WIP Continued

As promised - fifteen days ago! - some more WIP pics; sorry, A wip pic singular, of our birds punting by lantern ligh upon a "....bird made lake...". (Haven't got around to down-loading any other images from my camera as yet. I am keeping a record though, so you can look forward to some more boring images when next you visit...not many folk visiting so far tho....??? Oh well...)

Well, you ask, what's been added? Let me see...some more reflected lights, flowers and foliage painted in, cushions and some work on the costumes of the ducks in the foreground boat....Have I missed anything? Let me know if I have...Oh, yes...medium/s...sepia under drawing and acrylic gouache on on Bainbridge, cold pressed Illustration board. (The, so called, acrylic gouache, is beautifully translucent like the watercolours I used to swear by but, unlike watercolour pigments, it is far more versatile - for me at least - and I find it holds up very well with multiple glazes enabling a depth of colour that I just couldn't achieve with the traditional alternative. Shadows too, can be rendered so that they glow as they sometimes do on a hot Australian, Summer's day.

Hope you like what you've seen....Cheers 'til next time...RWS

Blue, yellow, red and green; a WIP

Hey folks. I'm back after a short absence - my PC now has a huge memory and loads of RAM; it's been a bit poorly of late...slow and some programmes not running properly.

I have continued to work on my personal project, Birds of a Feather, while my machine has been at the computer hospital, and the images with this post are WIP snaps I've taken over the past week or so. The first image is 3H pencil on heavy tracing paper, hence the rather poor reproduction - it was the final image in my preliminary explorations of the subject. Can't find any of the preliminary pencil drawings that lead up to this one - they were done back in 1990 and are buried away in the store-room of the studio. Hope someone out there likes them.

Cheers. RWS

Progress and Finished Pic

Hi folks, I said in my first post that preliminary and progress images are as interesting to me as a finished work, here then are a couple of images for you to view along those lines. I forgot to take photos of the earlier steps, prelims etc, but I hope that for the present, these will suffice to show at least one of the steps I go through when creating an illustration.

This is for a children's picture book that I wrote back in the1990s, Birds of a Feather. I have several finished line drawings on tracing paper for this personal project and I'm intending to work them up as finished colour pieces while I have a break from commissioned work. So, you'll be seeing a few more of them in the coming weeks. (The text for this children's book is in ryhme and metre and the lines which accompany this particular image are -: ...So, as the moon rose above the great house, the guests on the lawn played, "Kitten and Mouse",....)

Hope you like them. RWS

Some Pen and Inks

Hey folks. Thought I'd dip into the ancient portfolio and reef out some pen & inks for you to look at. Some of these are drawings, the knights, I did back in the 1980s for a project that unfortunately didn't come to fruition. The furry Australian animals in Manga, Flash Gordon and cowboy mode were for a set of children's activity /colouring books. When I was a child colouring books were always so bleeding boring and the line work rather crude. I tried to give the eventual users of the images a bit of finer linework and subjects they could really get their teeth into...the books sell well so perhaps I succeeded - either that or the parents bought them for themselves...?

Pen and ink as a medium has always been one of my favourite forms of expression but I don't have the opportunity to undertake what I would call, major works, in B&W these days. Not that I don't enjoy using colour, I do, but the sheer tactile pleasure of the pen across the drawing paper can't, for me, be beaten.

Hope you like them even if they are a bit dated. RWS

Wind in the Willows

Here are some of the sixty odd illustrations that were commissioned from a publisher back in late 2001. The Wind in the Willows is a book that I had wanted to illustrate for a number of years and so was a dream come true. It took me two years of intense but enjoyable slog to complete. Once the colour scans of the pictures were completed the illustrations went off to the framers - a Christmas exhibition of them at The Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide almost sold out in two days; most likely for nostagia reasons rather than my artistry.

For reasons which are inexplicable to me, the book, (along with several others in advanced stages of production) was never published - so, although I got to carry out my dream commission, I still don't have The Wind in the Willows with my illustrations, gracing my book shelf.

Hope you like what you see....RWS

Some Random Illustrations

These are in no particular order, just picked at random from my portfolio. Hope you enjoy viewing them. RWS

Hey, I'm a Blogger!

Well folks, never thought that I'd do it, but here I am posting my very first entry.

Not really sure at the moment what it is that I wish to acheive other than to present my art/illustration work to a wider world. I'll probably make some entries that will be nothing but rants about the state of the world, politics and social issues, but I hope that these will be infrequent -I'd much rather let my images speak for themselves.

I intend to post not only finished works but works in progress, preliminary drawings for the same and random studies. Personally, I am fascinated by the processes that illustrators, (artists one and all) go through when creating a new image - it gives a wonderful insight into the inner creative impulses that drive us all.

So, having stated that I am more about images than words, I should include one with this post.

Hope at least some of you like it.

RWS