Recent News

In recent news; HOBO gets taste of VICTORY.

Bouncing onward from my recent Daily Deviation, the Skywhale piece soared ever onward into the hearts and minds of Tumblrites and has currently amassed 16,000 notes, full of likes and reblogs. Thankfully this has seen a bleeding effect on my other tumblr offerings and recent posts.

To all my new followers on Tumblr - F--K YES I luff all of you. I hope to fill your tumblr feeds with more awesome in our futures together.

Tumblr is a seriously powerful force to be reckoned with, I would reblog more stuff on there but I want to keep my main account purely my own stuff as an interactive ever changing gallery. I'm hoping to set up an inspiration tumblr in the near future, but there's so many on there already

I feel really humbled to be able to quantify that I have touched the minds / vision of almost 200,000 people through Imgur. That's amazing. I did some terrible math, and discovered that if each of those viewers offered up £1 each (I'm British), I'd be able to work for the next 10 years and produce roughly 4000+ paintings (of that quality)..... @_@

INPRNT

I submitted 3 pieces to INPRNT for review and I was thankfully successful. I now have the power to offer up high quality prints of my artwork for those of you who expressed interest.

PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE :D

 "This is an gallery-quality giclée print on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks."

I reported myself to the Grumpy Cat owners for copyright violation, in the hopes they'll see it sooner and grant me permission to sell it as a print. :3 Paws crossed.

I will be offering up more artwork in the near future as and when I have prepared them for print. I'll post up details and updates as and when they turn up.

STUDIES

Gotta keep sharp with the studies! Push it push it push it!

May 4th

This image made it to the front page of IMGUR today which is a pretty cool honour, glad the image was well received and had me super pumped to create its counterpart artwork.

Artwork in tribute for May 4th, Free Comics Day. Hope you dig :D

I was listening to a lot of Judas Priest earlier in preparation for the next Crimson Bloodsports Challenge and the music got me super pumped that it will forever populate my working hour playlists. I've heard JP songs in the past, but it felt like today, I truly listened.

Studies

Easing myself back into studies, here's a 1 hour warm up from this morning. Extra brownie points if you can guess where this fellow is from. You can find references from films here too!

Daily Deviation Attained!

Woke up to find that I'd been given the honour of a Daily Deviation on Deviantart. A community I have frequented for years but never truly embraced to its' full potential until this year, and it is great to see that attitude reflected back. Thanks so much to annelienvdb for recommending, and Thiefoworld for awarding it :)

I look forward to my inbox swelling with the new watchers, comments and favourites, pushing me to create new work to share with you all. Thank you for taking the time to view, and express your support for my art.

It means the world. Thank you.

To adventure!

Background Environments with Asian Twist

Environment backgrounds

What I have learned

In this series I tried to maintain a colourful / slightly animated looking approach - struggled to maintain the values, focusing on the lighting and emotive feeling. 

From this I can see that I need to study I'd like to learn how to render wood / stone / ground textures to a more believable degree. So more environment studies are on the cards.

Its fun an useful to thumbnail out compositions in value first to establish some ideas.

I created a specific brush for this kind of work which you can see being predominantly used in the monochromatic rough thumbnails. Great for blocking in major shapes.

Mugiwara No Luffy

Fanart of Monkey D. Luffy from Eiichiro Oda's ONE PIECE manga/anime

Had a ton of fun creating this image and would like to paint more of the fantastic characters from the series. Slightly rushed I think I'd amend the framing and use of Luffy's Gomu Gomu attacks better either an update or in a new piece.

DOJ-CON Experience

Exhibiting at DOJ-CON

I've been attending D-CON/DOJ-CON for all of the years it has been in operation and each year I've thought, or have been explicitly told, 'You should have a table here!' So this year marks a notch in my belt, and I decided to book the table before I was even ready for it. No matter what, BE THERE. Be present.

"Eighty percent of success is showing up. " ~ Woody Allen

Surprising and quite relieving to find I wasn't as nervous as I expected while I was setting up my table, but I was still full of jittery energy without the sinking feeling. My mouth kept going uber-dry as I tried to settle into my 'totally needs a cushion' chair.

