Professional Envy

I’ve been looking at my portfolio recently, and if there’s a cure for professional envy, that’s it. I’m a really good artist, but sometimes I compare myself to people who’ve been painting for twenty years, or professional comic book artists

Portrait of A. – background

The gridded portrait was quick enough that I could get started on the background in the same day as I began the tonal sketch. I decided to go with the same lighting as in the train, and to lie about

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 6: Finishing everything!

The last day’s painting was added details and some rocks. Some of the details were, necessarily, pretty big. The dragonling counted as one detail, for example, but its snake head and eager lizard face add life and movement to the

Making shell gold – decanting it

After making the shell gold powder, I settled it and washed in a clean jar, but that gave me the problem that I then had gold in a jar. As it dried, the powder stuck to the bottom. So, I