Three Artist that I admire...

The first Artist I'm going to try and emulate, in style and content is :
Stephanie Pui-Mun Law ... now a word of warning!
Steph is not wholly human, there's more fae about her than you would
guess. When you see how beautiful, her Artwork is,  how quickly she
can produce her fantastic paintings, I start to suspect  she has and whole
army of little Fairy's that she controls, or maybe little foxes...ha please don't turn
me into anything unnatural Steph!...

I'm starting from one of Steph, early Art instruction books "Dreamscapes"
Which lays out some of the ways she weaves her magical spells.
Since primary my fantasy artwork has always been inspired by Mr Tolkien's
"Lord of the Rings" realm. I'm going to try create an painting of the "Tale of Beren and Lúthien" which is from "The_Silmarillion"

I`m lucky , in that over last ten years or so , I`ve taken hundreds of photo`s 

that I can use as reference.I use an external hard drive  plugged in to a 

40inch Samsung smart TV , to draw from.

I found this Beautiful foxy Fae :D on the net , that I used for reference.

Then traced the drawings to separate pieces of tracing paper. The advantage of working in this way, is that when your creating a composition, you can flip and move each tracing around until you find something to your liking.

 This is what I have conjured up , with the great help from using the book of "Dreamscapes". I struggle drawing this because the drawing pad I was using , was only  12"x16" and mech pencil 0.5 was a little big for the detail. (Steph uses 0.3). The solution I`ve come up with
is enlarge it in photoshop , and print it on two sheets of paper at 16"x 20" and then trace it onto the watercolour board as Steph advises in the book.
  as post note: I won`t turning this around in a couple of
days as Steph does , so don`t hold your breath , it will be more like a couple of weeks ha!... love an light!

 Well I had a problem tracing on to the "Strathmore illustration board 500 series" ... all my own fault. I tried to rush it, instead of pressing down hard on each line, I just scribbles over some of large areas on the left. the consequence was that some of the drawing was missing.

 Another lapse on my part, I should have taped the board down to stop it warping. Now I`ll probably do it when I`ve finished. The way is to dampen the back of the board and use gum tap... I hope

laying down the night sky with a wet wash and dripping surgical spirit with smattering of sea-salt crystals.Steph makes it look so easy... but I`m struggling :D 

Ha... I might have gone a little overboard with colour.

It`s funny, no matter how I try to make it, look like one of Steph paintings, my own style comes into play ...it`s a real battle at the moment...

 When I first started this painting I thought it would be finished really quickly... but I should have stuck to the way Steph works, with quick and free washes to the background. Still one good thing of me being a sl.ow coach, is that I can add new narrative to the painting.

   

Well eventually finished it ... I got to say I learnt quite a lot in paint this picture hope to do better with the next... :)