A Pale View of Hills

This book is by a Japanese author and I wanted to at least slightly reflect an Asian feel in the illustration (hopefully). The tree is really a cop out on my part, as I just didn't manage to achieve the look I wanted and would have liked a tree with much more detail and one that curled around in a beautiful shape... but it wasn't to be I guess.

The Road

Back to the book illustrations finally. Here's one for The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Not sure if I would recommend the book! It is all about the atmosphere really, so I wanted to do something very moody and tried to capture the bleak emptiness of everything.

Also, that's easier than doing anything definite that can be critiqued!

NOTE : this one looks a lot better in the bigger view.

A Bird

Well, I managed to get one book illustration up before I got distracted!

I saw a nice bird on the grass on my way to work. Nothing unusual, but i just liked the look of it and the composition with the road. This is EXACTLY what I saw... colors look so much flatter at that time in the morning.

Or something.

Brave New World

I thought I might do some illustrations inspired by books that I am reading... makes it easy to think of an idea!

Not necessarily of a particular scene or theme, i'm using it VERY liberally, it's really just a starting point for me to think of something, anything.

Here's Brave New World.

Debbie

Found a portrait on Flickr that I could reference for a painting (I'm trying to work on portraiture, I'd like to start doing it with actual friends/people). Then realised after a few minutes that I didn't feel like doing it. I kept going for a bit longer regardless, but the result is sloppy and very half-done. I find my paintings tend to look bad until the very end where they (hopefully!) come together... this definitely didn't get to that stage.

Something on the water

I wanted to play around with some color, so I just picked some and started going.

I guess it's clouds and water and ________?

Cityscape

Was messing around in grayscale for a poster I was doing, and while I didn't end up using this, I liked how it was coming along so i just added a bit more today.

I like the feel of the top half, the bottom is the added bit, it needed SOMETHING to make it a bit more interesting but it doesn't work as well, i think.