Flower Girl

June 9, 2021

Another originally created off a Maddy stream but of course morphed in someone who looks suspiciously like Daenerys, I added the lighting to make it more interesting and to be sitting in a cave, I am starting to realise now that telling a story is quite important, although it is not always possible with a simple portrait.

Conning

June 1, 2021

I wanted some art to hang up at work, the main issue I struggled with was to get the sub to fit in with the background, originally I had rendered it quite dark and with little texture but it didn't really seem to fit into my style so there was a lot of playing back and forth between GIMP and ArtRage to get this right and a little overlaying of the building from a partially completed piece to enhance the composition.

Waterhouse

May 24, 2021

The original was started on a Maddy stream, I tweaked the house a little to make it more interesting and added a spooky man wading through the water in the center (can you spot it?).

Submarine

April 21, 2021

Although there is a sub with high contrast in the foreground I wanted the eye to be drawn to the mountains. At the time I was watching quite a lot of Bob Ross so wanted that kind of rendering, I'm still not quite sure I got the colour of the sea as it may be a little too saturated, but it is good enough.

Sub

April 21, 2021

I really love the reference for this but wanted to change the original cool colours up so it reflected more of a northern mystical sunset. I utilised the deeper thicker paint of the oil brush in ArtRage to acheive some of the snow textures, the difficulty as is often the case with my paintings is getting the final result to be bright enough. I added some humans in the near background to add interest and imply that they are on some kind of exploratory mission.

Bridge

April 21, 2021

Started on a Maddy stream and came together quite quickly, I was careful not to overdo the textures in the foreground and spent longer than I thought on rendering the sky, I wanted more af a focussed light but couldn't really get it to work.

MJDogsFinshed

April 21, 2021

A commission I did for someone at work, I don't often do white backgrounds but he was very insistent. It meant that I just had to blur and soften the edges just a little to unflatten the main protagonists. As you can tell they both look very similar and a little copy paste took place between the two.

Martyn Dog

April 21, 2021

A commision I did for someone at work, dogs of this furry variety are always fun as I can leverage the ArtRage palette knife, however it is essential not to render every hair and only focus on those parts of interest. The key to this portait was the background and one which I had already rendered seemed to fit in nicely with few changes and fix the dog firmly in space.

Lamb

April 21, 2021

I was in the mood to start some animal portait and found a really good lamb reference, but as always I didn't really want to follow the reference too religiously and wanted my own spin.

KatesMedicalSeries-6

February 26, 2021

Part of my girlfriends medical series, this time simply a hand holding some pills, the proportions of the fingers really took a long time to get right but fortunately I have the warp took for that, as part of this series I wanted to get consistency between each part of my artworks and in a way firmly grounded my art style.

KatesMedicalSeries-5

February 26, 2021

Another from the medical series on paintings, another atypical piece in that here we have some bottles, with labels on them, more difficult to apply a twist and potentially to make it interesting.

KatesMedicalSeries-4

February 26, 2021

The first portrait of my girlfriend with her tube!. My main aim here was to capture her beautiful personality and to define a new lighting setup, a dappling type of sunlight across the face. Unusually for a portrait the face is very cropped and it took me a while to get this balance spot on.

KatesMedicalSeries-3

February 26, 2021

A continuation of my medical series, this time face on with my girlfriend. Quite a simple and quick portrait, but the more I look at it the more I like it, the skin tones are flatter that I normally render and I was content with little dynamic lighting and I liked the unfinished look.

KatesMedicalSeries-1

February 26, 2021

Another part of my girlfriends medical series in which we paint a common occurrence when one goes to a hospital in that a tube is put in your arm. An interesting challenge in technically this could be quite a boring painting, so I tried to add extra impact by focussing on texture.

Tree

January 25, 2020

My idea here was to create a very simple landscape with the focus on a tree utilizing quite a few of ArtRage's foliage brushes. As it turned out this painting formed the backdrop of quite a few of my later paintings!

Zombie Girl

January 21, 2020

I found an interesting reference of a woman's face and started off in Infinite Painter, as I progress I thought that it would be fun to overlay my Frankenstein painting as I loved the lighting and see what would happen. As it turns out the best effect seemed to be really to push the contrast on lighting on this one.

Deer

January 2, 2020

A large proportion of this painting was completed in InfinitePainter, I was struggling at times to really get the colours to look interesting, but a couple of GIMP exports and really focussing on that rim light along with a late texture overlay seemed to bring everything together.

Baby Yoda

January 1, 2020

I have yet to see the Mandalorian, but I liked the idea of painting that uber popular character baby Yoda. So I took my original Yoda painting and using the warp tool, initially to enlarge the eyes of course, turn it into something a little bit cuter.

Keva

November 17, 2019

A commission I completed for my girlfriends parents. This is a portrait of their dog. I have done quite a few of this type of animal portrait with a simple face lying down, the main challenge with this one was to add something extra to the eyes and to define the environment.

Parrotz

June 24, 2019

Feathers and more feathers! Started in InfinitePainter on a black background initially as I really wanted the parrot to be bold although in the end I decided against it, but it took me a while to get a background that would fit. I got a little lazy with the feathers too where I really should have spent more time on them.