Art Attack

Hello people!

As I said, I want to give you insight into some artwork. Before I do that I thought it would be nice to give you a little history on my art background. My mum told me that from a very young age I was always trying to draw things, especially dinosaurs as they used to fascinate me when I was younger. Both my parents testify that I was hopeless at drawing but like any parent they told me my drawings were good and didn't discourage me from drawing. So I kept drawing and I guess with practice I got much better. By the age of 8 all of my classmates knew me as "the best drawer in the year". This title came about as we were asked to do a book review but I couldn't be bothered to write so I started with drawing the characters from the book, which according to my teacher were "very accurate". Soon after this revelation I was encouraged to join the Arts and Crafts club after school where I was taught to do other types of art but I was primarily interested in sketching.

In year 6, we started having more regular Art classes where I got a chance to show off my skills.
There was a particular day when we were asked to draw portraits of our classmates while they posed outside in the sun. I remember sketching my classmates Sam, Vivian and Billy; this was in 1998 and I've been informed by kids who still attend the primary school that my portraits are still hanging in the headteacher's office 11 years later.

After Primary school I went to Ghana for three years and did not really have many chances to develop my Art as it wasn't really incorporated into my school curriculum but I would do my little sketches in my spare time.

Even when I came back to London I was still 1 dimensional an didn't like the idea of painting because it used to spoil my sketches and the idea of painting straight onto a canvas was not one that appealed to me.

It wasn't until I was about 18 that I actually started to enjoy painting but even now I prefer to use pencil first, hence my paintings take ages but I get satisfaction from seeing it develop slowly. Below you will find my latest finished painting and pictures of most of the development stages.

This piece was a birthday present for a good friend of mine. This is one of my best paintings to date and as I wanted to meet the deadline of her birthday, had to be done in a record 6 days. Just to put that into perspective the other painting that I regard on a par with this one took roughly 150 hours {batman and joker- I was doing the whole of last summer basically}

The theme I chose was "lions and tigers and bears" which I will explain at the end.



As you can see here, I started with a grid on the collage {left of the canvas} and then had to use a bit of maths to convert those dimensions to the grid on the canvas because I wanted to get the proportions as accurate as I could.


Purple was chosen for the background because it's her favourite colour and I thought it would go well with the browns and oranges of the animals and the lady.

I ended up changing my mind about the shades of purple many times as I wanted to blend about 3 different shades of purple and they didn't look right together. Thats why I came up with the idea of the pink strip to see if it would even it out a bit.

It still didn't impress me because the pink was clashing with the purples and didn't look like it belonged there. So I had this ingenious idea to turn it into a clear colour divider and since she plays the piano why not turn it into keys.

At this point I was still trying to get the right colours and make sure it all made sense. I then had an idea of using the Cadbury's shade of purple because she has chocolate skin and I thought that would really bring it out and also compliment the animals lol.

Below you can just see the progression as the picture finally starts to near completion!

I slowly tried to make the pink piano look more white and tried to capture the detail of both the lady and the animals.

The portion sectioned of at the bottom was initially going to be used to write Happy Birthday but then I thought it would be a bit of a waste as it wouldn't be as timeless as I wanted it to be. This is why instead I chose to write "I'M NOT SCARED OF LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS" and the reason the cross is there is because I actually made a mistake with the spacing but it works out because she is a Christian!

Voila! Here we have the finished product, a lot of mistakes but overall I like it.... I think I've come a long way :) especially as I couldn't stand painting before.

I'm gonna end, as I said, by telling you why I used this theme:

I chose the theme "lions and tigers and bears" because it's a song she likes and I felt like drawing wild animals lol. However, there is more to it than that. If you observe the finished product carefully you'll realise that there are different two different species of all three animals, one species of each animal has jaws wide open {possibly roaring} and the other seems to lay in wait, stalking it's prey while the lady {a central figure in the painting} just smiles in the face of adversity and danger- a typical characteristic of hers.

Hope you managed to read all of that. I know it is a lot to take in but that's how much effort and thought goes into my paintings!

Until next time,

Peace out!