Alex Morgan Celebration Size:  51 x 40.5 cm (20 x 16 in) Medium:  Acrylic Support:  Stretched canvas Notes:  Painting knives This is a painting that embraced so many interests: my lifelong love of women's sports, painting with knives, and echoing the styles I liked when I was growing up. While my foundation leans more to the realism side of representational art, I also harbor a desire to wield painting knives with bold colors to also feed the impressionistic musae of my inspiration. I also love it when I can feed my women-sports-loving side that I've long been so passionate about. This painting is almost exclusively knife work with just a few lines of brushwork to deal with details too fine for blades. It's also mostly heavy body acrylics which, as I've outlined elsewhere, dry so quickly on my palette that I'm pushed to paint quickly and with commitment. Fun times. Unfortunately, practice is about all I can claim with this image as I don't have the rights to the reference photo to do more. Sadly, most sports photos are rights managed (often with no mention of artist reproduction licensing -- grrrr), and as a result, I don't have nearly the access I'd like to do more of these (hey...artist gotta try to make a living). So, as much as I enjoy the general subject matter, this is going to be an uncommon appearance -- hopefully just for now. It was fun, and since I can't sell it or anything, I actually get to enjoy it hanging on my own walls. (Disclaimer: Neither Alex Morgan, US Soccer, nor the original photographer, have any connection or endorsement with this [...]

Taking Measure Size:  35.5 x 28 mm (14 x 11 in) Medium:  Acrylic Support:  Gessobord Notes:  Painting knives My previous painting knife work left me unsatisfied as it was: 1) too small; 2) didn't feature female sports or athletes. Seeking to correct both of those strikes, I found a nice reference image on Pixabay and then got in touch with my inner Neiman. Overall, this amazingly straightforward painting was very satisfying. This image and many other images by CJ Carter are ready for purchase in a variety of formats: prints, canvas prints, phone cases, and so much more. Help support this site and the artist by dropping by the store and getting gifts for yourself, for family, and friends.

Male Goalkeeper for the Save Size:  20.5 x 15 cm (8 x 6 in) Medium:  Acrylic Support:  Gessobord Notes:  Painted with knives I mentioned to my brother that I had a hankering to commit some art with a palette knife, but I was loathe to use so much paint and that the Open Acrylics I use were unsuitable in any case. He surprised me on my birthday with a cache of heavy body acrylics, a craft store palette knife assortment, and a pack of 6x8 gessobord (Ampersand, of course, given the spelling). Now it was up to me. When I got a chance to return to the easel, I figured I'd give it a go. It had been a very long time since I'd wielded a painting knife with wild abandon. There were other challenges: some colors I was unfamiliar with, knives that were larger than the board was happy with, and a board that was undersized for the subject. In other words: this was going to be fun. I figured something to honor the Men's World Cup that was starting at about the same time as this painting would be good. So, football it was. Since I was usually a keeper, I wanted that as the subject. Unfortunately, I don't have any rights to @hopesolo images (the GOAT GK in the women's game IMO), so it was off to Pixabay to find something. Sadly, no good female GK shots. Except for some initial brushwork to set my lines, this was entirely done with the paints, knives, and board gifted to me. Considering the long layoff and the aforementioned challenges -- and that I made up the background on [...]