Fantasy Watercolur Sketches

So I've been inspired by the work of John Howe to do a couple of big(ger) water colour paintings. Like his work both will be a fantasy subject. Below are some preliminary sketches for the works. The main job of these is to establish the subject and the basic composition, the details I will do when painting so they are meant to be vague.

A2 Digital Art

Some older work today. Nothing new for the simple fact I feel uninspired to do anything today, probably because of the rain, and now I've run out of time. So here are some digital paintings I did for my A2 art, enjoy. (click on the images for higher resolutions)

 

Weird Text

Today is something different, some weird variations on my name, they gradually get vaguer as they go down the page so try and bear with it.

 

This first one is my name in the form of an ambigram. An ambigram is a word which reads the same when read right way up or upside down. I actually did this while watching a documentary on ambigrams from the Angles and Demons DVD, where they said ambigrams were very hard to do, this I came up with in under 10 mins, it probably helped that I do have very easy corresponding letters in my name.

This next one I first wrote in Denmark in a Viking museum from a Viking alphabet on display there. I have always liked Runic (from Runes) script and Viking culture in general. Note: there are only five letters in the surname as the 'th' is one letter.

And finally this is written from the twengar script which was created by a certain JRR Tolkien and as you may guess is elvish. This is very weird to write as the consonants form the main letter and the vowels are the accents above and below the consonants, their position depending on whether the vowel comes before or after the consonant. But anyway enough technicalities, it looks nice at least to me and that's all that really matters. So; bye!

Dog Fight

Click on image for higher resolution

Just a quick digital painting today. I felt that there was not enough colour on the blog, especially with the digital paintings so I decided to do a colourful one. I started by just doing the background, but when that was coming along, looking at the image I felt something was missing, the picture had no real subject or focal point and it also told no story. So I decided to put the dogfight in. I have been thinking of doing a piece with planes in so I felt this was a good enough opportunity. The painting is done in a widescreen format for that extra cinematic quality.

Knife Forging Part 2

So this is the second part of the creation of my knife from Denmark. If you remember the previous post the knife was very rough and dull see here. Since then I have spent a lot of time with a file and sandpaper and have now got the knife blade to a point where I am happy with both the knife's look and sharpness.

The next stage will be the most technically difficult as it is putting the handle on the metal, a process I have no idea how even to begin, so research will have to be done. But more on that later, for now bye!

Necklace

 

Ok so I was bored today so I decided I wanted to make something. So after a brief search I came across this small bit of clear acrylic I picked up at sometime in DT. After a quick bit of filing and sanding on the edges I decided I was going to make a necklace. After a first drilling attempt where the drill bit got stuck in the plastic and then broke so I had to cut that section off and refile it. I then drilled it correctly threaded a thread through it and voila! more pics below.

Globes

So once again apologies for the last couple of days, I was out all day Saturday and then We had a guest round all of Sunday, so sorry, but at least I had good excuses....yeah?

 

Click on images for Higher Resolutions

Ok so if anyone remembers back in July this post I said that I got a book on how to do Fantasy art on the computer. Well the image above is made from folllowing one of those tutorials, how to make your own world. The original image is from Vienna and uses the polar coordinates filter from photoshop to create the circle. I'm really pleased with the effect. The images below were very quick versions to see if  the photos worked with the filters, these were some of the better ones.

 

 

 So sorry once again, i'm not too good at this post a day buisness, but thanks for visiting. Laters.

A Level Results and Dark Tower

First things first apologies for no posts these last few days, I have been a bit busy so sorry. Anyway that over with...

Good news! I got the grades I needed from my A levels and have been accepted at Brunel to do Product Design. I got a C in physics a B in art and an A* in DT. So I'm really pleased with them and that I'm going to Brunel, my first choice.

 

Click for Higher Resolution

This is a very quick experiment with extreme perspective. To be honest it is a somewhat unchallenging subject matter, the Dark Tower, but it works so oh well. More later bye.

Virtual world to Reality

I was online recently and I found this image on a design website.

It's a stamp that take Facebook's and Youtube's Like and Dislike system and puts it into the real world. This got me thinking if there were any other virtual ideas that could become literally reality.

This is an idea that I quickly came up with. Taking the idea from Facebook it is having famous paintings with the people in them tagged. I will aim to come up with more ideas like this so stay posted (Points if you can name all the paintings and painters, the first two should be easy but the last...).

Wedding Photographer

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday. It was due to the fact I was out all day as acting as a (assistant) wedding photographer for one of my brother's university friend's wedding. It was a really nice day, the weather was good (eventually) and it all went well, except for the best man dropping the ring. Anyway my role in this was to take closeup, arty photos with a long lens while my dad took the more traditional photos. Overall we took over 1000 photos, but here are just a small selection of some of my best.

Interestingly the wedding shared some similarities with the Royal Wedding earlier in the year. First the bride was called Kat(i)e, with a sister called Pippa, and a Lancaster Bomber did a flyover. The flyover was completely random and unplanned, it just happened to flyover.

Lake Watercolour (Unfinished)

Click on image for High Resolution

This is a watercolour I did of the lake at the campsite. I consider this an unfinished piece, as when I did it the lake was full of people on kayaks and canoes, which I have yet to add and intend to do so. A couple of photos of the lake in use are below.

Knife Forging

One of the other things I got to do in Denmark was something I have wanted to do for quite a while, which is forge something out of metal. Unfortunately I was late to the forging session (I slept in) so I only had time to make a rough knife (not too bad then). I first heated up the metal in the forge till it was red hot and then a hammered an edge onto one side. As I did this repeatedly the sharpened edge began to curve away from the knife so I had to hammer it back to curve in the other direction. Once that was done I used a chisel to cut off the top edge of the curve to leave a (roughly) flat top edge and then cooled it off in water. Below are some photos of the forged knife.

 These below are pictures of me making the knife.

 Now that I am home I will use a sand paper and wire wool to clean the sides of the knife to a reflective (hopefully) finish and a file to add a decent edge to it. I will also add a handle but that will all come later(much later at the rate things are going at the moment).