St.Lukes Exquisite Palette show

This is about the third or forth time that I have been involved in St.Lukes Exquisite Palette show. I always find it so hard to paint small details with actual paint and brushes after being able to zoom in digitally to do details on the computer. It is always good to keep the hand in. Mainly done in the beautiful Golden Acrylics Louise and David gave me for my birthday years ago.

Robbie Roo cycling along Merri Creek one Tuesday afternoon...

Hazy Bushscape

I was doing another landscape and was trying to give it a heap more atmosphere and haze...might have gone a bit too far, but I have a bunch of new photoshop brushes that were fun to play with.

Hazy Bushscape

Stampy treescape

This is an idea that I have been thinking about for years but never actually tried.
Cut a few tree stamps, stamp em on a rough line then fill in the rest of your landscape in the same colour... Presto! Instant landscape!
Ok so this one isn't great, but it is a proof of concept. I just need to make a bunch more trees.

Stamp face

Stamp face 1

Here is a little cubistic stamp face i whipped up last week. Really soft rubber to carve, even softer than eraser rubber. The trick is to not cut too much off as it cuts like butter.

Tile pattern

Here is a tile design I have lifted and revised from an old portuguese design. There isn't much to the actual design but it combines great into a 4 square. I still want to change the main sort of thistle shape and fill up the space a bit more.

Revised pattern

Modigliani portrait

Modigliani sawtooth portrait

Muddy "Mississippi" Waters

Another in my line of vector portraits of songwriters is one of my all time favourites, Muddy Waters. I have been doing this one over the last few months. I haven't quite worked out what i want in the background yet or what the final colours should be.

This is probably the closest to what i originally wanted to achieve. Love that 70's style shirt...

Here i was fooling around with various patterns & fills in illustrator.

More with the patterns and fills, starting to fall apart as a portrait though.

I kind of like this colourway , but it isnt quite popping enough for me.

Maybe a bit to obvious for a bluesman to be in shades of blue...?

When I had the vector shapes sorted out i quickly painted it as an acrylic on wood portrait. I think it still needs quite a bit of work as it has lost something of the confidence seen in Muddy in the vector. Also it needs a background, maybe some kind of abstract cityscape...

Some more summer artwork

Here is some more stuff from my sketchbook of the last couple of months...

Some local wiring is like a puzzle to draw...

This stuff can get pretty busy but is fun to draw with a brush.

A native from the backyard

Same backyard, same afternoon, different medium.

A Salad container label for my daughters primary school fete.

A cupla kookas.

Brushpen of a newspaper photo

Yo dude! Whattup dawg?

Feb 2013

Yeah, a long time between posts, but I have been doing a fair bit of artwork including some paintings that i will post when they are finished.

Here are a few odds and ends from over the summer.

I dunno, some kind of vector/limited palette test...

Oh yeah, this was used to help sell gingerbread to to little prep kids...

This one is part of something else, still in progress.

Reflecto lettuce alien, still not finished but a fun way to make pictures. Did I show this already?

Something from a series I am working on currently in a few different formats.

Allright, that's enough for today but I have a bunch more that i will put up over the next little bit.

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.