I’ve had a few ideas for star filled paintings recently, mainly they’ve been science fiction with sleek space ships zooming around. However the other day I returned to a Tolkien theme of Hobbits wandering under a star filled sky. The main aim was to make the Hobbits just visible enough to be in the painting yet make it believable that they were wandering under the stars with little to no Moon to illuminate the scene. Another aim was to use real star positions rather than just splatter the painting with…
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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…
Read MoreWæterfeallan
I was quite looking forward to my week off work, the veg plot needed clearing out then dug over, and for once the weather was looking promising. So what happened? Well, my mind kept going back to a rough sketch I’d made a while ago, I was thinking about how I would tackle painting it. Not only was I thinking about the technicalities of painting the scene but I was busy thinking about the story that went with it, who loved there, why it was located where it was…. That’s…
Read MoreHere there be…
I had an idea for a map based on the ‘theme of the month’ over on John Howe’s website. However instead of writing the story down I decided it would be good to see what the map looked like… Now I’ve spent so long drawing the map I no longer remember what I was going to write :-/
Read MoreEyes of Tol in Gaurhoth
When I first saw the ‘wolves’ theme over at john-howe.com this scene sprang to mind, from Tolkien’s tale of Beren and Lúthien… “Then Sauron stripped from the their disguise, and they stood before him naked and afraid. But though their kinds were revealed, Sauron could not discover their names or their purposes. He cast them therefore into a deep pit, dark and silent, and threatened to slay them cruel, unless one would betray the truth to him. From time to time they saw two eyes kindled in the dark, and…
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