Who doesn't love a zombie, and also they are fun to do especially with ArtRage and the palette knife.

Another made up piece focussing on an exaggerated bone structure and making a little use again of the hair brush.

My idea here was to pretty much go for a Christmas card type feel so I thinned down the oil brush and focussed on simplifying the painting.

Starting this painting I employed a grid based technique to define the initial sketch and then put down some flat oil colour. I struggled on this piece to get some realistic blending on the face and as a result it ended up finishing quite flat looking.

Mainly the oil brush and very close to the original reference, I guess I didn't want to change the likeness of an iconic horse.

A landscape using as much palette knife as possible for a more abstract look, I was determined not to overwork this and make it look as if I had just thrown some paint at it. I think I would like to do some more landmarks in the future.

A portrait of my mum of which I experimented a little with the tracing option of ArtRage to make my life easier as I knew that this would be quite a challenging portrait.

I always like rendering an alien as the detail is so much fun to render. I am still trying to figure out how to use the oil brush, currently using it on a thin paint setting as I am not yet comfortable with the thicker paint mixing.

A pretty normal animal portrait using quite a thin type of oil brush and having lots of fun with the big dark cut eyes, for any portrait that is a very quick and easy win.

Starting with a reference of my mum and then improvising the rest, I made a little use of a button stencil to define the moon in the background.

A commission for my sisters boyfriend, I spent quite a while on this one to get it right, lots of detail and of course it is essentially two portraits and I really needed to try and get the likeness.

This was my first self portrait!, or more precisely creating something a little odd based on a reference of myself.

Another attempt at a portrait using the oil brush and this time the wet palette knife to generate some blending.

The first landscape I have attempted in ArtRage, for this I thought I would focus more on the pastels. For this painting I made use of layers to split out the background and foreground, usually I pretty much work in very few layers.

Trying something different this time by playing around with the grid feature to go for a more graphical design concept of that well known Star Wars villain.

I had the idea of throwing lots of textures at this one to see what would happen. My first idea was to grunge up as much as possible the pastels but I needed to go further.

Using a reference of a skull and a cigar I produced this mash up. As you can see I made some good use of a hair brush.

Went for a very illustrative look with simple colours and no blending, I basically took a panda reference and then tried to simplify.

I have started to watch True Blood, so some fan art is required methinks. I wanted a simple true to reference using oils. I tried to blend with the oils, but I am still struggling with that with the subtleties of a portrait for the moment so I overlaid a little pastel on top, also to bring out some nature skin texture.

I found a good reference and then put my own spin including, of course, zombifying him!

More of a three quarter view, this painting was quite faithful to the reference and I didn't really want to push it too hard but just focus on the technique of the oil brush.

This was an unexpected win in that I blocked in a lot of the facial colours in a very rudimentary way with no blending and then used the palette knife wet option to blend everything in which as it turns out worked surprisingly well.

I really wanted to render something from the world of Transformers and this was for an informal competition on the ArtRage forums. I found a couple of references and then had a lot of fun designing the planet.

Mainly using the oil brush and the style of the reference and the fact that there was armour to render meant that the painting lent itself to little blending.