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!