Creative BloQ Wallpaper Feature: Camels and Goldfish

Creative BloQ asked me to create a wallpaper for their weekly giveaway...and this week, it has been my turn to be featured! It also features a little bio and some words from me about the "camels" series.

I am super excited about this little feature as their previous wallpapers have been supplied by some legendary artists, such as last week's Jon Burgerman. Check out the rest of the wallpapers here.

You can download my camels to use as a desktop, and my oranda goldfishes as a wallpaper for your iPad! Here

Pet Portraits - gerbil babies, budgies and fancy goldfish

These are some pet portrait commissions I have completed recently.

This little series was a commission for a5-sized paintings of three gerbil portraits and one budgie. I worked from photo references but the client had some requests for little extras which I added in too.

 The rainbow was an unexpected request, and it called for some practice and experimenting with various techniques before I painted the final piece.

This handsome boy's name is Merlin, so he needed a bit of extra magic! 

Another recent pet portait was of this playful chappy named Bartholomew (the best name for a fish I have ever heard)

Fish Studies: Exploring movement through drawing, watercolours and ink.

I set myself the personal brief of capturing the fluidity and movement of fish. I decided to use a local pet shop for reference so I took my sketchbook along to do some studies of their various types of goldfish. 

 

I was also interested to find out how I would illustrate their transparency using my watercolours, so when I got home I added colour to the sketches:

I wanted to recreate the sense of life my initial pet shop drawings had and so it was suggested to me that I work at a very large scale and draw with very fluid lines. I used India ink and a large paintbrush on A1 (ish) sized card to produce new, very large, fish drawings:  

 

I experimented on some of the large scale ones with coloured inks, before altering the black ink lines in Photoshop to add more colour:

  

I then wanted to see if I could simplify the fishes' design so I restricted myself to only a few lines:

One of the tutors at my university wanted a photograph of my ink-fish obsession for the blog, and got me to lay them out around the studio! You can get a feel for how big each piece actually is!  (Click for a bigger view)

After photographing the large ink drawings, I printed them at A4 and A3 and experimented with my watercolours on top of them:

I found that I wanted to add colour to the whole of the image including the black lines, so I used Photoshop to add colour and after scanning in some separate watercolour textures, brought the two elements together:

I was now feeling like I was getting closer to a more polished outcome with my ink designs. I then completed a series of compositions and patterns to show the finished fish designs off:

I played around with other colours too; such as these reds for the moors, but I found they weren't "watery" enough in comparison to their blue versions.