Life's a Long Song

From one of my favourite song's ever, 'life's a long song' and you can 'take stock of the new day' with good cheer... Happy New Year everyone! It's 2018, and if you actually don't know this song (Life's a Long Song from the album Living in the Past) by Jethro Tull I'm chuffed to be the one to introduce you to it. Listen to it here.

I hope you all had a wonderful year and are excited about 2018 and what you can get out of it and put into it.

As you must know by now, I start my new year by blogging about what went on last year and looking ahead to the next. So this post is purely about that. Stay tuned though as I'll have news and announcements coming soon which I'll blog about this week also.

In 2018 I had many private commissions I can't share on here unfortunately and it left me with time to make only two witches this year (yep...yikes!) and also a Captain Hook maquette. The year also saw magazine features about my work including an article on the Peninsular Press, a presence at the CTN Animation Expo, some fun YouTube videos, and trips to places such as Costa Rica where I got a tremendous amount of inspiration which I'll apply to new works.

I ended the year with a fantastic night out at the Ace Theater in Los Angeles where I saw Dita Von Teese's live performance. Whilst we're on the topic of this dynamic performer, I'd like to make a small shout out to someone I consider the most uniquely imaginative artist of our time. That is Franz Szony. His style has been described as bizarre and magical, his genre 'illustrative photography' and I love his work because each image is like a window into a familiar beautiful, ethereal world of the past yet it's so fresh and new, and like nothing I've ever seen before. You should take a look at his site here. He created this wonderful image of Dita Von Teese.



The year's round up....!

Some witchy sculptures / maquettes...

Other miniature and scale set work...

Captain Hook maquette...

Some publicity and events...

My re-vamped website (find it here at www.tall-tales.com)

Trips and travel... ;)

Shout Outs!

First, a bit about what I've been up to... I ran out of brown clay and so had to put my tree sculpt on the back-burner whilst I wait for my Amazon delivery, so in the meantime I've planned and started painting an illustration for the book 'Good Witches Bad Witches'. (See my progress below)

I've always been inspired by Norman Rockwell's paintings which show a gathering of people (for instance his 'Golden Rule' which you can see here), and for ages I've had in mind an illustration of my 'bad witches' in a similar crowd setting. And if you're interested n learning more about Norman Rockwell you should check out his page on Artsy (here). Artsy is a great resource for art collectors by the way, so you should out the site anyway!

The first sketch was just to see how many faces (from my sketchbook here) I could get onto one page. Then I roughly scribbled some crayon colour over it to make sure I didn't have all the redheads on one side and blondes / greys on the other. Then I re-drew it, this time paying more attention to form (inspiration from Rockwell). Then I drew it a final time in pencil, and larger.

I hope to have this painting finished by the weekend and I'll post it here when it is.

And now some 'shout outs' as Americans would put it. To everyone else - 'giving credit to / raising awareness of' some of the artists I met at Comic Con last weekend.

Melissa Pagluica. This artwork has a slight Mucha feel to it, but is super original and just beautiful. She writes her own work too - very talented. Check out here work here.

Vin Teng. This artist does amazing sculptures. I actually watched him work at his booth at Comic Con - very impressive. Lovely bloke too. Find out more here.

Jack and the Pirate Attack / Jack and the Zombie Attack. These books were written and illustrated by this fantastic husband and wife team I met at Comic Con. Find out more here.

Mike Bocianowski. This guy's work was so enchanting! Adorable and a lot of humour. See more here.

Josh Shalek. This guy is brilliant! He writes and illustrates his own comics, has done an album cover, and he was one of the most buzzing, ambitious people at Comic Con - and I just love that kind of energy. See more here.