Sometime last year a very good friend of mine  Snala offered to lend me her entire collection of oil paints from her days in college. I had told her I was meaning to dabble with oils for a long time but the cost of getting started was one of the reasons I allowed myself to procrastinate further. The set was not just a box of paints, brushes and mediums but a gateway to a new horizon for me.

I discovered almost immediately that everything I had found frustrating with digital art in the last few years nearly disappeared as I played with the oil paints. That's not to say there wasn't a learning curve, there absolutely was/is, but I felt an exhilaration in painting that I had been missing recently in my digital work.

I've had an incredibly busy year between my day job, my work on The Leopard Sun, and a few other ventures I have scrambled to put together to hopefully start paving the way for financial stability, but doing small practice oil paintings like these in my downtime was a breath of fresh air!

These two also inspired a bigger project that will be coming together over the course of the year. I'm excited to work towards it and begin to hone my skills with oil paints! I'm currently wrapping up work on some outstanding commissions and am eager to get rolling with my scheme!

(The piece on the left was done as a birthday gift for my bestie  wickedsairah, the piece on the right was just for fun using an old sketch I had done years prior!)

details: 8x10 oval canvas + oil paints.