Artists Hellbent with Drug-Fuelled Desire

Here's an hilarious 1960s book cover posted by David Thorn Wenzel on FaceBook.
I thought that those of you who do a bit of life drawing might enjoy it.
I'm afraid I don't know the name of the illustrator who did the cover.

Portrait Study of Amanda in Four Stages

When I first saw our new life model Amanda, I have to admit that whilst I was really keen to do a portrait study of her, I was quite daunted by the prospect of rendering her white dreadlocks in paint.
I considered just not tackling the dreads at all, but in the end I decided to knuckle down, look very hard at the subject, and paint away as usual.
This shows the two and a half hour painting process in four steps.
Amanda is a great model, and I was pretty pleased with the final result.

From "When Jessie Came Across the Sea"

This is a big spread from When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest.
It was the first picture I did from that book, and I did it as a way of breaking myself into the project.
This was really going in the deep end, as this scene has so much detail and required a lot of research and working with models.
Often starting out on a new book I would tackle a spread that involves depicting the setting rather than close-up views of the characters. It means I can get some work under my belt, and so immerse myself deeper in the project before I start working with models.
I'm at that stage now with a book set in the desert in Africa, and I am enjoying drawing lots of landscapes with sand dunes and desert mountains. I'm even starting to enjoy drawing camels, which are among the goofiest looking creatures on God's earth.

Three Views of Stephanie

Following my recent post showing a painting of Stephanie in which I mentioned James Hanley's recent exhibition in Dublin, I've put together three paintings of Stephanie done by different artists at one life session.
The first is by me, the middle one is by James, and the painting on the right is by another life painting friend, Comhghall (pronounced Cole) Casey.
There are lots of great things about painting in a group setting, one of the most intriguing is being able to see how other artists choose to approach almost exactly the same subject matter.

Happy St Patrick's Day to you all.

Happy St Patrick's Day to you all.
My new studio has a great view of Dame Street in central Dublin and we brought a bunch of kids and a lot of sweeties in for a great day watching the parade.
As usual it was a wonderful, colourful event and this year it had a theme based on a "brilliant' short story by Roddy Doyle.
Here are a few pix of some of the paraders.
My favourite was Macnas's giant boy.

The Salmon Cariad

This was from my very first book,"A Bag of Moonshine" by Alan Garner.
I was delighted to find that I still have the original painting.
Cariad is "sweetheart" in Welsh, and after a pretty unpromising start, when she tries to drown him, these two end up living happily ever after.

Lucifer; The Light Carrier

When I was sharing a studio with a number of other illustrators some years ago we decided to produce a self promotional calendar.
I did this painting in response to the simple brief "Light" that we set for ourselves.
I found a print of it in my studio clear-out and enhanced the light effect in photoshop....the original was a bit lacklustre.
It's intriguing to me how Lucifer, the light carrier came to be one of the names associated with the Devil.
I was playing about a bit with preconceptions about light and dark, good and evil and even male and female in the image of an angel.

Life Study of Stephanie

I haven't posted a life painting for a while.
Here's one of Stephanie that I did just before Christmas.
With one thing and another, I have missed a lot of the Thursday life sessions, but I had a good full day's painting yesterday.