So my good friend Cat got married on the 28th August. I was unable to attend the wedding, mostly because she lives in Denmark, but also because I had a 30th birthday party to go as well. Since it would have been rather costly to FedEx over a wedding gift to her, I did what I normally do for gift giving situations: I painted her a picture.

After much deliberation, she decided she’d like a painting of Mads, her gorgeous little boy, so over the course of about seven days of on-off painting, I came up with the following picture which, thank god, looks nothing like a gnome. (I can’t remember if I ever posted the results of the last time I tried to paint a kid. It wasn’t pretty. WoW’s gnomes have smoother skin.)

Mads, A Portrait

I’ve also begun work on September’s artwork. I’ve tried several different pieces of art on this particular subject in the past, but none have got very far. This new version will hopefully be the one to buck the trend. I don’t want to particularly give away any plot points, so I’m calling this one ‘September’ for the moment.

September WIP1

This particular painting is a bit of an experiment for me. As you can see, I’m using Marta Dahlig’s skintone palette from the Fantasy Females issue of imagineFX. I don’t normally use so many different colours for skin, and I think it can make my work look a bit plasticy and artificial at times. So this is me trying to improve.

I think its turning out decent so far, but she might look a little bit took much like a zombie at the moment. Still, I’m only about 3 hours in on this one, so plenty of progress to be made yet.

Okay, so finally stuff started to click and fall into place. This is the NEAR final piece. I shall be posting it to the imagineFX forums for further crit, as well as chatting to world (of warcraft)-famous art critic Olorin for advice. Anybody else wants to post crit in comments, feel free to do so now!

Lovers: The Near Final Version

Getting there. SLOWLY.

Yep, it’s another WIP update. Going pretty slowly due to that annoying saturation error that pops up when moving files between Photoshop and Painter a lot. Had to redo a couple of sections. Still very much unfinished, but starting to shape up.

Lovers - work in progress #5

Lovers - work in progress #4

Lovers -  work in progress #3

Lovers – work in progress #1