A paint over and update to one of my first pastel type paintings in ArtRage, it is always useful to attempt this to see if I am actually making any progress on my art journey. I can now see a lot that was wrong from my original effort.

Something very strange, I just was having fun and playing around with just about all the tools in ArtRage.

Sometimes I like to take a reference of an innocent children's toy and then tweak it to extraordinarily creepy levels.

A simple still life, and in the style of an old master, hence the dark backdrop. Surprisingly this didn't take too long, I held off applying the higher tones and the saturation for as long as I could so the luminosity of the orange tones could come through. This was just about the first still life I have done using ArtRage and actually surprisingly I enjoyed it, it was nice to have no pressure to achieve the likeness of a portrait.

A spliced painting taking my dragonfly painting as a background and then the lizard painting to adapt into a dragon, this gave me the opportunity to experiment with the ArtRage editing tools.

I found a cute picture of a teddy bear online reading a book and thought that it could look pretty cool if it had a bit of an edge, like if it was a little evil for example.

Initially I was just going to follow the reference of a lion faithfully while applying a little texture, but as it turned out I decided to give him a little bit of an edge by colour dodging a red highlight around the eyes and a little rim light.

A fun still life from a challenge suggested on the ArtRage forums to simply render a pear using just the oil brush, surprisingly I had quite a lot of fun with this one

A Sand Snake from Game Of Thrones, I really don't think I caught the likeness and it really isn't done in my own style. I think I ended up focussing too much on the airbrush to achieve a blended skin tone.

A simple reference copy, and I think the key to this painting was its simplicity as I seemed to hold better control over the oil brush and palette knife and to achieve the right background colour.

I wanted to combine superman with robocop, so to start I painted based on a superman reference and then started to work out some dynamic lighting. I overlaid a few of my old paintings and even played around with a stencil to apply a texture to achieve the overall effect.

Inspired by Bob Ross I had an idea to come up with an original fantasy landscape.

An amalgamation of several paintings I had previously finished.

This painting changed quite a lot during inception as originally it was supposed to be a child of the forest from Game Of Thrones, but I was struggling with the oil brush in ArtRage and things were getting a little muddy.

Tried to use the oil brush for as much of the portrait as possible, but I am still struggling a little to blend colours smoothly. Tried to overlay a previous portrait with different blend modes and then push colours and textures towards the end.

Simply a fly on a flower, I wanted to try and channel the success I had with the dragonfly painting I did a couple of years back with the foreground even more prominent with a blurred background.

Another superhero!, I really do like getting a theme on and then bingeing on it. Again I gathered up a lot of reference and wanted to produce my own take which would a combination of the 60s Adam West version and the latest Dark Knight.

More superheroes, this time on of my favourite, catwoman!, I gathered quite a few references and realised that it should be very much a Batman Returns type catwoman but with my own design of mask.

A fun monster, overlaying many of my previous monsters combined with the use of the Warp tool, this turned out to be more of a photo bashing exercise but using my own art. I always find these experiments valuable as it pushes me out of my comfort zone.

I am certainly in the mood for superheroes at the moment. This one I completed on my new Wacom Cintique and wanted to put my own spin on the wonder woman concept. I gathered quite a few references and just figured out along the way what I wanted.

An experiment to adapt my original Spike piece into something else, a troll. My idea was to give me practice with the newly introduced Warp tool.

This painting was based on my airbrush based Spike portrait as I wanted to experiment with the warp tool and to apply a few more textures.

I really pushed the palette knife to blend the oil paint as much as possible and actually ended up blurring at the end for a softening effect, ideally I think I would have liked to have pushed the piece a little more but for the blending experiment, it did what I wanted.

A paint over from an old pastel drawing which is probably about 20 years old. From the scanned in picture I simply overlaid some paint and added a few effects, so gauge whether I have made some artistic progress.