"Julia" (oil on stretched linen; 10" x 8") gift

gift

This beautiful young lady is my daughter's best friend since middle school.  She is a straight-A student and an accomplished pianist and artist, which makes her choice of college major difficult.  For now, she will be an "arts and sciences" major at the University of Virginia.  Hopefully, the two girls will share a dorm room.  The portrait is my graduation present for Julia, as she embarks on her higher education and adulthood.  I wish you my very best!

"Birthday Cake" (oil on stretched canvas; 14" x 11") nfs

nfs

I don't know why, but I have always been shy about painting myself.  But as a practice, because only practice makes perfect and I need models, I decided to paint a self-portrait, using a photo my daughter took on my last birthday.  I am looking at a candle-lit chocolate cake.  Don't I look happy?

The hardest part was naturally the mouth, as the famous John Singer Sargent said, a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth!  I am not sure whether it is exactly me, but it must be close enough.  All the people who saw it knew immediately that it was a self-portrait.  Below are some of the step-by-step pictures.