The Journey So Far
Growing up, I liked making art, but I wasn’t great at it as a kid (my mom would argue this heavily). I didn’t start taking art seriously until I was around 13. My dad showed me Naruto when I was 9, and from then until I was 19, I spent most of my free time reading manga and watching anime. It became a major artistic influence. You can even see my old (and, I think, horrible) art from when I was 13 and 14 on my old Instagram, @fireking_art.
I still love anime and manga, although I’ve been busy with college and life and haven’t kept up with much anymore (I’m like 50 chapters behind on One Piece). Anime and comics were my main artistic inspiration until I was 18 and in college, where I fell in love with the Old Masters and, eventually, oil painting.
In college, under the teaching of Jacqueline Gold, I was introduced to and studied Old Masters and more recent masters such as John Singer Sargent, Norman Rockwell, Caravaggio, Albrecht Dürer, and Rembrandt. I was fascinated by Sargent’s portraits, the stories Rockwell could tell in a single illustration, and the precision, hatching, and values of Dürer. I loved the darkness of Rembrandt and, especially, one of my top five painters, Caravaggio. I was drawn to the way darkness eats away at the edges and through the backgrounds of his paintings while light beautifully reveals the subjects, as well as his figures and complex scenes painted at a massive scale.
During this time, I first tried charcoal and immediately loved working with it—the softness, the mess, using a brush, and the depth of darkness I could achieve. It felt natural to use and made sense in my mind while working. My love for charcoal only grew as I learned techniques like the pickout method and developed a feel for building up darks and pulling out lights. During this period, I created "Head of Chrysès", "Life on the Table" and "St. Matthew and the Angel Caravaggio Study".
Working with charcoal allowed me to fully focus on values, and in my classes it was used as a stepping stone toward colored illustration and painting. After learning values, we learned how to mix colors using a limited primary palette of gouache, the three primaries, white, and black. This was my first time painting with anything other than watercolor. I enjoyed mixing colors and learning color theory, and I learned a lot simply by doing and making mistakes. At first, mixing colors was mostly trial and error. Learning how to balance value, hue, and saturation was a challenge, but I enjoyed it.
I liked gouache and worked with it for a while, but there were aspects of it that annoyed me. Gouache dries really fast, making wet-on-wet painting difficult, and its color and value can shift as it dries. I also liked using thick gouache, but if it gets too thick, it can crack. While I still enjoy working with gouache, and it helped prepare me for oils, these frustrations eventually pushed me toward oil painting. The idea of paint staying wet and workable for hours or even days, and being able to lay it on thick like the Impressionist painters I was beginning to admire really appealed to me. Around this time, I started diving into Monet and Van Gogh. Their thick paint and expressive use of color pulled me in.
I started using oils in the summer and fall of 2025, beginning with still lifes and studies from photos. While those helped, I found that studying other painters and trying to get into their minds taught me even more. I began studying and making studies from great landscape painters, especially Edgar Payne and Albert Bierstadt. Around this time, and even a little before getting into oils, I also started going out and painting on location, working plein air. I would hike or drive somewhere that caught my attention, find a spot, hang out there, and paint for a few hours. Doing this felt amazing! I felt like a real painter, outside painting directly from the world like the painters I admired had done.
Working on location also made me a better painter. I had to compose my own paintings while everything around me was changing: people moving, shadows shifting, and the sun constantly changing. Being inside the scene while painting it, and having my time limited by nature, forces me to work more instinctively. I don’t second-guess myself as much. Instead, I try to capture the feeling of the place: listening to nature, noticing what I find beautiful, and emphasizing those things in the painting. My best example of this so far is "Pacific Beach Sunset Plein Air". I try to film my outings and post them on my Instagram so go check it out for some little painting vlogs!
