Loading the Ship by Lamplight

Here's another detail of one of the illustrations for the book I am just finishing up. 
The ship is being loaded and our hero and friends are on the gangway in the middle distance.

Bustling London...... Final State

Here is a scan of the finished painting which I have tweaked a little bit in Photoshop.
This is very much a picture to be looked at up close so that the viewer gets to scan over the various details and incidents.
It will be the first spread in the book and is very much designed to set the scene, to give a sense of the time and the place for the action to come in the rest of the book.

Medieval Street Rough ...Figures added

Here's how that medieval street scene is developing.
I have altered the view in the distance to include a bendy road down to the docks and I have added the various figures in the foreground.

Our protagonists are over on the far right trying to figure out a way to get safely on board a ship.

Medieval Street Setting

I've been enjoying inventing some nice old architectural settings for the book that I am working on at the moment.
The tones are added later in Photoshop.

"Illustrating the Fantastic in Life and in Art"

I always liked that image in the previous post, but felt that the grimness of the Spirit was compromised by the cheery household scene that I had to show behind him.
Anyway I couldn't resist tweaking it while I had the image in Photoshop.
As happens so often, simplifying the picture seems to improve it a great deal.

I will be talking about "Illustrating the Fantastic in Life and in Art" at the National Gallery of Ireland on Saturday as part of the Study Morning on Fables and Fairy Tales in Irish Art.
I might well use this picture as a darker example of my work.

Hell on Earth

The folks at Chemistry asked me to do another poster advertising a forthcoming series of articles in the Irish Examiner newspaper on the clergy in Ireland to-day.
They wanted a picture that looked like an old master painting but with a crowd of people in modern dress who are about to burn a priest at the stake. The scroll was my idea. What a fun brief!
Unfortunately I had a really short time to create the picture, so I developed a technique that is half oil painting and half Photoshop. I was very pleased with the result, which should start appearing on poster sites in Ireland next week.
Many thanks to all my friends and relations who volunteered to model for the crowd, and especially to my pal Giuseppe who was perfect as the priest.

Oh Well That’s Just Lovely, Isn’t It?

Here's how the wide version of that poster looks in situ.
Thanks to Broadsheet for that. They have a few funny comments on it at their blog under the heading "Oh Well That’s Just Lovely, Isn’t It?".


Thanks to fellow IGI member Annie West for the heads up on this one.

My Digital Christmas Card

I was a slow starter when it came to computers, but, when I discovered what could be done in Photoshop, I really got into it.
I haven't published any images that I have created in photoshop, but at some stage I would like to do a whole book digitally.



This image, which is based, of course, on Leonardo's The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, is typical of the jokey kind of personal work that I have created on my computer.
I made this one as a Christmas card in 2001, when our first son was about nine months old.
This was pretty much an indulgence, but it was also a great way to learn blending techniques.
You can see how I use photoshop when I am composing a picture in one of my step by step videos, "Making Fairy Tales" with Full Commentary Part 1

Roughs for the cover of The Gift of The Magi

Here are a couple of roughs for the cover of The Gift of The Magi.

The first is a quick sketch that I coloured in Photoshop, and you can see how I was trying to make the type work against the lightness of the window.

A few variations of this went back and forth between myself and Liz Woods, my designer at Walker Books. 

Liz is an extraordinary designer. She takes immense pains in getting every detail of a book cover just right, and is a very inspiring person to work with.

The next drawing is the final rough, but this also needed to be tweaked. I remember that the size of the table and chair in the foreground were a cause of much deliberation. Again, Photoshop makes it easy to change the size of elements like that, and to move them around.

And the last picture shows the almost finished painting. Look how much bleed there is. (That is the surplus area around the actual cover image) This is needed for wrapping around flaps etc, but it makes it very much more difficult to consider the essential image as you are painting it.