I used an A3 sketchbook to prop up my folio display in a stroke of last minute improvisation and Ak secured it to the table via gorilla tape. I was ready. Slight delay in the doors being opened, but holy shit when they finally did. The glacier of people sliding past the table, in assorted eccentric dress was amazing.

Brilliant fun followed while painting live, and while I've not livestreamed much in the past its a pretty solitary experience compared to being able to look up and into the eyes of people watching the monitor. Audience interaction became tactile as I could respond to comments/reactions in realtime, often I was inspired also by the amazing soundtracks being played by the organisers.

I began to settle after I'd sold some prints - my first one being Selling a Luffy print to a Luffy cosplayer. Easy sale!

My aim was to cover costs so I wasn't losing vital income, and to gain some new audience and in this I feel fulfilled. I spent my profits feeding my friends :D I retain a folio full of prints to use in the future which are available to buy for £5, and I carry with me the experience of the event itself.

What I've learned

• I need a larger selection of prints for people to 'browse'. 7 is too low a number. People want moar.
• People like to watch digital art being created when they don't especially understand the medium.
• The most commonly asked question of the day was 'What sort of tablet is that? :D'
• 1 day is not long enough, bring back the weekend event
• Always bring along a monitor / laptop. It kicks ass!

Thanks to those who purchased prints and showed their enthusiasm, its a bolster to my ambitions to succeed as a freelancing hero artist, and to any new followers of mine online Harro! and I was super pumped that the best sellers were my original paintings over fanart.

Many thanks to my visiting friends from Edinburgh who helped keep my company, and made the evening following the event a pleasure.

PS.

Gryffindor woolen sweater for the win!

Doj-Con Artist's Alley

Hey folks,

I'll be exhibiting some artwork at Dundee's DOJ-CON manga and anime festival this weekend on the 13th of April, on the basement level of Dundee Union. I'll be on one of the Tables in the Artist's Alley alongside my friends from Lefay Engraving.

I'll be selling prints of digital paintings, while giving LIVE painting demos, answering questions and fulfilling commission requests. Come by and say Hi.

I'm working on some ONE PIECE artwork at the moment and you can see some of my work posted in my gallery here

Hope to see you all there!

Freelance Work for Proper Games

New work update with some recent artwork for Proper Games' mobile title in development. Here's a selection of WIP environment concepts showing a variety of potential locations.

 I've been working on them in batches like this as it helps me keep the scenes in context with the others.

Map / Level Select Layout Concepts showing a path through single player.

Perspective in environments is something I'm stumbling over, I found a useful vanishing point brush which has assisted me as I've yet to get to grips with photoshops' grid system. Hope you dig :3

Learning some graphic novels

Visual storytelling is amazing, I always get fired up when there's narrative involved in the creation of an image. I love delving into the histories of things. I've not really been an avid reader of comics growing up, mostly due to finances and a childhood of gaming instead however I love them. With the advent of webcomics I was able to consume the media at a staggering rate. I tend to dive head first into narratives like this and binge on them, reading everything available in near to as one sitting as I can manage.

Some that I've read in the past include Demonology 101 by Faith Erin Hicks and Hanna is Not a Boy's Name by Tessa Stone. Check them out! Recently I was linked to reMind by Erik Ly, and I was hooked instantly. Beautiful visuals, and mystery to boot. I luffs mystery.

I've been reading the short speed stories 'Lust' by Will Wright, and got super pumped. The whole comic page arrived in my head all at once around midnight and in my stubbornness I wouldn't let myself sleep til I got all the foundation elements in place. 2 hours later I arrived at this -

There's a ton of things I would amend, change or redo in this but I'm so glad it exists. Get it down on paper, and then you can assess where to go from there. I get hung up on the fact that I don't know all the grammatical rules that have developed around serial artwork / graphic novels but the best way to learn them is by doing them, as I was advised by Thomas Foster recently, '... it's the only way to learm. The more resistant you are to something like that, the bigger a hole it is in your knowledge.'


learn by doing.