Jon Snows Nothing (oil portrait)

How to paint cute men and puppies, the key to oil painting is to learn everything you can about oil paints, then just practice about ten years and you’ should be good to start trying. So obviously I was scared to re-unite with oil paints after the long pause in any other way that to try to remember what I used to know and try a couple of portraits. This is the second portrait painted just for fun and during this one I remembered how important it is to select (or have) a set of brushes that works in your hand, so you might have to modify them a bit or use the wrong ones. So far, both trial paintings have been useful in different ways, even though they look a lot alike.

My glorious set of new paints, very proud.

First thing I always want to do is to spend a lot of time sketching the portrait, even if it seems like a waste of time because it will all get painted over right away. To avoid getting everything dusty with pencil lines, sketch on a different paper first I guess.

I thought a mistake here was to make the flyaway locks and hairs before the background, but not really, if your background is very simple, you can blend it pretty nicely and add layers. 

I figured since it was so obvious what I was doing (making a portrait of Kit Harington is the easiest choice if you’re going for cute) I though I’d like to overkill it and add a puppy, and overkill it twice – adding the magical puppy dire wolf who saves everyone.  

 

Here is the final version of the portrait painting of  Jon Snow and Ghost the wolf. I had a lot of fun painting it and it made me remember that oil paints are really special.