ARTWORK

When I get the time I dabble in the graphical arts. That includes both canvas and on-screen pixels. First up are some of my works in paint, usually involving calligraphy (another hobby of mine). Past that you will find my latest dabblings in the digital art world - mostly designed as background wallpapers for your desktop. Most of the images are available in 1600x1200 and 1024x768 (though 1600x1200 is the preferred resolution to do them justice IMHO).

Hand Paintings

These are some works I made with old fashioned brush and ink. It represents only a small part of my art collection, but is a reasonable sampling of my more recent work. All calligraphy is pure free hand with nothing but brush and ink; no tracing, no pre-sketching.

This was an early texture experiment. I was curious to see what sorts of interesting textures I could create. Unfortunately this photo doesn't really show the actual depth of the piece - it has a lot of layering in different media, so is more physically textured than what shows here.
This is a painting based of poetry by Nicole Blackman. Red seemed, naturally enough, the ideal colour in which to render this, so I tried to create a deep red texture onto which I could apply the calligraphy. This involved much layering of acrylics and inks onto canvas - and I ended up rewriting the calligraphy about 20 times as I mostly painted over it, etc. In the end this made the words seem to stain the canvas rather than be painted on it - an effect I am rather fond of.
This time I went more classical, with a quote from The Dry Salvages by T.S. Eliot. A sombre quote, blues and grays seemed appropriate. This time however I sought out heavy water colour card to give it a suitably washed out feeling.
And on to Yeats, for something a (little) bit more upbeat. No texture this time - well only the texture provided by a very rich (almost cloth-like) handmade paper. All the focus here was on rendering the calligraphy as well as possible - something that can prove to be a remarkably difficult task indeed. I rate this as my most effective calligraphy yet rendered with ink and brush.

Digital Art Set 1

Nicole Blackman is a New York poet who has a very fine turn of phrase. Her first book of poetry "Blood Sugar" is in it's second printing, but mostly she gives live performances. Her poetry does provide some wonderful inspiration for artworks, which is what I have here.

All original photos of Nicole were found at nicoleblackman.com

From Ms. Blackman's "What I Want For Christmas (And Other Holidays Where We Speak of Deadmen)" - I found some photo's of Ms. Blackman that I thought were ideal for the quote, so I spent some time reworking the images to a larger scale, building a composition and then working the piece over in photoshop to create the final look I wanted. [1600x1200] [1024x786]

From Ms. Blackman's "Holy" - This was a case of the other way around: while hunting for suitable photos for some of my earlier work, I encountered a rather small image of Nicole in wicker wings - something that was too good to pass up - from there it was a hunt to find a suitable quote. A lot of work went into this due to the low quality of the initial photo. The entire background is composited in from another random photo, and I endeavoured to give the whole image a rough broken look to contrast with the theoretical purity of the subject matter (angels etc.) [1600x1200] [1024x786]

Digital Art Set 2

Some people have questioned my use of the term "goth" with respect to these images, and I apologise if I offend anyone - but I simply lack a suitable handle with which to describe the class of image style. I am open to suggestions.

All original photos in this section come courtesy of Dusk Falls in Eden

While surfing I came across some photos that were just begging to get treated and made into wallpapers. This was the first - the original image was quite small so some work was required to make it viable at this high a resolution. However that was alleviated by making the image have paint effects (a variety of photoshop filters to various layers, with different compositing between layers), and then repainting the image where required (including some blood tears just to make things interesting). I'm in the process of creating areworked version using the GIMP's more powerful paint effect filters. [1600x1200] [1024x786]

More from the same series - this time in a more etheral guise. I needed a background with a violet theme (lacking any decent ones at this scale), so I put this together. Obvious influences are from Dark Alloy, who has provided me with a myriad of indigo and violet backgrounds at 1024x768. For that reason I am not offering this at that scale - if you want something that size go check out Dark Alloy's work instead. [1600x1200]