I should start by saying I’ve been under the weather since the weekend, coughing fits, breathless, dizzy… great fun really 😉 anyway I couldn’t settle sitting doing nothing at all but wasn’t fit to do any real work :-/ so I decided to finish of my Arabian Knight painting – it obviously took me two hours to paint one rock as I either had to stop and cough up a lung or wait while my nose stopped running. Anyway, here’s the Arabian Knight – Mainly gouache on watercolour board with…
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Under the stars
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…
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 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…
Read Moreπαράφρασις
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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