Closer

 

One of my favourite films is Closer and in particular I love Natalie Portmans character Alice.

 

I used the pink from her wig, to add depth to the shading in this portrait.

SNOOZE

 

 

One of my biggests dislikes is alarm clocks!
I never want to go to bed at night, but I never want to get up in the morning.

SNOOZE!

Paddy

 

Tonight I stayed up late sketching this portrait of my Granny.
It's her on her 80th birthday, which was such a lovely, family day and clearly made her so happy.

 

 

 

I copied the image to work on with watercolours to bring it to life. I like the effect on the top, and lighter areas of the image but think the pencil shading makes it a bit too dark when watercolour is added.

I was really happy to do some portrait work again after what feels like years! so hopefully I will be inspired to do a few more soon.

Multicolour Watercolour

I've been busy finishing off work for deadlines at the moment, where I am illustrating the answers to questions about myself e.g. favourite food, favourite colour...

 

I've been playing around with watercolours again and did some multicoloured illustrations to help answer my favourite music.

 

This is to show my penchant for classical music
(in particular I love Clair de Lune by Debussy)

 

 

These are some of the lyrics to one of my favourite songs, Goodbye to you, by Michelle Branch. It's a really emotional song so I quite liked the flow in this writing and the subtle colour changes going on throughout. It was much more successful than I originally thought it would be and I really want to get a copy of this blown up and printed really, really big for the wall.

Night Driving

This morning I started drawing for a piece about driving at night & of course looking at the beautiful stars above.

 

So I though would share how I did this step by step and got to the final illustration which I am actually pretty happy with.

 

 

This is the car I drew from an image online (I don't know car makes so couldn't for the life of me tell you what it is) but i'm making it clear the car design is not my own... well done car manufacturer for making a car.

It's just fineliner on white paper but cleaned up a bit in photoshop - I added the sort of stippling effect for a bit more interest and shading but without making it too heavy.

 

 

Then I got my watercolours out to paint some more galaxies.
I have done some similar painting recently anad absolutely love the effect of them and way it blends colours so I will continue with it in the future.

 

 

Here is a colour edited version of the car done in Photoshop.... I'm not sure I like it as much in colour but wanted to play around a bit. I'm getting more and more into colouring my images on the computer (just because the limits are endless and you don't risk ruining the original)

 

I edited it again in much softer white and grey tones to be placed alongside the stars to create the 'Night Driving' illustration.
It took a while to balance the colours but in the end I ended up with something I'm quite happy with and does really evoke the feeling I was trying to get.