Self Portrait

Here's me after work. Look at my dirty hair.


Sketched with Wacom on computer from observation in mirror.

Doodles on the train

A selection of doodles and observation drawings from travels in Italy in the last weeks. The first is Observation, the 2nd Imagination (kind of). I'll be moving on to Hell for Leather design for the next few weeks so I'll be posting a series of Hell for Leather posts here and on Cobweb Games.

Other news: I've been commissioned by a famous journalist to paint a picture for his beautiful luxury apartment. More details as and when they become available. ;)

Holidays and Deadlines

Such a long time. I've been posting a little bit on concept art but not much. Here's some life drawings for you to look at for now. I'll be a bit more regular here for at least a couple of weeks as I try to get the art work for Hell For Leather finished. Thanks for reading.

Hey all. Just to duplicate a couple of posts from conceptart.org: I'm bashing away at drawing but I don't feel I'm really getting anywhere. Probably I need to be more consistent and try also to copy some master paintings.

Ash gave me some brushes to play around with so hopefully this weekend I'll have some fun with that.

Here they are anyway:

Holiday in Brazil? Sounds good to me!

Hey Paulo! Thanks for the invitation. Fede and I are planning a holiday, when is the best time to come to Rio? We really want to come and visit!!!!!

For the rest of you here's a sketch I did of an Asian woman as a study of values.

Apple on Conceptart.org

Today's picture: Apple

Digital Painting Tutorial

Hello. I did this last night. I'm planning to paint some onions later and also read over the full manuscript for Hell for Leather.

You can check out my sketchbook on ConceptArt.org now anytime you want. I've put a link over there on the right! ----->

And I will probably be uploading all my art work up on cobwebgames as well in the art section just to be sure no one can miss it. :)

Daily Sketches

So here's the first few daily sketches. I have relearned a few key practices (that to be perfectly honest I thought I never would have forgotten in the first place): Light and form...

While the portrait of Ms Degli Esposti took more than a day the hand was done on a Wacom at the end of a lunch break and the man looking into the valley took about 2 hours. I know I've got to speed up but I'm happy enough with what I am learning if not entirely with what I am drawing.

Hell for Leather in Beta

I currently have two projects on th go at the moment.

The first is a daily sketch for conceptart.org which I will begin on Monday although I have been warming up the last week by trying to get something finished every lunch time in work. Also to note that on this project I will be more or less exclusively working digitally ie I will not be sketching traditionally. This is to help me to train myself for the work place.

The second is that I'm working as main artist for illustrating a table top role playing game published by cobweb games. I've already posted some of my artwork up there so I thought I may as well start posting some stuff here too. While I get my creative juices flowing by reading the beta draft I will also be scanning in some of my old doodles and posting them here for fun.

Illustration coming soon

Hey folks.

Here's some of my latest life drawing, I am too lazy to compose them nicely into one sheet so you'll have to just scroll through them (I apologise for the horrible composition on the blog post, it's me versus html and I'm loosing).

They're pretty large so click em up and zoom 'round.

I'm starting illustrating now for Sebastian's game "Hell for Leather". Check out his site here:

www.cobwebgames.com

Looking forward to filling his book with ink pictures of normal people doing horrible things.

J out.

Life Drawing Sketches

Wednesday nights squished into my company's largest closed room we now have 10 artists a programmer and a writer all huddled around a posed nude trying to remember how to draw. All thanks to me!

It went well and I'm proud because I actually got off my arse and did something for once instead of just talking about it.





Anyway here are the first classes drawings. There are two large hand drawings which I found in my notebook and I haven't posted anywhere so I included them as well.

Next post will be about some web designing I'm doing for my brother. :)

Just back from Berlin

After some weeks flying in and out of London Stansted, it's been a bit of a blur. But an inspiring blur. Barcelona was buzzing with artistic energy. Art was breathing through the graffiti and the festivals were alive with creativity.

London's modern take is a bit more stilted but no less impressive. In between the giant public spaces are an overwhelming plethora of venues to watch the latest art spring forth. Satchi held me for a few hours showing off the newest expressionism oozing from the States and the Tate Modern's entrance looks like you're in an inverted Titanic before she ran into Pingu's house.

But Berlin is the Queen. She has art in every flake of plaster, in every glued poster and every hasty stencil. The walls are covered with expression from the lude to the beautiful. Screaming kids and goggley eyed aliens, a girl pointing a wand at a star and an astronaut with a gasmask. Fish sculpted into the walls, toilets without an inch of raw paint, whole shops painted in rainbows and working 10" pink sewage pipes coming out of the ground like some sort of steel loch ness Flying Circus sketch. The people too looked like they dropped out of "Brazil" and I'm sure Mr. Gilliam spent some years either living here or building this city.

I must go back. I had about 1 billion ideas while I was there and the air of Cambridge has almost dried them up. On that note I'll say danke und tschuess!

Enjoy the pictures of my next few paintings and a slightly better version of Chiara. I'm opening up for more photo contributions. No subject this time I just want any picture you'd like to make into a painting. :)

Chiara

Chiara is finished and I'm starting on the first of the "Ape Car" series which will be called "La Macchinina Azzurrina". You're going to love these. The tiniest, coolest cars in the world. I'm going to make them my celebrities.

