divided by blue

For some time now, my painting teacher has been encouraging me to try oil paints. Since I started taking painting classes four years ago, I have exclusively painted with acrylic. Apart from some failed attempts in my youth, I have never done anything with oil paint.

In my youth, I was gifted a box set of Van Gogh oil paints for a series of drawings I created for my school (I painted with gouache back then). It was a lovely gesture, and I appreciated enormously this gift they gave me. Sadly, I didn’t have a painting teacher who could advise me, and YouTube didn’t exist yet. So I bought a book and tried it on my own. The book provided a wealth of information - too much information, in fact, for someone who knew nothing about it. It felt lost. I tried a few things, but didn’t use the right medium and techniques. It didn’t work out. I put the paints in a box and never touched them again.

Fast forward to 2025, when I’m at the end of my thirties. I’m not going to lie, the failed attempts in my youth trying out oil paint left a bad impression on me, that the medium was hard to use, that it wasn’t anything for me. It took me months of gentle encouragement from my teacher to finally give in and try it again. I searched for the old oil paints everywhere, but couldn’t find them. So I bought new ones (and then a week after my purchase, I found them again :) )

I decided to paint this portrait of Spanish Actress Natalia Sánchez (Begoña in Sueños de Libertad). It’s mostly painted wet in wet, ‘alla prima’, on a small canvas board. I painted without a medium, only with a bit of linseed oil.




I must say that this experience was very positive. I felt relaxed working on it. Thanks to the slow dry speed, you have more time to blend colors. The face was therefore a lot easier to get right. The hair, however, felt more challenging to do than acrylics. The fast drying speed of acrylics actually helps with hair, as you can wait till a layer is dry to add some individual hairs here and there.

I’m looking forward to doing another one of these. I set up a charcoal drawing on a larger canvas board to start painting on Monday in the painting course.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: In what way has your art/writing changed over the years?

I’m going to answer that for my art.

I mainly made fantasy gouache paintings and pencil/pen drawings from imagination in my youth. Years later, when I was in college, I dropped the fantasy theme and switched from gouache to acrylic, but pen drawings were still part of what I did. I also experimented with watercolor and ZIG Art & Graphic Twin brush pens. Later, I kept the pen (sometimes fineliner) drawings, combined with their digital equivalents, and continued exploring acrylics. Most recently, I’ve been trying to become familiar with oil painting and rekindled my love for pencil drawings.

Over the years, my love of pen/fine-liner drawings has remained, and I’m looking to experiment to make better paintings. Fan art came and went in my journey, from being very present in my youth to almost absent and, most recently, once again taking a vital place in my art journey.

Since the end of last year, I’ve started making pencil drawings again. Quick things, mostly, at first. But then I started to make a few quick portraits of characters of the Spanish telenovella I was watching Sueños De Libertad. Now, drawing faces is something I've struggled with for quite some time. I became better at it when studying the Loomis method some time ago, but still. It was always a hit or miss. And so were the first fan portraits I made of these characters last year. However, I started doing them more regularly, and they became better. I decided to post them online in the fandom of this telenovela. The first ones were not particularly good, but I started getting better. I saw other fan artists doing weekly drawings, posted on Saturday or Sunday, and I decided to join in. For some three months now I’ve been making a weekly fan drawing. Today I finished and posted this one:




All the drawings are posted on Twitter as well as on my fan art Instagram account.

I usually search/make a screenshot I like of this couple and try to make a nice black and white pencil drawing of it. Doing this weekly for three months has permitted me to improve my pencil skills and given me an insight into how many hours a drawing like this takes to complete. Both are valuable. At the moment, I’m seeing this fan work as a place in which I can make decisions on how I want to improve/ grow. In that regard, I’d like to do two things. I’d like to try to make such portraits in acrylic. I’ve already done one in black and white last year, and it turned out well. Another way I wish to take this, is that I want to be able to construct scenes of my own with these characters, instead of only relying on a screenshot. I’ve seen fan artists do this. They construct a pose with a setting for a couple they like, then use corresponding pictures/screenshots of the character’s faces to be able to draw them with a good likeness. This takes considerable skill, and I’m going to have to practise and learn a lot to be able to do this.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Do you draw original art, fan art, or both?

I draw both. I go through periods where I mostly draw original art (pen drawings and acrylic paintings), but for the past few months, I’ve mostly made fan art. These are pencil drawings of my current favorite lesbian ship, Mafin (Sueños De Libertad).

In many ways, this fan art has had a positive effect on my artistic practice as a whole. I felt that I didn’t feel much connection anymore with my original art, and making fan drawings of a couple I love so much has helped me reconnect with my artistic work. It also let me explore a medium (pencil drawings) that I’ve abandoned since my youth and rediscover it again.

I’ve been thinking of expanding it and maybe starting to make acrylic fan art paintings. I want to explore mediums in fan art that I usually only use for original art, but now try to use them in another way. This should be a fun experience.