I’m pleased to finally announce that I had the honour of being asked to do the poster for the Lucca Comics and Games 2015, I attended the event last year and was blown away by the scale of it and just how warm and friendly the people were, so I was unbelievably happy when the organisers asked me to do the poster
It’s a great pleasure and a real highlight of my career to do this for such a global event and for people who I can now call my good friends!

Grazie Mille!

I had the pleasure of being invited to the Grand Prix Florence recently as one of the Magic the Gathering guest artists. Florence is a beautiful city completely immersed in art a real pleasure to wander around, I was also lucky enough to meet some fantastic fellow artists, Jason Felix, Lucio Parillo and Rob Alexander. One of the highlights personally was getting the opportunity to do some live demo painting with the other artists, its great to see the different approaches to painting and I always come away feeling inspired!

After intending to for a few years now, this year I have entered the BP Portrait award competition. The portrait I submitted is of my daughter, Eva, it is painted in oil on board and is 30cm x 45cm. I have a real love of portraiture and would be happy to simply make it through to the final selection of such an auspicious award!

Heres the actual card, I spent a little longer on this than I probably should have but had a lot of fun in the process, it was sketched out in pencil first on watercolour paper as you can see in the first picture, I used photo reference for my kids and santas body (myself in a big coat with a cushion down the front!) I then fix the drawing and cover the whole picture in liquitex matte medium ,3 coats of it. I follow that with a wash of blue acrylic (indanthrene and cobalt mix) And then on to painting it in oils using a fairly limited pallette!

Heres the actual card, I spent a little longer on this than I probably should have but had a lot of fun in the process, it was sketched out in pencil first on watercolour paper as you can see in the first picture…

My exhibition launched last night, I had a great night met lots of lovely people and had a super response to all the paintings in the exhibition, it’s spurred me on to start some more paintings soon!

In the meantime here’s another that didn’t make it in, its Rik Van Looy, twice world champion and the 1st rider to win all 5 of the spring classic monuments.