Back in the Shed

Hi everyone, thank you for your patience... my wife and I are now back after a fabulous trip to the Far East!

Shall be posting more about it soon, now its time to wrangle the jet lag...

"We are sailing.."

Just as Rod Stewart sang in his famous song, my wife and I are sailing a cruise in the far east from tomorrow and shall be 'out of the Office' for a couple of weeks. I am not sure if we will be able to connect to the internet so it may be quiet here for a while!

So look out for us and as soon as we can, I shall post pictures and an update on our journey with the cruise!

We are visiting lots of countries including China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and Thailand!

See you soon!

"We are sailing, We are sailing......."

Malta cartoon crazy

Just back from the Cartoonists Club of Great Britain's mini convention! We had a wonderful five days and had lots of fun and loads of drawing along with making new friends!

This photo shows us playing cartoon charades!

Birthday Boy!

Celebrating my 50th Birthday this weekend, yikes!

Having a great time and thank you for all the kind birthday wishes!

Please click the voice memo to hear a short message from yours truly!

Flowers

The Lily is both a beautiful and fragrant flower. It is also my wife's favourite flower and we enjoy having Lily's in our home!

Flowers are also a great subject to draw! One of the best ways to help an artist improve and or understand shapes and structure, is to practice drawing flowers.

In nature there are basic shapes and these can be seen in flowers. From circles to triangles, they sit together to make the basic structure that the human see's before it. An artist sometimes has to get behind the beauty and see the basic shapes. In flowers this is a good approach. It is easy to be over awed by the colours and texture of the flower and so miss the basic shapes that are there in front of you.

So next time you look at flowers, after enjoying the beauty, try to see the basic shapes that go to make up what you see before you!

Wedding Caricature

A Few pictures from the wedding of James & Charlotte last year, (Charlotte very kindly sent these to me!) that took place at Gaynes Park in Epping, Essex. The wedding was wonderful and Gaynes Park is a great venue and location for any wedding!

Click here to visit the Gaynes Park website

The guests enjoyed all the fun of the caricatures and we all had a great night, laughing and joking around with the caricatures proving to be very popular!

As you can see above, guests will wait their turn to be drawn and while doing so, have the opportunity to watch as I draw the people sitting and it provides some great entertainment as you can tell by the smile on the lady's face in the back, waiting for her turn to be drawn!

In this photo yo can see me concentrating as I draw a caricature! I try my very best to draw something that is fun and pleasing, so that guests will want to take them home and get them framed to hang in their homes!

I am often told that my caricatures are hung in the toilet but I really don't mind, as hanging anywhere is good and much better than being thrown in a draw or a loft, never to be seen again!

So if they hang my work, I am very happy, regardless of its position or place!

If your planning a wedding and want something a little different and great fun, then why not contact me to talk about how I can help you! Thanks! Have a great weekend! I have a wedding to draw and entertain at tonight!

iPad 3

A sketch exploring a caricature that has no direct facial features but instead is made up of eyebrows, nose, moustache and that's about it but it kind of works.

Sometimes a caricature is about what you leave out of the drawing!

This sketch was drawn in ZenBrush on my iPad version one.

Rumour has it that Apple will announce on March 9th that the iPad 3 is about to become available!

If so I may just upgrade once the iPad 3 is in the stores!

Chocolate

A crazy idea I had for a new brand of chocolate...

Not sure if I am crazy but something about the name 'Ugly Chocolate' seems fun and appealing!

I wonder who comes up with names for confectionary and candy? I would love to be a fly on the wall during that meeting as they bash ideas around for names of candy bars...
Please click below to Tweet this post and share with your Twitter followers and also on the Google + button to share more over social media as I really appreciate your support, Thank You!

Warrior sketch

I love to sketch when I can as it helps me explore ideas and improve my art, something I am always trying to do!

Here is a rough sketch I drew on my iPad in the ZenBrush app and I used my finger!

It is a Chinese Warrior ready to fight!

I love watching the movies of these type of subjects and I was watching one when I drew this, it inspired me to pick up my iPad and just sketch!

The only thing I forgot to add to the drawing was a goatee beard to the warrior himself as they all appear to have these, but I am very happy with the result of the rough sketch as it captures the feel of the moment before he swipes his swords in anger against his enemy!

I hope you like it too!


Please click and plus one this on Google for me, thanks:

Flower photography

As you may know, my hobby is photography and I love shooting with my Nikon D80 DSLR camera.

Every now and then I am able to capture a good photo. It is realistic to expect that most photos that you take will be ok, but a few will be great!

I hope that you will agree with me that this photo is a very good one.

I took the shot last month while on vacation in Sarasota, Florida. It had been raining all morning and early in the afternoon, as the rain began to stop, we were in a rose garden and the roses had the droplets of rain on them and look beautiful. I added a dark fill on the right side of the original photo but nothing else was changed or altered from the original shot.