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“Thanks for taking a poke at that, urm, the catch a ride, not my momma’s parts”. Scoota, brilliant. Since my internet provider (Thanks BE) sold out to Sky, (thank for nothing anti-monopoly committee) my packet loss has been stupidly high. No tinternet games for me, no Planetside 2 >:(

Fortunatly I was able to pick up Borderlands 2 which came free with a spare copy of Borderlands 1 (of courseI already have it). Lots of shoot-em-in-the-face LAN action has been occuring in my life, and for once my wife actually likes an FPS game. Of course she now preferes to play Borderlands 2 on my PC, so I will have to purchase one of her own in the Steam sale.

With classic quotes like “Catcharide” and “Kill him my minion” I was just crusin’ for a bruisin’ on the whole Borderlands cell shading. So this is to add a little variaty to the collection, based on a combination of cell shading, cartoon imagery and of course Borderlands.

Welcome to Punchy, who happens to be my Beserker characters name. Guess what, he doesn’t use Rocket Launchers.

Ahhh, well I have a new follower on Twitter, so I thought it was about time I painted him. The idea came from a picture of Rob in his full armour, and one of his friends said “You need a Halo”.

I enjoyed the kingfisher picture from a few weeks ago and wanted to know if I could produce something similar but all under my own steam. See what you think with week twenty eight, Sir Robert.

P.S. To truely appreciate the picture, you need to stand far away. To help with that, this is what it looks like ‘smaller’

Oh bugger. When your painting a picture of someone who you haven’t seen in twenty five years, you can only hope you don’t offend them. One of my friends on Facebook (Hi Chris) changed is profile picture the other day (for all of one day), but one day is all that required to steal photo’s from there. Actually I asked his permission first.

Anyhow, the original picture had been fed through one of those aging photoshop filters and it was the sepia style thatI liked. So I’ve gone for a mix of a single colour and black to try and get a sepia look PLUS (no expense spaired in the excitement department here) a two area tone effect, where the background is one colour and the foreground the other.

Hope you enjoy and lets hope Chris likes it as well 😀 As usual click the image for a full the screen version.

I supposed when your painting fifty two pictures in the space of a year, some of them are going to look a duffer. I was following a particular technique in one of my books, and on reflection neither my painting or the example look that good.

Saying that, tastes are all different and some of you out there may actuall find it pleasing to the eye. Oh and the thing by the trees on the left, It’s a well.

This one was complete at the start of the week, but I don’t want to get into the habit of posting early and I do like to keep you all in suspense.

A gentle landscape this week.

Bit of an experiment this week. Whenever I paint portraits I outline areas of colour. Before I apply any paint the picture looks like a complicated paint by numbers but without the numbers.

So this week I’ve painted a "paint by numbers" without the numbers. That is I’ve blocked in some areas and purposely applied flat washes of the same colours to different parts of the picture. In fact I"ve used eleven colours in all, and because they are water colours and near impossible to mix to the same colour again, I painted each "˜number" at the same time and all in one sitting.

Stand back (or shrink the picture) to get the best effect. I quite like it and might paint a few more piccies through the year in the same style.

Trumpets blaring, drums banging, swords clashing. Raaar! “To Battle, To Battle”.

A commission this week, suggested by one of my good friends James Jones, of one of my good feinds James Jones (and yes I have spelt that correct).

So I watched Coraline for the first time the other day. Of course that night I then dreamt of a beautiful women, wearing a blue silk dress, with neon blue hair sitting next to me at the theatre. She didn’t say anything too me, just sat very close with our legs lightly touching. Being a dream it wasn’t really a theatre and more like a long table we were sitting at, and the show wasn’t in front of us, but to the side. After a while she moved away, I watched some more of the theatre then looked down the table three seats in her direction. She was sitting there, signing (as in sign language) to thin air. It was at that moment I realised she was deaf and that was why she hadn’t said anything.

I moved down to sit next to her, holding my hand up I whispered “Hi”. She then signed that she knew my Grandad and had often had conversations with him across this table in sign language (all of which I also heard as a whisper). She then told me that because she knew my Grandad that she loved me and we kissed.

I then woke up before I could get any of her clothes off, but that is the nature of dreams 😀

Anyhow, I took it as a sign of what to paint next and after a while kind of realised that the girl in my dreams was very much like Katie Fey (aka Eugenia Diordiychuk). So I painted a picture of a girl with bright blue hair.

“Katie Fey” IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. If your searching for reference pictures BE WARNED – do it in the privacy of your own home, with the curtains drawn.

However my picture is safe.

Hmm. What can I say. Didn’t fancy thinking this week so I decided to follow one of the painting guides from one of my many books. Of course it was only once I started the painting I realised I was following one of the authors who jumps from “placea flat wash on the forground” to “and add some detail” with no inbetween. So like I’ve placed a flat wash and now your saying “finish the painting”.

So I spent more time thinking and interpreating the advice then I do when I paint from scratch. Ahh well. Up until about half an hour to finish it looked rather pants. Then, like most times, it fell into place.

So I’ve been playing a lot of Batman Arkham City. This week I was going to go back to old school, that is my old school. As a youngester I used to paint in arcylics inked in drawings. It was quick, fun and looked cool, kind of like a comic book cell shaded effect. Anyhow while looking for cool Batman poses to colour in, I came across another character – Harley Quinn. I like the updated look of Harley in Arkham city (and I can’t stand the old checkerboard outfit).

So I though hey – lets give Harley six inches. Six inches of canvas that is, she’s painted on an almost miniture scale of 6 inch by 4 inch.

So watch ya waiting for, you wanna Rev up ya Harley dontcha ?