Artistic
Arriving at Bag End
Four dwarves arriving at Bag End, straight from the book 
I may paint them differently in twelve months of course 
This was a large watercolour which I stopped and started too many times, lost my way, forgot what I was doing, but I got there in the end (The majority is watercolour, but there’s a touch of gouache, some coloured pencil, and a bit of Photoshop included for good measure).
W. N. Hodgson – Website
This week I’ve been working on a bit of web design, it’s a site for a book ‘Climb Black Sail For Me’ based on the far too brief a life of W. N. Hodgson.
It was a fun site to work on, especially trying to create a pen and ink map for the header – actually it was one of those ideas that comes to you and you have to stop everything else until you’ve tried it out glad I did now. Hopefully the website will spark plenty of interest in the book and we’ll see it on the shelves sometime soon, it’s such a shame that people like W. N. Hodgson who in the midst of fighting for his Country in some horrific conditions can still create wonderful poetry yet is not all that well known. When the weather is right I plan on wandering up Black Sail myself If you have a moment though, pass on the link to this site you everyone you know http://www.w-n-hodgson.info/ and perhaps it won’t be too long until the book is on the shelves.
Tribute ;-)
This is what you could call a piece of silliness, but then it’s good to be silly at times. Last week we lost Janeway one of our chickens, she was named after Captain Janeway from Star Trek Voyager, since I was already trying to come up with some ideas for an anthropomorphic drawings the result was fairly predictable really
Pen & Ink with colour added in photoshop.
From photo to painting
I decided to work from one of my photographs taken during this trip into a watercolour. Here is the reference image -
And here is the watercolour – 
I need to practice a bit more getting a few more layers into the background, but it was an enjoyable painting to work on in the end.