It's been a while since I painted a portrait, almost a year actually. I hadn't realized how much I miss it. After all my photo montages and Japan inspired watercolors, it was a welcomed commission to start this portrait. And I'm working in oils. I love oils. The photo is monochrome black and white, but I added subtle flesh tones to some highlights on the cheeks, as well as some dark, warm brown tones to the hair. There's a suggestion of warm peach added to the background. I f

For the last month and a half, I've been working on a triptych. Three different sized paintings of a beach scene. The scene is the beach with the red Torii gate on the rocks. These paintings were studied from a panoramic photograph taken at Shimoda, Shizuoka Peninsula, Japan sometime last year. My client commissioned me to transform the panoramic photo into a triptych scene across three different sized canvases. From left to right, we have 14 x 18 inches, 12 x 24 inches, and

With a break in Arts and Craft fairs for at least a few months, and my most recent commissions completed, I’ve started the sketching for several paintings. I’m working on a watercolor painting to add to People Being Series. This one will be of South Korea. Two girls in yellow hanbok dresses with dark blue sashes. The wind that day means there is lots of movement and fluttering. The girls were part of the Jindo Sea Parting (Moses Miracle) festival in 2008. I put them into a ba

This is the first oil painting in the series Drawn To Love. Up to point, I have only been doing portraits in pencil on paper. But, the photograph I studied had such intense lighting that I felt paint would better tell the story rather than pencil. (photo credit: Daniel Smädný Mních Jurčo). Below is the progression of this portrait. At the end of each day, I took a photo of the development thus far. Some days saw 4-5 hours worth of work. Other days saw as little as 30 minutes.

A question artists can find difficult to answer. Here’s the long version: I suppose I don’t call anywhere home. I may have spent half of my life living in in England, but it isn't home. I may be citizen to the US and the UK, but I am not exclusively either, nor neither. So, everywhere is a new place, be it passing through over a day or so, or residing in for a decade. Each new country brings newness and freshness. A list of all the things to do and see in the time allocated t