A Birthday Retrospective

I'm dusting off my oil paints because I'm going to need to create a piece for a friend on a fabric surface later this year, and that excludes the use of colored pencils (which I manage to incorporate somewhere in a large percentage of my works). I brought my oil paints when I moved to Florida (taking up a decent percentage of my limited suitcase space) and used them once to do a plein air palette knife painting of the garden before giving up as a lot of the tubes were stuck closed and I had trouble finding the right size jar for a DIY brush cleaner. In the intervening months, I managed to loose my pad of canvas paper, so I'm rapidly progressing through a pack of canvas boards and will need to come up with a long-term plan. Because the purpose of this series is to build up my comfort with the medium, I have been following the design employed by my Painting 1 professor for our final project - printing out photos and then tracing them onto my surface differentiating each area into patches of highlights, mid-tones, and shadows (basically creating a sort of paint-by-numbers outline); he used it for the purpose of focusing attention on the technique of painting for those students taking the class as their single art elective, but it feels appropriate for my current endeavor as well. To keep things interesting, I still managed to cut off part of my dad's nose (though that may have been the fault of my not having fine enough brushes at first) and somehow put his eye too close to the edge of his face, so I got some experience with trying to cover over and re-work things. I started with a portrait of my Dad because when I sat down to start the project, I realized it was his birthday, and so decided to do something to commemorate him. I actually made a portrait for him ten years ago - it was technically turned in for a school assignment, but it was right around his birthday, and he hung it on the wall next to his desk. Each image showcases something he loved - the first piece of him barefoot skiing was dynamic and fun (we had a speedboat for several years and would go water skiing as a family) and was intentionally stylized, and the recent painting highlights his favorite sports team, the Gators, because I thought it would give me a good opportunity to play around with colors, and it technically shows half of the logo of his favorite band, They Might Be Giants, on the front of his baseball cap (I did edit out a camera strap around his torso as I wanted to be able to read the whole shirt).