My vision of the character ‘Smaug’ from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’.
Pencil sketch, coloured digitally on IbisPaint X.
Here is a passage from The Hobbit describing Smaug’s appearance: “There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed.”
For Inktober this year, I am following along with Lisa Congdon’s CreativeBug course. I’ve made a few extra rules for myself for an extra challenge which includes trying to maintain a mostly black and white theme. Excited to see where it takes me.
Depicting the young peoples lack of real identity coming from a lack of any real sub culture except looking good on a social platform and trying to become somebody on t.v or on a billboard. This is only led to a lack of respect for each other and the notion that what you own or buy makes you more special than the next person, this in turn leads to robbing each other in chase of a fancy phone that will be out of fashion in 1 year. Human conciousness at this point in time had been completely eroded.
I'm traveling through England ans Scotland for the next two weeks, and of course that meant I had to start a new travel sketchbook! I found it fitting that the first page shows the route I will be on.
Pen drawing of the gate into St Cedmas Church in Larne, Northern Ireland. I got married in the church in 2004. My wife’s parents were married here too in the 1960s.
This is an acrylic painting that I made for someone I was close to. We would often take turns of one of us being overly affectionate and the other being playfully annoyed. I tried to capture this dynamic in the painting of these two owls. This painting was an experiment in portraying animals, something I don't do often, and using my paint knife as a tool in my paintings.
