Modest Avatar For Your Inner Deity

Just finished another portrait avatar image, my but they’re popular this time of year. This one was a bit different though so I thought it deserved a mention. I’ve done some interesting ones over the years and this is now one of them. The brief was pretty simple, make me into a God. I’ve had Victorians, I’ve had zombies, I’ve had fairies – but this is the first request for deification.

It was rather more tongue in cheek than an indication of any serious delusions of God-hood, so no cause for alarm. We had a chat about what she was looking for exactly, thought about how to go about it and what kind of God she wanted to be. There are after all, a large number of Gods available to choose from. She wanted more Old Testament traditional, something that would go with the strapline “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”.

She sent me photos of herself and a couple of religious reference photos to get her ideas across and then it was over to me to turn her into something angelic and divine. I used a number of layers in Paintshop to get the different effects of clouds, translucency and light. Then I also added oil on water shimmers to the edge of her dress, just to give that ethereal quality. She said she needed it done by Christmas, so I pulled out the stops and did it for her in less than a day, which gave her enough time to send it to a printer’s and have it put onto canvas. That’s going to be one heck of an interesting portrait for the wall, although saying that, she does have kids so I guess it kind of fits.

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Happy New Year Everyone

So ends 2012, we’ve had our ups and we’ve had our downs, and I hope they overall it’s been a good year for you.

It’s been pretty good over here I’m happy to say, and now it’s time to do a few new year tasks like backing up all my images again (oh how they’re growing!), get my accounts up to date, look forward at what my plans are for 2013 and what business targets are achievable, and also look back at 2012. See where I went wrong, see where I went right.

I’ve had some great fun this last year, some pretty interesting commissions, like the shotgun box packaging marketed towards female hunters, or the lovely and colourful mango lassi recipe which was amazingly fun to design, I’ve done some portraits for an assortment of people, designed a wicked search engine for Waxamomo and created some fab steampunk cats.

If I had to choose, and I don’t have to but I’m going to anyway, I think one of my favourite commissions this year was the one I got from Protect Your Bubble, partly because it was quirky and fun and but also partly because it was my first commission for a really big company, they’ve been on the telly and everything!

So here’s the link to my illustrations on their website, now I’m going to go do a happy dance and sing Auld Lang Syne.

Happy New Year Everyone!!

http://ukblog.protectyourbubble.com/news/page/2/

A Job Well Done

In the words of that guy from that show I’ve never actually watched “I love it when a plan comes together.”

I’ve been really putting the hours in over the last fortnight or so, it’s been great fun as usual, but the best part is getting a good reaction from the clients. Recently, I’ve been working on some display artwork for an insurance company, that’s still being finalised so more on that later.

Also just done a cute little avatar for a “Mommy Blogger” called Kari who writes the blog “Mommy to Elodie” and I’m running a little competition for her followers. Basically I’ll make a note of all of her followers who like my Facebook page and follow my Twitter account and at the end of the month I’ll have a prize draw! The winner will get a cute avatar of them, and their little bundle of joy, for free! Kari really liked hers, she wrote a pageful of praise on her blog, which made me chuffed to bits.

Finally, I just finished a zombie portrait for a very cool mum who got in touch to commission a zombie version of her son, for his upcoming birthday. She said she wanted him and his dog, zombified, planting a Union Jack into the peak of a hill. It’s not the strangest request I’ve ever had, so, sure thing!

I started it on Sunday and sent it to her on Monday night and this is her reaction:

“you’re a genius!!! It’s totally brilliant, Jack, thanks so much! It’ll take pride of place in a room that does, itself, resemble a zombie apocolypse!! Thanks a million. ”

I’m glowing with happiness. When my clients are happy, I’m happy!

So! Who’s next for the zombification treatment? That’s the question.

Zombie Portrait