So what did I learn from this painting? A lot really. First off the joy of using more paint. It loosens the creative muscles, provides room for happy accidents and allows longer blending times to make more sophisticated choices. I've also discovered I'm not much good with a paint brush yet. I used only a palette knife which I had a lot more control of than I did with the brush.

Artistically I was hoping for something a little more pointilist and something resembling the kind of cheap compression that we got so used to seeing all around us in phone camera photography. That kind of greeny pixelated blur. I wanted the image to resemble a woman lost in thought and lost in digital inaccuracy. In a state of limbo between reality and perception. This is a further study on the inaccuracy of memory and of the manipulation of past perception where the recognisable is distorted into the individuals fantasy to become what they need and desire from what they have experienced. To distort the past in order to define themselves.

So look on my new work and also my little collection which has grown from one little picture to three. :)

Started another

Hey all.. Probably no one still reads this. Anyway here's my newest piece. It's just the first coat. Lots more pointilism style painting layers before it's finished. :)

What's that? Another painting?

It's back, thanks to a cunning schedule designed to fool one's self into following one's ambitions instead of lounging around fretting about them (courtesy of my dear brother), J the artist is back on form. With another masterpiece laid out before you all and three more in production all is looking well.

I will now stop referring to myself in the third person as this may be psychoanalyzed at a later date and lead to the discovery that I am, indeed, self obsessed.

It took some time to finish this one but it was time spent idling rather than working. With my new schedule, which I started two weeks ago, I am spending more time painting than I have since I left Italy. I work a two week schedule with the first week on painting in photoshop and learning other software techniques and every second week it's back to pure traditional painting with brushes and tubes of paint. During these weeks I do at least half an hour's solid work a day which normally eats into two or three hours.

Last week I learnt to use Channels in photoshop for selection/masking/greyscaling.

This week I've finished a painting, primed three canvases and started to update this blog. Now I'm going to scan this one and let you dwell on ir while I start the next ones.

The painting is called Rick.

Thanks man, I miss you. J out.

Things have changed

Change was in the air and old dreams were left aside for another future. New ones sprung in their place and were nurtured in to fruition. When each cool drop of rain runs down my neck I am reminded me that the portico's and protection of Bologna are far away. Here the streets are open offering little in the way of architectural umbrellas but in the same instance there are no barriers, nothing to obscure your fields of view. Bologna may shelter the ombrophobiacal pedestrian but it also shelters the mind and obscures not only the storm clouds but any vision or ambition for the future.

I have arrived in Cambridge where I can see a future. It is not some grand and poetic thing for tales by the fire. Nor some thing that gives the right to brag among the elite at a party of some circle of society or another. It is the simple truth that the future will be calm. It will be exciting. It will be happy and I will be content.

My love, my job and my home. To paint, to work, to live and love. Is it really as simple as this?

A change has come and gone and I feel displaced but displaced from something old. So very very old that being part of it was like being sucked into it's decaying history. Displaced into something new and something fresh. The change has come and gone and the change was good.

Art is Hard: Truck: Update 04

I just finished putting on the layer of modelling paste and the surface is textured the way I want. I'll sand some areas that are too rough but mostly I think I'll leave the texture. The modelling paste/paint mix is very satisfying to use but because it is made to dry textured it is very thick and not so precise. As you can imagine with this painting I need to be fairly precise and with the thick paint it's taken me a long time to get the textured layer finished.

I apologise for the blurry photo..

Next step: Sanding, re-painting yellow bits.

News here: Waiting for an interview; working in Irish pub; looking forward to Dan coming over on Wednesday. Byee!

Art is Hard: Truck: Update 03

So I've finished the basic undercoat. You will notice that I have once more changed my mind and now I'm back to mostly yellow (not for aesthetic reasons but because I think it makes the message I want to say more powerful). If you have a look at this reference picture I'm using, you can see how I want the different coloured areas to appear (more or less) in the finished painting. I will also be adding oil stains to parts on the left hand side.

My next steps will be to build up a thick coat of coloured modelling paste to add some texture to the rusting layer of yellow paint. Without this layer the blue and rusted areas seem more elevated, like the rust and blue have been painted on to the yellow. Obviously this is not the effect I want.

Once the texturing is complete I will work into the rust and steel areas. After that I will add stains and dirt to the yellow and wash out areas that I want "bleached by the sun".

I suppose the final stages will be adding gloss and glazes to the shiny areas followed by sanding and light rust stains and oil dripping effect. I would like the oil to have a organic quality like blood dripping form a wound.

Art is Hard: Truck: Update 02

Hey again...3 posts in one day. Sorry for anyone who is obsessive and needs to read everything. I'll keep this one short. This is the style (roughly) of the final painting. I like the bold colours but I will definitely be washing parts of them out and the rust will be less symbolic than in the photoshop version.

Off to paint again and apply to more jobs.. Bye!

Life Update

Photots:
Largest doughnut I have ever eaten. Also the tastiest..
Fede suprised me with a breakfast. Italy is great. Look at all those tiny little cakes.

