Fellow Artists – FAQ’s

In the beginning of the process, when I start to block in the big areas I'm using two slanted pastel blenders. The brushes are in size 2 and 12 from Da Vinci. At a later stage, when there is much paint on the paper I use my fingers only. I have tried allot of different blenders, but somehow I always end up in using my fingers as that feels most natural to me.

The oil color brand I use is Winsor & Newton Artists. The "brown" color I'm sometimes using to sketch up the subjects with is Burnt Sienna. But you can use what ever color you are comfortable with, like Raw Umber or Ivory black. I use Ivory black quite allot too. You can also combine colors for sketches, like Raw Umber and Ivory black. The colors are mixed with allot of Turpentine.

When I started out to paint professionally I didn't have a clue what was waiting around the corner. When thinking back, I'm wondering why my hair isn't grey yet! My opinion is that I'm still not where I would like to be and I know I still have a long way to go. A big failure I did was to go internationally right away, everyone should start to get known locally first.

To do a career as an artist of any kind is very difficult, no matter in which country you are located. As a matter of fact, living in nordic countries as I do myself makes it a bit easier. Why do I think that? Well, it's because there is no big competition among portrait artists, especially when it comes to creating portraits of pets. A big problem is that people here don't trust anyone, which makes it hard to sell services online. One other issue is that people don't even think about searching for something like pet portraits in search engines. To sell services, we have to market ourselves offline in order to make them visit us online.

It takes around 10 years of very hard work for a artist to "make it". By that I don't only mean painting or pursuing better painting skills. I mean working hard with marketing and creating a SEO friendly website. The only thing I have had time to do so far is creating a website which can be found in major Search engines, and that's since 2006 when I decided to paint portraits professionally. All commissions I get right now is through my website only. What I will do next when it comes to marketing is a big question, I do have many ideas but didn't try anything out just yet.

I used to work as a web designer professionally, so I created my website from scratch. This means; first I created the design exactly how I wanted the website to look in Photoshop, a PSD image in many layers. After that I puzzled the site together in HTML and CSS. I used Dreamweaver to help me out with the visual as I'm working, but I'm also doing allot of coding myself because I want it to be clean. I'm using div tags for the website template because it loads faster than tables do.

The "Work in Progress" Blog (wordpress) have the same template (theme) and is also done by myself. I'm very fastidious when it comes to design and I want everything to look exactly how I imagined it to be. One pixel wrong, could make me stay up at night :). That's probably not normal, I know...

I'm also using some coding made by others on the website, things like the slider on top of each page. That one I'm using is called Nivo slider and can be edited to suit your needs. More about my website can be read about here : new website 2011

That is a good question! I love oil paint and it's my favorite medium next to pastel. Oil is also a very popular medium among art lovers and buyers, simply one of the easiest mediums to sell. Oil was frequently used by the old masters who created all beautiful masterpieces, many artists both admire and study old masterpieces.

I love to paint with oil because of what can be achieved with it, but also because of the buttery feel the paint has. It takes some time for the oil paint to dry which is great when I want to keep the paint "open" and I don't have to worry about if it's too dry the next day or not. Oil is also a great medium for painting in many layers and that is the painting technique I use.

Actually I have been thinking about writing a simple pastel tutorial and add it to my Art Article section soon. I'm going to do that as I'm painting the next dog portrait. Unfortunately I don't have any tutorials for sale yet.

I wouldn't recommend any other paper than UART for detailed work and Sennelier for sketches. There are two other sanded papers that I know of; Wallis and Fisher 400. For a start you can try a hight quality Fine Art velour paper like Hahnemuhle. My first and only portrait created on velour paper is the papillion pet portrait. It's a great looking portrait, but it was very hard to achieve what I wanted on that paper. I buy my art supplies online too ( some of them ), since they don't sell all supplies I need here in Sweden.

Painting fur: It is not the stroke that makes a hair, it is the dark color around it. First you have to create depth and a good base, then paint both dark and light strokes in order to make the fur look realistic. After this is done, you will probably need to go through the same process in several layers.

Painting layers: In oil you need to work from dark to light. This doesn't mean you can't add darker colors with each layer, it is something you still need to do in order to create depth. The tiniest details at the end of the painting process are usually the lightest ones. The first layers can cover the previous one, but as you are progressing and the painting is starting to take it's shape, you can't cover everything you have done before. Only add the details and colors you need. Always work from thin to thick paint when painting with oils.

I do have a tutorial written on my website. A step by step guide about how I paint a German Shepherd. Read the oil painting tutorial here >

When drawing detailed I usually use a method called negative drawing. First I'm drawing the darkest areas, leaving the lightest out and then drawing all the values in between. That method is preferred by many pencil artists.

The paper makes a big difference. The choice of paper is individual and the only way to know which paper suits you best, is to try it out. The paper should be thick and really white for graphite work in my opinion. I use the Fabriano 5 for my pencil drawings, both sketchy and detailed portraits.