My first self-portrait.

This was done alla prima on a plywood board. It's supposed to look like me, but... it was my first attempt at a self-portrait, so I'm not too bummed it doesn't look much like me. At least I hope it doesn't...


Usually I start by drawing the contours of a character with black, then fill it with some nice colour, then add white to create light, to try and create some form for the picture. Finally, I add more black to sharpen the lines and to finish the shadows more carefully. If I'm feeling calm and patient, I can go on for hours, trying to get the shadows and the form just right, especially if I'm painting a portrait. If the curve of a cheek isn't exactly as it should be, the picture just won't do justice to the real person...

Since I painted on plywood, it was actually very easy to use the alla prima technique. The wood just soaks up all the paint very quickly, especially if you only add small amounts at a time, so it was easy to finish it in a few hours without a messy result. I wish I had more plywood boards, it keeps the paint perfectly moist yet not too wet. It's so easy to keep perfecting the contours and blending the shadows as subtly as possible. A whole another issue is whether the paint will peel off over time, since the oil has been absorbed into the wood...

It just occurred to me that the Simpsons have yellow skin colour, as well. A reference to the Simpsons was not what I was going after.

Soaring ambitions.

After a while, I knew I liked linear painting. Hugeously. Humongously. It is probably why I'm so fond of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, one of the internationally most famous artists in Finland in his time.

He visualized the national epic of Finland, Kalevala, in a completely original way. Here is an example, called Lemminkäisen äiti, depicting Lemminkäinen and his mother. Lemminkäinen was a kind of a tragic hero, who shot a swan and got thrown into the river of Tuonela (a kind of an underworld) by some lapplander, and his mother had to fish him out and put him back together. Poor guy was only doing what he was told by an evil woman, Louhi, who had promised Lemminkäinen the daughter of Pohjola as a bride.


Gallen- Kallela often used clear, dark outlines, and the paintings depicting stories from Kalevala were all painted like this. I'm not a huge fan of Gallen-Kallela's other works, even though they're interesting in their own right and skillfully done (the following is called Ad Astra, which means "towards the stars" or something like that):
His other works are either symbolist, or depict African scenery. I'm not that much into symbolism, and I'm not so crazy about Africa, either. It's the Kalevala pictures I like the most. The linear style was often combined with a realistic painting of the actual figures in the pictures, and that's what I nowadays always do without even thinking about it.

So here's one of my first attempts at linear painting. I was quite cautious about smudging the outlines with the inner colour.

The composition is pretty confusing, there's no perspective, and all the figures stare in different directions. The painting as a whole is hard to take in, so I've divided it in individual portraits.

This is supposed to be an Egyptian woman. I'm not sure if there's anything Egyptian to her features except the hairstyle, and perhaps the thick eyebrows (remember Elizabeth Taylor from Cleopatra?). However, I adore the combination of grass green, white and salmon.

This one's a guy with a crown and a princely hairdo. He looks pretty weird, even aside from the expression on his face. At this point, I knew the painting was going to be a mess.

This guy's the only one with a body. It looks horrible. Horrible.

I think I was going for a Greek profile here.

Hmm. Horrible.

This one I actually like. The colours, that is.

There are no words to describe these really... I'm glad I've come a long way since this painting.

Penile Landscape.

It is time to introduce the first ever oil painting I've done (actually the second one, but since the first one is missing...). I had just bought my oil colours, water soluble ones, and I was trying to get the knack of using them. Back then, I still imagined I could do landscapes.


It is easy enough to try and create effects of shadow and light using only one colour, red. I'm actually quite happy with how the back of the picture looks to be darker than the front. As a model, I used a black-and-white photo of a quarry somewhere, believe it or not. There was a floodlight around the middle of the photo, and I just tried to imitate the way everything was lighted by it.

I love the almost unmixed red streaks next to the purple overall colours. I suppose I had an idea of painting a landscape on some moon, or a lifeless exoplanet, with an ominous atmosphere to it. But don't ask me what I was thinking with the phallos symbol in the middle.

Ok, I found the original photo.


So I got this from a stock photography site, but they'll never notice... it's not like I'm putting it here to decorate my site or to earn with it. I'm not sure if it really is a quarry or not - but the tower, whatever it is, obviously became the phallos/Doric column in the painting... I'm quite fond of this photo. It looks like it could be from the Moon or something.