Ok, I forgot to post that blog post earlier so I have actually done the photoshop work now.. I'll post that in a few minutes once I have finished a little bit of an update as to what's going on here.

So last time I talked about my life I was all set to go to college, I had received my Italian ID and was looking forward to a life of pub work, teaching English, freelancing for Ion, studying Italian and generally painting and enjoying myself.

Then I realised a few very important things.
1: The first that I am increasingly poor and dependant. The idea of being this way for at least 3 years before I finish my degree followed by who knows how long suffering as a poor artist is too much for me at the moment so I decided like my grandfather before me to work at something I love at the same time maintaining my painting.

2: In Italy to work is very hard, to succeed and rise some sort of metaphorical career ladder is nearly impossible. So for Fede it would be much better to get out of this crashing economy.

So we decided together that I should get a job in computer games and that Fede explore her own ambitions in whatever job she chooses. And everyone knows in Europe computer games = the Uk, so off we go!

PS I am applying for a few jobs at the moment so wish me luck!

Finally a post about Art is Hard: Painting 01

Hi all. It's been a mad week. I'll tell you more later about that but before I'll give you a sneak peek into how the painting is going.

Slowly is the right word for this one but I think the care I have taken will translate well into the final version. For example I have a clear indication of the dark and white areas which are easy to confuse if you just outline them. I also have decided to change the colour I originally thought of (acid yellow) to a more washed and pastel blue. I think the yellow is too obvious and crass and a little too pop art for the themes I am exploring.

The blue I want will have a subtlety, a blue to remind the viewer of something maritime. A rusting blue you might see at a harbour on a boat or old barrel. I think this will contrast better both with the red/brown colours of the underlying rust and thematically with the setting of dessert Iraq adding another twist to the memory. Constantly inverting the memory until it's barely perceptible.

Next stage will be to test out some blues in Photoshop. After that I want to start laying down the rust undercoat and the blue paint undercoat. I will be using modelling paste and a lot of glazing and varnishes later which I will describe as I go.

Oh and a lesson learnt already: If you use a lot of pencil on your gesso to block out areas of a painting make sure you use fixative or all your colours get muddy. :(

Lulu Mae

Hey all. Sorry about the lack of posts. At the moment I'm organising moving back to the UK so things are on hold. For the moment in case anybody hasn't seen it I'm reposting Lulu Mae. this also for the ease of use for potential employers who don't want to search through Youtube..

Art is Hard: Update: Competition Winners

It was tough to pick one so I picked two. Here's the who and why in brief:

Winner 1: Rick with his Iraq picture. I'm going to turn this inside out in a graphic style. This will be abstracted slightly but not beyond comprehension. It will have a strong base colour with a line drawn in dripping paint highlighting the details. Possibly with some flat areas to give a bit of form.
Final output: Painting for transfer to T-Shirt.

Winner 2: Sebastian with his Thailand picture. This will be fairly heavily abstracted with a lot of use of texture and layering. Dripping and sanding may be used as well as thickener.
Final output: Painting.

Thanks a lot to the other entrants, it's really helping to keep my mind busy, full of analysis. I'm sorry I can't do everyone's. This month's theme is memory, please enter again!
J Out.

PS Become a follower of my blog if you like (You can do it down there somewhere on the right sidebar).

Sono un italiano!

It's true!
Now I'm a resident of Italy, well almost, I still have to wait for the final bureaucracy of proof that I'm actually living in my apartment (via a police raid). So in just a few weeks I'll be signed up to university and I'll start the application process for getting a full driving licence for the moped.

In all it took over 3 months for this application to be compiled. The last addition was working somewhere with a legal contract (hence the factory work). In the county council office it took an hour and a half to compile the form. Check it out. It's the size of a broadsheet. I was laughing when they showed it. They also gave me a receipt to prove I have it all filled out officially. At this stage I was ready to go but no.. i mustn't forget the all important second reciept.

Not a copy but an entirely different reciept to prove that I have recieved a copy of the first reciept which proved I completed the form. I was wondering where this was going to end but luckily it was just the two. The reciept of the form and the receipt of the reciept of the form..

Lavoro and Art

First off thanks to all the entries for the first Art is Hard competition. I'm still debating which of the photo ideas I'm going to paint.. Perhaps I will choose two as there are a couple that gave me ideas as soon as I saw them. I will have decided by tomorrow and I will post which and why along with what I plan to do with the image(s) I choose.

Secondly, I have started working in Italy. In case anyone isn't aware, it's in a cigarette filter factory at night from 2 until 6 in the morning 6 days a week for 700 Euro a month. I get to clean the floors, windows, walls and machines of the largest producer of filters in Europe. Glamorous.

I'm also starting to work in a pub in two weeks two nights a week and I'm just finishing studying how to teach English in preparation for October.

So that's it for now, I better get changed for work.. Oh I spent the weekend in Trieste by the way on the beach in the sun and ate beautiful fish and drank beautiful Friuli white wine for free.. Just in case you thought I was a bit miserable, sorry to disappoint you but Italy is still great.