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Daily Deviation

Today marks a historic occasion in the history of my artistic and creative career!

My painting “Gill the Queen of Fishes” has been officially recognised today as rather good over on deviantART and awarded a daily deviation. if you haven’t seen the picture, it can be seen here

I shall post the accompanying poem here, as I reckon it needs more exposure. It took me at least 2 hours to write that!

At the top of a hill, in a house on the cliff
Overlooking the vast sapphire sea
Lived a lady called Gill
Regarded still, as barmy as could be

For it was Gillian Finney’s greatest wish
To own one of every single fish
The fat, the thin, the square, the big, the really small
Even those shaped like a dish, the crazy lady wanted all!

Come rain or shine or storm or hail she’d sit beside the sea
With a butterfly net getting rather wet and then go home for tea
Her catch she’d place in tanks of every shape and every size
The poor souls that she’d caught before would end up in fish pies.

One successful sunny day she caught a massive whale
She rolled her sleeves up, held on tight and dragged him by the tail
When she reached her house atop the hill and in his tank he went
She was far too tired to notice that that the floor had somewhat bent

That night while reading anglers weekly she heard a curious creak
As the water soaked her slippers she realised a leak
Had sprung up in the largest tank and now the glass was cracking
A blast of water later and poor gill was soon sent packing

Cascading down with Gill came every fish and every tank
And as she hit the water neath the cliff and promptly sank
Ironically her thoughts took on a slightly new direction,
That maybe she could now
Somehow
Be part of whale’s collection?

You can also buy a signed print of the artwork on my shop page, should you require one.

Crazytown

Today I present a collaborative piece by myself and my sister Ellie (aged 7) I have to say, it’s one of my better efforts.

Crazytown

It’s refreshing to work so directly with another artist, you get a wonderful mix of influences and approaches within the single piece. It was a hell of a lot of fun to do too, I reccommend all those with a younger sibling seek thier artistic expertise at some point.

The piece itself (titled Crazytown) is mixed media; ink, oil pastel and melted crayons. A1 in size on brown paper.

How to make a Children’s book

Once again that time has come when the frantic dash to get all my projects finished for uni is over. Another year, another £3000. Still I can’t complain, the poor buggers starting next year will have to pay £9000 so by comparison my university education is a bargain!

So what have I learned this year? I’ve learned to always allow half a day to get things printed when deadlines are close and I’ve also learned how to make a Children’s book. I’d love to be a Children’s book illustrator, its the perfect job for spending all your time painting bizarre colourful illustrations of fantastical stuff. My kind of thing basically.

The basic thumbnail for pages 5-6

Our final uni project of the year was a brief taken from the Macmillan Children’s book prize; to illustrate a children’s book. That meant pencil sketches of every page including cover and end-pages along with 4 full colour completed double page spreads. A lot of work for the short time we had. nonetheless, I had a damn good go!

The first thing you need to illustrate a kid’s book, is a kid’s story, so I wrote one. It was loosely based on my rather spoiled little sister and was titled “Princess Bratt’s birthday”.

The pencil sketches for pages 5-6

The next step was to come up with thumbnails for every page, so I knew how to approach the pencil sketches and where to position the text and all the compositional elements. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the process since it’s the foundation you build the rest of your artwork on and requires the most thought and planning. I had of redo several of them before I was happy with the flow.

Stage three, pencilling. This is where I spent a lot of time wondering why I wrote the daft story I did and doing my best to draw lots of stuff clearly enough to be interpreted visually by the potential publisher. It was easier than the thumbnails but a lot slower to do. You can see on the sketch the rough boxes where I’ve left space for the text. When I came to actually adding the text I found I’d left more space than I needed. It occurs to me that it would have been smarter if I’d mapped out the text on the computer after the thumbnail stage so I could see exactly how much space I’d need. Still, I’ll remember next time.Ponies

The final image without the text is above. The painting stage was all done in photoshop with custom brushes.

The Long Process

I’ve just finished my latest piece of personal work; The long Voyage, and its up in the gallery for all to see: here

On the left here you can see the process behind the image. I really wanted to do one with another with an airship in, preferably a more peaceful scenario than my airship battle picture.

The final artwork is a fair bit different to the initial sketch as my paintings so often are. I tend to paint things on different layers so I can move them about a bit and easily modify stuff. This of course means that because I can; I do. I started by blocking in the rough image in blues and greens to create a cold high atmosphere feel before deciding later I preferred the look of a warmer colour scheme even if it makes less sense, do what looks better I reckon, its fantasy art after all.

You may be able to tell I decided to scrap the airship halfway through and come up with a better design. I also wanted to ensure I got the perspective right, since I’ve got such extreme distances in the image. To do this I created a very basic airship design in Google sketchup (which I thoroughly recommend as a tool for artists) and then positioned it in the angle I wanted for the airship in my painting, before screen-shooting it and painting over it in photoshop.

Once I was sure I had the perspective and proportions of the ship right, I was free to paint all the details onto it and and work with the rest of the image. You can see the changes I made to the background in the final two images.

