παράφρασις

Last month I started on a painting of Niggle working away, it was for the theme of the month over at John Howe’s website. The theme was ‘The Bestest Book Ever – Imagine this is your dream commission, the book you’ve ALWAYS wanted to do a cover for.‘ So an illustration of Niggle was an obvious one for me to attempt. Sadly it was overtaken by real life events and I could not fit in any spare time to splash paint around, the month was gone all to quickly and…

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It’s been a while

For one reason or another I’ve not had chance to get the watercolours out for what feels like years, so I decided to make the effort and get my eye in again with a small practice piece. Now I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reference photographs which I take and file for just such occasions. Living where we do surrounded by such excellent scenery it would be difficult not to have a reasonable selection of reference images really. This is of course why I ended up painting something…

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Apologia

I must start this post with a heartfelt and sincere apology. To all those who find the lighter side of fantasy art offensive you maybe should stop reading now, and to those who think you should never be over influenced by another illustration then you’re really not going to like this 😉 Okay, the explanation…. I was trying to come up with an idea for animals in armour as this is the theme over on John Howe’s website. So I sketched a few chickens in armour, and tried to think…

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