Merry Belated Christmas

quick christmas ipad painting...

Vietnam - Hue

The Imperial Palace.

ipad plein air

I got myself an ipad to be able to do colour sketches from life. Would be nice to do it in watercolour but its just not practical. The ipad is surprisingly nice for sketching though, Ive used the program 'Brushes' for these paintings.


These first two are lunchtime sketches from the British Museum.

St Pancras station.

Queens wood in Highgate. Its getting a bit cold for sketching outdoors in London.

Exciting wardrobes!

Our entrance hallway.

Huw Edwards tells us about life in the big world outside.

Character and tree

The first image was ment to be a quick sketch for me to practice character design (Its supposed to be Victarion Greyjoy from Game of Thrones) but it turned into a kind of rendering exercise instead. Ive been thinking alot about trying to describe differences in materials lately and Im trying to get better at this.
The second image is a quick painting I did for a thread over at the sijun forums.

Heres a guy thats really good att describing materials in his paintings:
www.greensocksart.com

India - Varanasi

Holy men giving blessings by the Ganges river one morning in Varanasi.

A knight and a ghost

This image will be published in Spectrum 18 this autumn.

I thought I should show some images to explain the process of this illustration. I originaly had this idea of a stone tomb surrounded by dancing ghosts. I did a little thumbnail, scanned it in and tried some different colour palettes. My girlfriend said it was a boring picture and that I should get closer to the subject if I wanted to get more emotion into it.

So I tried out this composition, and instead of lots of dancing ghosts there's just one, whispering something to the dead/sleeping? knight, who is not made out of stone anymore.

After trying out colours on the second thumbnail I worked up a tighter drawing, using reference for all the things I didnt know how to draw. I scanned it in and finishied it digitally. The ghost girl went through the most changes and I ended up rotating her head around as you can see in the final image.

India - Jodhpur

Entrance to the womens court, Zenana deodi, in Mehrangarh Fort in the city of Jodhpur, Rajasthan.

Nepal - Patan

Temples on Durbar Square in Patan, a town next to Kathmandu.

Peru - Puno

Over the last four and a half months Ive been out traveling, hence the lack of posts. The good news is I had plenty of time to sketch. We went to Peru over christmas so the first drawings are from there. The top one is of some rooftops in Puno at lake Titicaca. It was raining alot and we were forced to stay in the hotel. This was the view from the hotel window.
The other two are quick studies done in museums.