Oscar

This is a clever little boy, full of purpose and delight. It's a portrait commission that I've been working on for his grandmother. It's 16" x 20" oil on linen. He's one of three. His two sisters are here and here.

My original intent was to have all three portraits finished before our daughter's wedding last weekend, but I spent so much time shopping for shoes (just kidding, but not really --it's been a super busy summer) that I just couldn't squeeze out a big enough chunk of time to devote to it. This week, I finally had three days in a row, enough time to complete the sketch I had originally drawn for this about three months ago. The first day of painting went OK, but I ended up scraping off a large portion of what I had painted - many many hours worth of work. Yesterday I put in a FULL day - morning until bedtime - literally. The light was lousy at the end, well, it was full on night time, there was no light, even with all of the lights on in the studio, but I was making such good progress that I hated to quit. And then today.....another several hours of working with tiny brushes  and voila.

People ask me all the time how long it takes to paint something. This portrait started with several (at least three) photo shoots for reference, trips to the photo lab, several initial portrait sketches, one final loose sketch, and hours and hours of actual brush to canvas, plus all of the clean up and running back and forth to the store to buy art supplies. Suffice it to say, I work hard at this....and I LOVE it!