Tattooing

So, I recently started a tattoo apprenticeship, I have been trying for years to get one and finally wore someone down :)

I have been in the shop in Mallow, Cork called Arti Tattoo for about 3 weeks now and have two tattoos done. I mostly deal with customers and learn bits and pieces here and there, tis good fun.

The first tattoo was the Batman logo from the later series of Batman the animated series

I barely had a heart attack doing lines for the first time

The second one was of a Knight chess piece, its a bloody pain getting a good photo when they are fresh

All in all its a death defying experience to mark someone for life, but its a great feeling once you get started and get into it. Look forward to many more pics :D

Rose

A new warm-up painting and process vid for the giggle

 

 

Process Vid

I started messing about with recording my morning warm up sessions, so here is one of them for your viewing pleasure!

Morning Warm-ups

Lately, in an attempt to improve my digital/painting technique, mostly in regard to tone I have been doing half hour to hour long paintings in the morning.

They are done in black and white and aren't rendered much. My hope is to get an awareness of detail and tone in certain areas in order to direct the eye of the viewer and suggest enough detail in the other areas to the point that it would hold up with a single viewing... I mostly fail :D

I add these, almost daily on instagram, feel free to have a glance here

 

Messing about with video

A quick painting of a house in a field in watercolour for the themed week over at Islander Art. I thought I would mess about with the camera while I was at it.

Another Master

In continuation to my last post of martial arts masters, here is the latest piece. By the way, anyone interested in a print of this piece or any previous or future ones can visit HERE!

Master Wang Shu Chin

Martial Masters

Working on a series of tonal portraits of martial arts masters from the ages.

Here are the first two.

First the extremely great internal master Bruce Frantzis

Second the man the brought Ip Man back to life Donnie Yen

There are many more to come and they will all eventually be for sale as prints. When that is happening I am sure I will make a post about it :)

Yoda

I finished Jedi (Grand Master of the Force and not a midichlorian in sight) Yoda

The original is for sale here : ebay

Painted with black acrylic and white gouache over black and white prismacolor pencil on stone grey stock

The airbrush is my ally and a powerful ally it is!

Some recent works I have done. I started watching and listening to the Vlogs of Jeff Lafferty as I was working and got all inspired to do some traditional stuff again just for myself as most of the work I have done in the last year has been commissions and all digital at that. Jeff is a fantastic artist, go check him out here.

 

A work in progress of Grand Master Yoda, I think I will only take this one as far as black and white paint though, but who knows.

Terminator inspired, if you have any interest in the process of how I made it you can go here.

Some sketches from 2014

Remember 2014? Seems like a long time ago now.

Here are some sketches I did during the long long ago, before the poccylips (if you get that reference we can be friends)

Don't look at his feet, he's self conscious

Oh for pages the scanner can't see through

Scariest bad guy on the Discworld

Merry New Year!

Recent sketches

Hello all and sundry, how are your faces? Well I hope.

As the title totally gives it away, here are some sketches from ye olde sketchbook.

I have been mostly rocking the old blue animation pencil, I seem to like it more now than I did back in college

"You're not gonna put this on the internet right?"

For those that despise technology that doesn't work properly and... being the thing

I have been thinking about making a manual for turning lights on and off, just for me

The joys of big boobs and taking the weight off

Anytime I draw a watch or clock, I can never decide what time it should be

See, the body parts are tattooed and make the.... ya you get it

Jack is even more back... again

Well those cheery chaps that hired me to create illustrations of Jack asked me to do two more because the first ones worked out so well

The second one they asked for is a repaint of an old book cover

They liked the first ones so much they sent me a t shirt for free, what nice guys they are

Majestic

Jack is back

I was recently commissioned to do two designs for t-shirts for a company in London that do Jack the Ripper tours.

 

The first is a playing card design, the Jack of... Ripper I guess

I wanted to make him pop out of the card, like he was coming for you and added a little street scene behind him to explain the light source on him.

 

 

This second one was to look like Jack had split you open and lifted your guts out, gross but REALLY fun to paint, took me right back to my days as a kid reading 2000AD and staring at all the gross details in the stories :)

I tried to keep it a little comic booky so as not to be to disturbing but still look realistic enough to be recognised.

 

 

 

Tigger the Tiger

It's been a while since I posted anything so here is a quick watercolour and gouache Tigger

Self portrait

I painted a self portrait to enter the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition.

As is my want I started off with a sort of practice sketch paint

"I really wish I was over there!"

I was not a fan of it, the proportions are wrong and the beard is way to yellow, but I did like the effect of light around me, like a shifting aura.
But I continued

"I also wish I was over there!"

Everyone that see's it tells me I look grumpy, but I always look grumpy and that isn't how it felt to me at all, ah well, can't please everyone I suppose.
Here is reference of my eternally grumpy face

This is why I can never fly to America

My Bluebell

Beena my love as a Celtic Queen, she loves Magpies (two for joy) and bluebells.

Viking mit Crows

German for no reason.

Sketch

"Oh look a Viking" - A Crow

Painting

"Oh look a Viking in color" - A Crow

A portrait of Mistress Beena

I draw Beena a lot, usually she is reading and fidgets a lot which makes it very difficult, but every now and then she does something that requires her to sit still, like sewing!

She still wouldn't keep that one arm still

But even easier is to just use a photo, which I did, this one

Or these three to be more accurate

So I sketched it onto a piece of canvas (a step I forgot to record) and painted over it with some burnt umber acrylic, the burnt umber went a lovely grey when it mixed with the graphite from the sketch, but what harm

Insert paint here

I then set about the joyful task of getting the oils out and in the space of about 2... maybe 3... possibly 4 hours, I dunno, I was totally in the zone, this was the result

Its similar to make-up, but more paint is involved

This was one of those paintings that just worked for me, there are a couple small things I will alter later on, but they don't even bother me that much to be honest which is a rarity in and of itself... maybe I should do this for a living.