Baby's First Book Illustrations

I wrote a picture book for my nephew as a birthday present/thoughtful keepsake/bribe for 'favourite uncle'/keep myself from getting into hard drugs project. I ended up working entirely digitally, it turned out pretty well.

Stained Glass

As part of a TV show I was working on, I was asked to modify a real-world stained glass window to fit the show's storyline and plot elements. Working from the existing window, I designed and illustrated a big chunk of "glass" which was then composited into the filmed footage. Who would suspect a thing?! Basically, the big soldier man is all my doing... the surrounding stuff is mostly real. Can't say I think much of the show, but I was pleased with the stained glass effect, and I had a good time in the process!

I'm renaming this post because all the spambots were abnormally attracted to it!

After all the photo-based stuff I'd done recently, I wanted to play around a bit, so this little sketch came out. I don't know how anyone works non-digitally... there's so many colour corrections, changes and tweaks here! Artists who mix their colours and just whack them on in bold strokes really amaze me :)

South of the Border...

This is a little illustration inspired by a book I read recently, South of the Border, West of the Sun. I did a few book-based illustrations a while back but the idea got waylaid pretty quick. Maybe I'll get back into it...

Runner

Saw this photo in a magazine and liked the way the sun was glowing throughout the image. My version is very saturated, a bit too much, but I didn't quite manage to rein it in without the whole thing become boring/normal again.

Digipaints and so on...

Some more digital sketches. Skintones still suck! But I feel gradually more comfortable getting going with a painting, so while improvement is slow it is happening.

Acrylic sketches

Working with a few junky canvases to practice more painting - the texture is just residue built up from a previous experiment, and gets in the way a bit, but they're just practices so no big deal.

Digipaintsomemore

A few more digipaints. Pretty quick, focusing on colour choices still, mainly...

Skintones by Ruben

Practicing skintones from the Masters. Many liberties taken, just trying out a few concepts. Monitor calibration is screwing with my head at the moment too... things are coming out super saturated in some cases and when I compensate for it it's just getting weird... urgh! Don't know what it's looking like from the other end but just assume that it's not meant to be horrible and neon :)

Skintone sketch

A quick (20min) play around with some skintones, man they're difficult to get right! I'm experimenting with dramatic colour schemes and using neutrals and contrast colours, but it's not very intuitive for me... back to the painting board again :)

Digipaint

Pretty pleased with how this digipaint came out - I used a different program, Sketchbook, which has some nice brushes and colour-blending simulation. Which is cool and all, but in some ways is a bit of a cheat, or at least covers up some of the colour issues I need to work on... (unless I just keep using this program!). In any case, it gave me motivation to keep working at it so that's a good thing.

A quick painting I started one night when I was in the mood. Very quickly fell out of the mood :)

More of the same!

Some more old painting scans...

More acrylic sketches

I realised that I haven't updated here for months! I've been busy with other stuff, but have still done a bit of art, so it's about time I got around to uploading it...

So here's a bit of stuff from my painting book. I'm pretty keen to try larger sized works, and on canvas more rather than paper, which I think makes a pretty significant difference.