Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! Yeah OK I know it is late but the days up to Christmas were filled with shops, wrapping and sellotape, and sorry but I'm not going to be doing this on Christmas Day and yesterday I was out so today then. I wanted to do a wintry scene so I settled on this view over some snowy mountains with the stag (or reindeer if you want) standing on this outcrop. It was fun, I got to use some different and more unusual brushes in photoshop, and it was interesting doing the deer. Oh and I may have been somewhat inspired by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which I got on Christmas and I must say is brilliant!

 These below show different stages of the painting, which are also the total number of layers I used for this, the last layer being the deer.

So hope you all had a merry Christmas, and hopefully I will get another post before new years so so-long for now.

1 Hour Design Competition - Winter is Coming

So this is one of a series of challenges created by Core77 called 1 Hour Design Competitions (1HDC), and it's the first I have attempted. The brief of the challenge can be found here, with more details here. Basically it is to create an item of armour or a weapon, based upon the characteristics/nickname of a character from/based upon George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice; part one: Game of Thrones is now an excellent TV series. For the 1HDC you are allowed to submit 1 sheet of sketches and 1 final rendering, all done within an hour. My design is based upon a position from Game of Thrones called the Hand (advisor) of the King. From this I have created a sword that would be suitable for this role.

Knight Poster

This is a large digital painting I made in photoshop. I may end up getting this printed off as an A2 poster. Below it are some variations on it.

That is all thanks.

Fantasy Tolkien Duel Watercolour

Click on the images for higher resolutions

So this is one of the two promised large water colours. I am very pleased with how this has come out and has ended up.

The subject of the painting is a scene from one of the lesser known works of Tolkien, The Silmarillion. This covers the history before what is seen in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The scene is a confrontatio between the High King of the Elves, Fingolfin, and the Valar(god) of Darkness, Morgoth (Sauron was his lieutenant). So quite epic stuff. The text follows:

"Thus he came to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth in open combat. And Morgoth came....

...And he issued forth in clad in black armour; and he stood before the King like a tower, iron-crowned, and his vast shield, sable unblazoned, cast a shadow over him like a stormcloud. But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail was overlaid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice.

 Then Morgoth hurled aloft Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld, and swung it down like a bolt of thunder. But Fingolfin sprang aside, and Grond rent a mighty pit in the earth, whence smoke and fire darted. Many times Morgoth essayed to smite him, each time Fingolfin leaped away, as lightning shoots from under a dark cloud; and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds, and seven times Morgoth gave a cry of anguish, whereat the hosts of Angband fell upon their faces with dismay, and the cries echoed in the Northlands.

   But at the last the King grew weary, and Morgoth bore down his shield upon him. Thrice he was crushed to his knees, and thrice arose again and bore up his broken shield and stricken helm. But the earth was all rent and pitted about him, and he stumbled and fell backward before the feet of Morgoth; and Morgoth set his left foot upon his neck, and the weight of it was like a fallen hill. Yet with his last and desperate stroke Fingolfin hewed the foot with Ringil, and the blood gushed forth black and smoking and filled the pits of Grond.

   Thus died Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, most proud and valiant of the Elven-king of old"

So good dark climactic stuff. Anyway the working pictures for this are below if you are interested, thanks.

 

Sketch for Digital Painting

This is a quick sketch I did to help with a large scale digital painting I am currently doing and I'll show you when its finished.

Fantasy Watercolour Stage 1

So today I started work on the two watercolours I intend to do. I have not posted anything for the last few days for a couple of reasons as I will explain, the most inconsequential of which was that I was shopping all day yesterday, but I was able to prepare the paper for work so not all was lost. Anyway onto the actual artwork.

 

These two above are attempts at the two watercolours. However these were done on only heavy cartridge paper rather than gummed watercolour paper. This meant that when applying the water and the paint, the paper start falling apart, not good. However I did not have any watercolour paper so I persevered.

Until I found that I did have some from my AS. So I prepared two sheets of that to start afresh on. The preparation consists of soaking the sheets in water for as long as possible, before fixing them to a board using masking tape and leaving them to dry out completely. What this does is it first of all swells the paper while it soaks, and then once it is fixed and it starts drying it stretches the paper. This ensures that when you start applying the water and paint, the paper will not curl or create bumps while drying. Anyway so once that was done I applied the first paint in a wash layer which you can see below.

This is a very simple layer simply to get some colour on the page to cover the white (but it will make a bit of a comeback later). So all is going well so far, though still lots to go.

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!

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.

AS Guitar Chair and Osgiliath

Okay so no new design work today, instead here are some development drawings of my AS DT project, a Guitar practice chair.

 

These actually show the second design process as I created one final design and was going with that until one of my teachers, to put it bluntly, said it looked like a toilet. So I then decided to try a more structural approach out of metal resulting in the design below which, despite being a pain to braze and breaking in half, then proceeded to get 93% for the coursework so not too bad.

So I've just begun reading one of Tolkien's lesser known known stories set in early Middle Earth called the Children of Hurin so that is probably the inspiration for this a quick digital drawing of Osgiliath during the War of the Ring (Lord of the Rings Period). Below is the plain line drawing.



Final note, I will not be able to post tomorrow or probably on Friday as I am going into hospital for a keyhole surgery. So I'll be back soon and please leave any comments, thanks.