--If you would like to see all the posts from The Portrait Project click here!

--To submit your portrait read this, there's still plenty of time!

--In other unrelated news, here are gift guides for the beginning artist. Give the gift of being an artist!

I have some amazing submissions from The Portrait Project! Thank you!!!! Thank you for submitting!!! Keep them coming! I will be taking submissions until December 2nd! If you haven't already read the guide to submitting or don't know how to submit, click here. 

Last night I was thinking about this upcoming Thanksgiving. Alex and I are going to be in California with my family which is always wonderful. I have at least a hundred old, old paintings of mine down in my studio there at my parent's house, and I was in particular thinking about those painting last night. I'm excited to see them all again. They're just full of nostalgia and sentiment, and I'm just that kind of person that enjoys that sort of thing.

I started to laugh at the memory of some of those old paintings though. For example, "Cake Face" is a portrait I worked on for days, and as the name suggests, after so many layers of paint, poor technique (I was 12 years old) and a severely neglected photo reference, the portrait began to look more like a frosted cake than a portrait. Actually it's kind of terrifying.

Another painting there is a rooster in a loft part of a barn. Let's call it "Fan of Feathers." I had some photo reference, but I got very carried away with the roosters tail feathers that after a few days of work and one night painting very early into the morning the rooster's tail feathers made him look more like a white, majestic peacock sitting on a throne of golden strings than a rooster sitting on hay. Those tail feathers are full of pastel colors! And I'm pretty sure they take up more than 3/4 of the canvas. YIKES. 

I may be way too ahead of the gift giving season, but I just love Christmas and giving gifts so much that I am already preparing! (And maybe there's even a birthday coming up before then!?) Regardless, I want to share a few gift guides I put together with the beginner oil painter in mind.

When I was 8 years old I got an "artist's perfect Christmas" with a set of oil paint. It wasn't just a set of oil paints though, it was the gift that set me on a path to become an artist. It allowed me to be ambitiously creative. Now, a number of years later, it's more often than not that I get an email or phone call from someone who wants to start painting or has a child, friend, niece/nephew, spouse, or grandparent interested in art, but doesn't know quite where to start. Maybe this scenario sounds familiar even to you! I always get very excited to hear of these budding artists and want to do all I can to help foster those artistic dreams.