My Derek Jeter Painting - Part I

I wanted to do a different post and share with you a Derek Jeter painting that I recently finished. I always enjoyed art throughout school, but enjoyed it less and less in high school as I was being told what to draw. I didn’t like that. I wanted to draw or paint sports-scapes and not snowy landscapes. So I stopped doing art after 11^th grade and never touched it again through college. I started checking out some amazing artists’ websites – guys who focused on sports as their subjects. Then after seeing some inspiring painted baseball card sets, such as Diamond Kings and National Chicle, it gave me the itch again. I chose to paint a photo of Derek Jeter that I always really liked. It's a unique angle of Jeter's patented jump throw.

I have always been most comfortable working in acrylic, so I bought a 14x18 canvas art board and a small set of paints and a few brushes. I got these at a toy store, so I wasn’t working with hi-tech supplies. I don’t have room for a dedicated space in my tiny apartment, so I did this whole project on my kitchen counter.

I started by drawing grid boxes on the canvas (in pencil) so as to keep the drawing to scale. I would never survive without this method. This took probably an hour or so.

Next up, I did the background. I actually did the light blue sky and then the dark blue stadium at separate times but failed to document it. I decided to keep the background simple as opposed to making it as detailed as it was in the original photo.

Once that was mostly done, I started painting Jeter. I did the shoes first, and then his skin and the gray road uniform. I also added some darker gray to show the wrinkles in the pants and jersey and add some dimension.

My next step was to work on some of the details and shading. I added color to his number and belt, as well as additional tones of gray on his uniform.

After doing some minor touch ups, I was finished! I’m a perfectionist and am always critical of my work (not just artwork, but work in general), so I see a lot of blemishes when I look at this. I always will. But for not painting a picture in about 10 years, I think I did pretty well jumping back in. I’m most pleased with the shading on the back of Jeter’s head and his jersey. 

Here is a shot of my painting with the actual photo. I apologize to whatever photographer I stole this from.

I have yet to hang this in my apartment yet, but I'll do that soon. I'm not sure what my ultimate goal is, but I do want to do another one. Maybe one day I'll be good enough to commission a piece. Would be a nice side source of income, but that's not why I'm doing it right now.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll show how this painting could look as a baseball card in a popular set that everyone is going gaga for. Let’s see if I can hack it with the artists who do this for a living!