Nostalgia is a pain in the arse.

This collection of heads was drawn just last week to consecrate the beginning of a shiny new sketchbook. I just felt like drawing something, and so I went into autopilot and started drawing a head, it occurred to me that I’d unthinkingly drawn one of the characters from my old webcomic; The Box.

Since I’d already drawn the first one I decided I may as well draw all the others. The fact that I’d then gone and drawn all my old characters made me wish that I could start the old comic back up, after I suddenly dropped it midway through last year.

Technically I can start it back up, there’s almost nothing stopping me. Of course the problem is that I never really liked making the comic, and I never had the time to do it. One single (often sub-standard) comic page would take me an entire days work, which I could have devoted to all sorts of other things I’d rather do. I did however enjoy the reader’s interest in the story and the feeling of creating a whole ongoing fictional world to share. Comics are much more involving than an illustration, readers get attached to the characters and the places, and feel much more strongly than they would about a single piece of artwork. It was a great feeling, but It just wasn’t a strong enough drive to spend all that time on something I didn’t want to do. Instant gratification generation syndrome maybe?

The temptation is always there though, to go back and start again, or to redo something you’ve already done that you enjoyed, even it won’t benefit you in the long run or you know that you’ll get sick of it fairly sharpish. Video games are a great example of this. I absolutely adore the video game Morrowind, I played it when I was a kid and loved how original and open it was, especially the setting and the art design. I love it so much that I decided to play it again. I spent half an hour installing it, 2 hours playing it, 2 hours adding mods to it, and then I stopped and didn’t play it again. Because it’s shit.

Which is what I’m getting at, nostalgia is all very well so long as you ignore it. It so often turns out that the things you once thought were brilliant suddenly look upon re-examination; a bit disappointing. Time gets wasted and your naive wistful memories of something are corrupted by horrible facts. Even Banana Man is awful!? When did that happen? Maybe I’m simply getting more cynical as I get older, I do still love Morrowind, but that combat system is inexcusable.

Asian Dragon

Since posting a selection of my old uni work several days ago I’ve been playing around with the charcoal dragon image and have now coloured it and done it up in photoshop.

This isn’t my usual method of working, but I’m happy with how it’s worked out considering I was just experimenting. It didn’t take very long either, which I suppose is one the benefits of having a sketch that you stick with from start to finish. I never do that usually.

Originally I thought of it more as a Chinese influenced dragon, but since I put that big red circle there to add to the composition I may have to declare it Japanese.

Train station faces

I recently completed this page in my sketchbook of people I’ve drawn while waiting around for more important things to happen. A lot of them were drawn in train stations, where you always get a lot of opportunity to draw weird and wonderful people. Train journeys are also a pretty good provider of inspiration, where you get the rare opportunity to draw people who are generally guaranteed to sit still for a while.

The big problem with train journeys is that half the people are facing the other way, or obscured by the people and chairs in front, and since one is also expected to sit still it makes it hard to get a good look at the inevitable nutter with the fascinating moustache who’s just come in and sat at the other end of the carriage.

Another problem is that people on trains often notice you drawing them, (which no one is ever comfortable with) since you’re generally facing each other. A cunning way to avoid this is to draw their reflection in the windows, sadly they usually notice that as well.

A small taste of uni work

One more year has passed and so too has one more semester at uni. Some projects were good, some were bad, many were extremely time consuming. However, the work I’m showing off in this post is but a small glimpse of one of the more enjoyable projects. More enjoyable no doubt because I had the opportunity to slip lots of fantasy art into it!

The general gist of the project was to start with one drawing in one medium and then produce the next drawing (which had to relate to the first via word association) in a different medium. It was an interesting challenge, I started with platypus and ended with alien, as I am wont to do. I suspect this word association drawing game would also make for pretty good practice in future, If I get round to it.

Latest painting complete!

I’ve updated my gallery to include my newly completed cover illustration for the players guide of the yet-to-be-released rpg “Ellandria” I’d been working on it for a long time now, and it feels very good to finally have it completed.

I’ve posted some work in progress shots of the illustration on the left. The first wip is the top left and the newest is the bottom right. As you can see I painted most of the image in black and white first then added colour later. It’s an approach I don’t like very much I’ve decided since it complicates things later rather than simplifies them.

It shows the moment a group of ambushed soldiers fighting a “Feran” (a giant feral humanoid) start to grasp the upper hand. You can see the final picture by following this link

Also, if you look very closely you may be able to see a small cats face hidden in the picture, courtesy of my Auntie.

Imagine Fx Dvd

Three of my paintings have recently been featured on the DVD of issue 63 of Imagine FX magazine. To anyone who’s found their way to my site through that route; hello and welcome! I’ve even posted a screen shot for those of you who can’t contain their excitement until they get back from the newsagent’s.

For anyone with an interest in fantasy art I suggest you check it out, and not just because I’m in it of course, hehe. Of course they do have a website which has most of the stuff from the magazine in, and it is a lot cheaper…