The Grey Towers

I was reading through the Riftwar Cycle by Raymond E. Feist when the Theme of the Month for May popped up on John Howe’s website. So my mind turned to The Grey Towers which is a mountain range in Feist’s world, I did start painting them, and will return to it when time allows. As I was out and about rather than at the easel I ended up sketching The Grey Towers instead.  

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Would you beleaf it?

Wandering round the garden this morning (after the fun job of cleaning out the chickens) and I started to pick up a few leaves. I wasn’t cleaning the garden or anything as radical as that, I was picking up any leaf that caught my eye. Returning to the house my intention was to take a few macro photographs of the leaves for a bit of fun 😉 however when I lay them on the table I decided to photograph them as they were – As I was photographing them I…

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If you go down to the woods today

This afternoon was the first really dry day with reasonable light we’d had for ages, so I put the camera and a sketchbook in my bag then went for a wander in the woods. I spent quite some time photographing leaves to use as reference for paintings/drawings then started sketching. From the (far too many) photographs which I took down in the woods it wasn’t a leaf which I liked on the screen back at home, it was one of a patch of light on a mossy branch, almost a…

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It’s strange….

It’s strange how things develop and change when you’re playing with ideas for a painting. I’ve been wondering for a while how I’d paint Bilbo meeting Gandalf for the first time at Bag End, so I sat down with a couple of pencils and a large sketch book and pondered. Nothing came to me, I stared at a blank piece of paper and wondered if it was like they say about carving, the piece is already there you just have to chip away the waste. Well, I tried looking at…

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