with the lighter lead used first so that I could darken in the shading later on as I was finishing up the piece. Maybe this could be seen as a “simple” assignment, but I’m proud with how this came out compared to other similar projects.