Adam S Doyle

Another artist with bold brushstrokes, Adam S Doyle's animals are airy and evocative, captured beautifully with heavy strokes that still manage to give the pieces a sense of lightness. I particularly love his birds and wolves.

Animal Paintings

I'm not sure why I'm so into drawing animals lately, but it's a lot of fun! After the Stag Terms post a few weeks ago I sketched a few more animals, and today I started putting them together with texturing and color in Photoshop. More to follow!

Stag Terms

Background texture from newartcolorz.

I learned today that in medieval hunting terms, a stag had six different names depending on age! I found that pretty fascinating. From Wikipedia, "a stag in its first year was called a "calf" or "calfe", in its second a "brocket", in its third a "spayed", "spade", or "spayard", in its fourth a "staggerd" or "staggard", and in its fifth a "stag", or a "great stag". To be a "hart" was its fully mature state". How interesting!

Butterfly Paintings - Behance!

Just a short post to let you know that my best butterfly paintings can now be viewed on my Behance page! I think I'm done painting butterflies for the time being; there are other things to attend to! Check them out, and let me know what you think. I'm particularly pleased with these ones you haven't seen yet:

Butterfly Paintings

The other day I decided to make a fake butterfly display case. They're so beautiful, aren't they? The only sad thing about butterfly display cases is that the beautiful butterflies within are dead, and so I thought I would create an artistic one instead. All the butterflies in this post were digitally painted by me, and each butterfly took me a bit over 2 hours to paint. It's really fun - I might end up painting a few more!

Which is your favorite? I particularly like the vivid orange one, and the blue one is beautiful - though I do love the earthy colors of the others, so it's hard to pick a favorite! I'm thinking of selling prints of these, since I'm sure they'll look lovely on a wall! These might even be nice in calendar form, if I paint another five butterflies... 

Poem Illustrations

A little glimpse at what I'm currently working on...

"What's that?" chirped Ben, a baby bird,
And, pointing with a tiny wing,
He lifted wide his beak to sing,
"What's that?  What's that?  of everything,
To learn another brand new word.

Poem excerpt courtesy of Anastasia C. Moser, illustration by Sophie-Therese Lupas.

Turtle Illustration

I'm working on a digital painting of a sketch I did the other day:

Clearly, my skills at drawing animals without a reference are pretty terrible. Thankfully, it's easy enough to find photo references, and upon finding a nice photo of a turtle I set about recreating it digitally.

The original image

My digital version! As with the sunset from last Friday, I completely painted over the original photograph.

I do quite like the idea of a girl riding the turtle, but I'm afraid I'm still working on it! Here's a work-in-progress image, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the idea to copy part of the turtle's shell pattern to create a lace top for the girl's dress. So sweet! Lots of work still to be done, though.

So that's my current art project! Takes a while to paint all that. (I fear it'll take me a long time to get the girl's face right, too!) As always, click on the images to see them bigger!