The ultimate dracula of course being Christopher Lee, all I knew for this portrait is that I wanted a splash of blood at the end using the ArtRage sticker spray.

Mainly using the pastel at the start to apply a little blending, playing around with the hard pastel as I have been struggling a little with getting mixing to work with the oil brush.

I am currently watching True Blood so I thought some fan art was in order. I tried to use the oil brush and the palette knife but I was struggling with the mixing colours become quite muddy, looking back I think I should have pushed the hue of the facial shadows.

Quite a quick and simple bird painting, managing to get the hang of the oil brush. Experimented with a gradient overlay to add extra drama.

I think it was more by luck than judgement that this ended turning out so well, I think I mainly learnt that the shadow areas can still have a good colour and hue to them rather than just being a dark grey, this really looks as though I have applied a real pastel to create this painting.

I wanted to start on a black background and very gradually build up the colours to have Arya just appearing from the shadows with half the face in the darkness. I wanted to focus on mainly using the airbrush as so far I have been struggling a little with the oil and achieving a nice blend of colours. In hindsight I think I would have liked to have made the face a little more pronounced and lighter.

Unusually for me this was more of a landscape and also featuring a piece of machinery, of course there is the geeky aspect to it.

A very straightforward reference copy using a hard pastel, although I think I could have pushed the beard a little more with the palette knife.

For a long time I was really struggling to find the idea for this painting but it was only when I exported to gimp and then applied a swirly filter that I really found what I was looking for.

More airbrush on a black background to form the foundation and then using the sticker spray in overlay mode to subtly apply texture, this reminds me of one of those aliens from the film The Explorers.

More airbrush to start the painting and I think with this one I finally figured out how to better integrate a texture using a multiply layer.

I really went to town with the fur brush here, possibly a little too much and in the end I think I would have done the colouring a little differently, maybe focussing more on a cooler lighting setup.

I grew up admiring the art of the Transformer comics and would try and reproduce it, this is some sort of homage, but with a twist, due to the eventual green colouring I thought I would make the mighty Galvatron a little hulk like!

Lots and lots of palette knife here and showing the power of the ArtRage mixing engine to produce some unexpected colours!

Pastel based and deliberately applied some blur to give a more cinematic appeal, warmed up the original reference and pushed the face to emphasize the terminator endoskeleton coming through.

Finally a Buffy portrait that turned out well. Mainly focussing on using the pastels especially the hard one to help with the blending. The final painting very much looks like one I likely would have produced using traditional media.

Started this using the hard pastel to blend more easily, this painting came together pretty quickly, and drawing hands is really quite difficult!!

A strange sad creature and for this one a slightly different colour palette than normal.

This painting came together quite quickly and was helped by my technique of blending a hard pastel for realistic skin tones. I experimented a little with a more complicated background, but the simpler the better.

All palette knife!, I tried to be as loose as possible mainly focussing on the simple lighting and high contrast.

Finally I managed to figure out how to use the fur brushes! this is one of my favourite paintings so far and I accidentally managed to achieve and interesting dynamic pose.

I wanted something dark almost mechanical but with a subtle zoom effect applied.

Another initially thumbnail piece of art that I scaled up and turned demonic!

An expansion of part of an entry to an ArtRage forum competition / collaboration which started originally as a ghost but I had an idea to really push the colour and give him a fiery effect.