Not your average Bonfire Night

As the large firework displays were just beginning over Swindon, Suzanne and I went up to Barbury Castle to get a spectacular and rather chilly panoramic. Barbury is what's left of a large Iron Age hill fort the impressive ground works are still there which includes a perimeter ditch roughly 25ft deep so making our way round that was a bit hairy in the dark however our trusty torch and flask saved the day - or rather the night.

Apologies for my poor photography. Left is a blurry view of the bonfire in the next field, Right is an even more blurry Swindon void of fireworks because I've never managed to time a photograph well. Unfortunately you can't see the smoke accumulating from the many fires lying low over the town which is a shame because it gave an ethereal quality to the view.

The blueprint for an heroic leader.

 

Above is a single page illustration I completed for Management Today that was published last month. The concept was reasonably straightforward but even so my small bit of training in technical drawing helped immensely, without it who knows how the piece would have turned out?

I was also asked to supply a couple of spot illustrations based on two well known business leaders. Fortunately for Tony Hayward his annotations didn't come from my pen. I don't think the feature would have made the print otherwise ;-)

  As they are meant to be seen.

Soon I'm hoping to put up the most recent bit of work I did for the same magazine. Mostly black and white and ridiculously detailed - my eyes are still trying to re-adjust.

Ainulindale in colour

I've been adding oil colour to the under-painting of 'Ainulindale' in-between other work, despite the slow progress it's finally coming together. Tomorrow I shall move onto the foliage highlights and then the faces can be added when the paint is touch dry.

Rockwell originals at the Dulwich Gallery!

This is incredible! For the first time in the UK you will be able to see in the flesh original Saturday Evening Post covers, advertisements and illustrations by Norman Rockwell. If you don't know who Rockwell is visit google images now.

The exhibition is being held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London between 15th December - 27 March 2011, for more information click here.

Further development on 'Ainulindale'

 
For the moment I've had to put this on the back burner but that doesn't stop me from blogging about it. Above you can see my final drawing for 'Ainulindale' (see previous post) which gives me more information to work with when I pull out my brushes. I have however decided to leave out the singing heads until the background is painted, then I can overlay them which will hopefully add to their transparency.

The top image is a few hours in advance from the final drawing. Here I have added burnt sienna and ultramarine acrylic to give me an under-painting that has warm and cool areas.

After the paint dried I diluted a marvin acrylic medium into a milky consistency and began priming paper with a soft hake brush, sanding in-between four coats just to be on the safe side. When everything dried completely I ran some magic tape around the edges to keep them clean.

Recently I have actually been trawling the internet for information on mounting and priming paper for oils. There are useful tips and videos out there but so far I haven't found anything on stretching paper with gum tape and then priming it - the advantage being the finished oil would just be on a sheet of watercolour paper without any heavy board attached. That means they are easy to store and very lightweight even with a frame because you don't need the glass! It would be strange to think nobody else has tried this before but who knows maybe I've just invented a new priming technique although I seriously doubt it.

Scrap that reverse it... or sometimes it's best to realise your mistakes

In previous posts I've shown some WIPs for an oil painting I have been working on. Unfortunately my oil painting skills aren't up to scratch and I've made a complete hash of it, I might just have to install a 'gallery flambeau' (check James Gurney's imaginative realism). So after putting that aside with a bin liner wrapped around it I've attempted a re-run on the concept and come up with this sketch. Fortunately this has been approved by my friends who will be receiving the final artwork so I can now get on with the final drawing.

To try to explain the composition it is taken from the 'Ainulindale' chapter in Tolkien's 'Silmarillion' where the world is created through song. I have tried to focus more on the environments this time but also kept with the singing characters. Also the circular composition is designed to be hung any which way and evoke a pulse of sound spreading from the center.

Legal Business 100

Above are the recent editorial illustrations I did for Legal Business magazine called 'Legal Business 100'. The funfair brief was to contain certain elements to related to the performance of legal companies over the past year. I'm not even going to pretend I know who these people are on the rides I just had to make sure each person was in the correct place and every ride didn't encroach on the text, gutter and bleed. It was a challenge especially when I started work on the DPS in a small lake district village without any WiFi available.

Got there in the end though... hope you like it.

Work In Progress

I've been struggling with this oil painting in-between other work but will keep plodding away.

Ezmerelda drives again...

I wanted to try out mounting paper on board for oil painting and so used that as an excuse to paint this for Suzanne. The vehicle in question is her old camper van 'Ezmerelda' (that's how Suzanne likes to spell it) which now resides in a field next to her engine which is on a wooden palette. Despite this Ezmerelda will always be seen as Suzanne's ticket to the open road, even if it did spend most of the time parked on the kerb steaming.

Sir Gawain skirting a mountainside

Something for my friends... I had a lot of fun playing with inks on this one.