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...