Wire Skies 2

Here is a painting of a local telephone pole from the earlier drawing "Wire Sky 1" I sold it at an exhibition I had late last year.

Birthday Jamboree

Yes the Birthday Jamboree!

Various Birthday items happily marching to a birthday party to offer themselves up for your delight.

I first did some sketches as ideas for the annual Illustrators Australia 9by5 exhibition, the theme Carnivale. I carefully drew it in pen and ink to 9" x 5".

I scanned that and came up with the colours digitally. I used an idea from James Gurney (of Dinotopia fame) to come up with the colour range, it's called gamut masking and it really helped limit the colours and made it much easier to make colour decisions.

I drew it up on the 9 by 5 wooden board and started in with the Golden acrylic paints. I am not so keen on painting things so small.

That was finished just in time for the 9x5 exhibition and was well received but didn't sell...

Pretty happy with that little painting so I decided to upscale it to a bigger canvas. This was now the fourth time I had to draw it so I felt I was getting the hang of it. I had a little more room on the left so I added a drink cup but that was voted out by others and I changed it to a choc top ice cream which everyone loves. I have been taking photos of the progress of the bigger painting but it is going much slower than the little one. I will post them soon.

Dylan Portrait

Well, I have been doing a bunch of different stuff towards a Bob Dylan portrait but still not sure which direction the final will take.

The black and white version evolved from a large pen and brush ink-drawing and an acrylic painting. I enjoyed using Ben-Day dots to add tone, here is an almost finished coloured version.