Spotlight On: Sa’adiah Soul Arts

Spotlight on an artist I know in actual physical space, and have met! Sa’adiah Khan is very focused on what she can do with her art, and on helping people with it, far more than I can manage with fine

Shell Gold Batman

Having recently finished my shell gold, I wanted to do a couple of experiments with it. Firstly, I had to know how it painted. Second, I wanted to run a multimeter over the gold to find out just how grinding

Portrait of A. – gridding up.

I finished the tonal study of A. and went straight on to squaring up, transfering a composite of images onto the canvas as one. The jacket and pose from one photo along with the face from another will give me

Portrait of A*.

Sometimes in the life of an artist there comes a time when they just have to terrify passing civilians by asking, “Do you mind if I paint you?” For extra points, you can then tell them why, but that usually

Dragons: Day 1 – Initial Sketching

Last week I brought in a new commission, on the subject of great big winged flying majestic lizards – I’m going to be painting dragons. The client would like to replace a print over her mantelpiece, meaning it’s going to

Planning a Painting: First Sketches

Part of the process of making a painting is working out what will go where. Part of the process is working out what shapes it will be, and how the shapes interact. Sketches help with both of those. The first

Personal Critique: Mangling Holiday Pictures – Part 4

This is not, strictly speaking, a holiday picture. However, it is from the same artist, so it comes in by the door marked ‘holiday’ and gets treated as such. It’s a portrait. I’m good at portraits. I know exactly how