15 min painting on paper

finished painting

Currently on the Drawingboard.

I've been commissioned to do a CD cover / itunes image for a rather excellent band called The heights. here is the initial painting:





I was worried I was going to gory but after speaking to Sarah (lead singer) It seems It is to be gorier (which I like a lot) so I will make the necessary changes and post the finished artwork up here when its done.

New idea for portfolios

I've been planning on updating my portfolio for quite some time now, its shocking that i haven't updated the thing in almost 18 months and I got to thinking about how much tougher it is to get your work noticed than it was when I first started out. so instead of re organising and printing new pages for a folder I decided to try something new. I used a very underused feature on iphoto to arrange jpegs of my work into photo album (books). i decided to do an experiment and organise my fine art (not my illustration just yet) into their appropriate exhibitions and make books of each one.
it took about a day to do each and a week for the books to arrive from apple. when they did I was extremely impressed with the hard back books that arrived in slip cases. the cost of each wasn't too bad either, still less than what i would have paid out in printing to do a portfolio the normal way. I think I may do one for my illustration work and plan a trip to london and attempt to get some illo work that way. though it will have to wait a little while as I have a few projects up in the air at the moment. these books were an experiment worth doing.

Mannanan

After finishing work on the paintings for the DoE, I've been mucking around with the subject matter a bit as I don't have much freelance work on the go at the moment. I'm in the process of altering my work a little, I'm trying to do more work with out out the odd little black figure I've been using over the last few years. I've always liked fantasy artwork, so maybe in this down time, I'll do a little more of that, any way this is just a messing around piece, just trying things out really.

quick update

well since finishing the animation at the beginning of this month and after having a very very very drunken and enjoyable wrap party I have managed to hit the ground running and just finished a number of paintings for the Isle of man department of eduction based around manx folk lore, I'm not entirely sure what purpose the will serve, but I did enjoy doing them. I have also invested in a new printer and scanner, which will hopefully arrive soon, after a number of years loyal service my old printer and scanner have died. right on to the next job now.

It' over

As of sunday Feb 28th, my part as a digital colour artist on the animated feature 'Chico & Rita' has come to its end, production here on the Isle of man will completely cease a week today. a few of us have been on the project since it began production on the island 15 months ago, most others have been on it for about 12 or 13 months, so it is a bitter sweet fare well to my time on the project, I have worked within a great team of people and I will very much miss the insane things we have spoken about throughout this project.
but on to new and exciting things, I'm currently working on some images commissioned by the dept. of education over here, which is good fun, One of the things I have discovered about working on Chico & Rita is that though i love working as an artist and illustrator, it is a somewhat solitary profession. So whilst I have relitivley little work on the go at the moment, I'm contemplating getting together a body of work that would allow me to apply for some more team based work. so I am going to focus for a few months on concept work, storyboards, maybe environments as well. so I'll see how it goes.