Creed Bratton.

Creed Bratton from The Office is one of the best characters. He's a true psychopath. My friend, Luke, asked me to paint a portrait of Creed for his wife, Annie. She's a huge fan of the show and he wanted this great quote about worms on there, too. Creed has a lot of great quotes to pick from, but this is a great one. Check him out!

Pet Portraits.

I had the honor of doing some pet portraits in December for some friends AND you get a bonus post that Matt Benyo did (of his dogs) for his dad. Matt is on the verge of something huge. I did a stylized kind of old school Chelsea portrait of some dogs and a realistic rendering of my friend's dog. It was a great time. Looking for pet portraits? I'm your gal (or Matt is your guy). Would love to do more in the future!

Max & Eleanor.

Matt and I are good friends with one of his former teachers, Amanda. Well, earlier in December, her husband reached out to me about creating a couple of portraits of their kids for her for Christmas and I was so excited to do it. She messaged me on Christmas and told me she ugly cried for 20 minutes and I don't enjoy seeing people cry, but when it's out of pure joy, it's a great feeling. Check them out below!

Hanson.

For Christmas, a coworker and friend asked me to create a Hanson piece for his wife (also a coworker). She's a huge Hanson fan and wanted to incorporate that love in with their love of Christmas. It was a real challenge, but it was a lot of fun to do! Matt did the glitter scarf as an homage to their album, Finally It's Christmas.

Old St. Nick.

When I was in college, one of our assignments sophomore year of college was to recreate a master painting using a limited color palette. We are always told that if you want to learn how to paint, you paint like the masters. It was even more challenging because you had a limited color palette which means you had 5 colors to try to make all of the colors you saw. Only a true master of color and paint can pull this off well. I chose Old St. Nick by N.C. Wyeth in 2007.

When you have a color palette, the choice of paints used determines a lot. With limited color palettes you can choose a variety of color schemes, but for this, I went with a warm color palette meaning that all of the colors had reds as their base.

I recently came across the painting in an old sketchbook and I thought to myself I wanted to give it another try. Surely I had to have improved in 11 years. I struggled and painted for 7 hours spread out over two days. At one point, I wanted to give up, but Matt urged me to keep going and I persisted. Have to say, I have majorly improved. There's an image below of the two paintings side by side and you can really see the progression.

If you're not constantly getting better and learning more, you're plateauing. You should always be working harder to be getting better. I hope that in another 11 years, I am able to make this painting look identical to the original. I used acrylic paint. Click to enlarge to check out details! Merry Christmas, everyone!

The Last of Disney!

This is the end of the Disney portrait series! 27 in all! I'm really happy with how these turned out. I bought a big set of acrylics to test out and used all of them on this series. I think it was a great experiment. My favorite is the poisoned apple.

More than half way there!

So far, the most popular Disney painting I have done is the last one here, THE HATBOX GHOST! I am going to have to do a spin off and do a bunch of paintings from The Haunted Mansion. Anyway, here are a bunch more Disney paintings!

More Disney!

The Disney theme continues! I think I am just going to post them in 6's. This is the next set. Pua, the little pig in the bottom middle, is one of my absolute favorites. There's a nice, eclectic mix here. I like the glitter a lot. It really makes these pieces.

Disney.

I've started a Disney series and each day I'm posting a different one. It's pretty neat because they're all in full color and have embossed glitter accents compliments of Matt Benyo. I'm really happy with them so far. There's a lot left to do and I have a long way to go, but here are the first 6.