Me just having fun and making something up, but with using a reference of a great white shark to define the mouth and a separate reference for the eyeball.

This was a painting that I did for my dad of his cat and the first painting I printed on canvas. I have learnt that the colours on a digital piece just need to be brightened before printing to get the best effect.

A massive level of experimentation using the palette knife to smear the paint around everywhere!

I started this painting with a sketch based on the reference of an axolotl and then improvised.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

The challenge of almost a profile, this time I decided on sketching with a white pencil on a black background and building up the colour from a dark starting point.

Started with a reference of a ginger cat and then did what I love to do and that is to add a twist, namely to zombify something, in hindsight this effort ended looking a little flat.

One of the first pieces of digital art I ever did in artrage and although I was struggling with the likeness at times I at least felt like the result was very similar to a pastel painting I would have completed using natural media.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Very much a pastel based piece of art and this out of all my ArtRage paintings so far has come out in a very similar manner to that of my old pastel portraits, this makes the transition to digital a little easier.

Art I fooled around with as a young person

One of my first ever pieces of digital art this time on an ipad with a dumb stylus and using an app called ipastel. This is just about finding my way in this new world.

Done on an ipad using an app called iPastel to get myself familiar with using digital art. I used a simple form of stylus, a non pressure sensitive type, so the accuracy wasn't too great, but I was using my fingers and pastels on natural media anyway.

Another try at applying my pastel techniques to ArtRage and a throwback to a very old darth print I did when I was a child:

Just about the first digital piece of art I ever did in ArtRage, and of course GoT was very popular and I thought this would be a good test of translating my pastel art into ArtRage.

This year began my experiments with home made cider!

Hang on a cotton picking second…wasn't it July literally yesterday? How has December managed to swoop in with such stealth that none of us noticed until it was sitting in our laps? As we all gear up for Christmas, Jew's the world over have been making preparations for Hanukkah (which has actually been and gone now since it landed on the 8th of December this year).

This year we went on a cruise!

Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day, but lets face it during the week nobody has the time or the inclination to fanny about cooking up an elaborate breakie. So come the weekend its always nice to pull your finger out and make a bit more of effort. This was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, I only had a basic recipe which I changed and embellished and this was the fruits of my labour, or not as the case may be as its a super quick and really easy recipe with loads of ways you can customise it to your tastes. Plus its ridiculously yummy. Fact. So dig your frying pan out sharpish and get cooking…you can thank me later.

Pumpkins. As a nation us Brits probably only encounter a pumpkin when Halloween rolls round and even then I doubt many of us eat the innards after we've finished hacking a face into one. I know Pumpkin Pie is a Thanksgiving staple in the U.S but we don't have anything like that here and I think a lot of people are a bit daunted about where to start with a pumpkin and what to do it, and most of the time pumpkins are generally bigger than the International Space Station and unless you have a meat cleaver it's a bit of a battle trying to slice them to bits.

I've got to be honest and say I'm not keen on traditional X-mas desserts like Figgy Pudding, and since I became chef de jour at casa de Jeffs the responsibility has fallen to me to do the pud for Christmas day, and the past few years it has gone well (although we shan't mention the disaster with a Jamie yule log recipe…I'm still bitter). Last year I made these Eggnog creams and they were yummy and not massively heavy either which you don't want when your so full to bursting with turkey and 'tatoes that you couldn't even wedge a sprout in. So if you fancy something different from the run of the mill Fig-Pud or X-mas cake give these creams a go, you won't regret it.

Can you tell I'm starting to run out of adjectives for my recipe posts? The recipe can be used to make mulled wine or cider, although please forgive me for having not tried it with cider since even mentioning the word cider brings back haunting memories of my first ever escapade into alcohol at 13 which resulted in much barfing and eventually being picked up by my dad after my friends exhausted their combined powers of patience and nursing care as as I lay gagging in a bush.

I'm usually the sort of person who is repelled by fruit in salads, or nuts in curries or any of that other faff. Its like drinking a pint of water when you need a wee, it goes against the grain. But saying all that my dad made this marvelous little salad from the September issue of Delicious magazine (which if you don't read you should since it's awesome) and after I tinkered about with it and made it to my liking, I thought I'd shove it (belatedly) up on here for you to have a butchers at. I know strictly speaking we're well into autumn and in this weather we're way beyond thinking about salads, but this salad is warm and with all the orange-ness it doesn't look a bit Halloween-Esq (clutching desperately at those straws now).

This year there were lots of little piggies born