For those interested, the project he’s doing promotes the idea of agriculture within an urban environment. Pretty interesting stuff. So my job was to do caricatures of the people contributing to the publication which was awesome. More to come…

As you can see,  I have a severe inability of painting below the neck. I think I just find faces far more interesting and I would always ruin pieces by drawing a really disproportionate or just a generally poorly drawn body. Also backgrounds were also tricky for me. I could never spend the time to draw every inch of detail because it was way too tedious and intricate of a job for me. I just stuck to the faces. I actually remember my art teacher taking the piss out of the second one saying it looked as if Seb had been slapped in the face and that the yellow streak was a massive trail of spit.

So I don’t know which way it happened, maybe Nicola asked for a painting or I offered to do one for her birthday which was a good month or so ago. Anyways, the idea was to do a portrait and after a some vigorous browsing on Facebook I found the photo below. But I didn’t really want to paint it like for like so I wanted to experiment with it. I basically tried to emulate certain aspects of the Skinny Man I did a while back. It’s probably not the most flattering portrait but I guess my two reassurances are that I barely draw/paint girls and, to be fair, this doesn’t really look a whole lot like Nicola. So the mediums used are a little bit of a fine liner, pencils and oils on a primed piece of wood. To be honest, I don’t know if this works. Part of me feels like I should work on the face a bit more so I may claim it back sometime to work on it again. But for now, it’s done and dusted so there you go.

So this was part of a scene from a Korean gangster film called A Bittersweet Life (달콤한인생.. for the Korean readers). It’s a brilliant revenge story which everyone should watch. Also for some reason, Korean films of the similar genre such as Old Boy seem to always get it right with their twisted plots, dark humour and stylish yet super-realistic and violent fight scenes and so on. Those two films definitely beat other revenge films such as Kill Bill any day of the week.

In this scene of the film, there’s a clash of two contrasting characters. So the man with the cigarette is meant to be the snitch of the film. Both characters here are under the same boss but the man with the cigarette is doing a deal and trying to appease the enemy over the phone. The man with the red lips, on the other hand, is a much darker, quiet and brutal character. Despite this he is loyal to the boss and, in the film, threatens the enemy over the phone calmly and reminds his counterpart where his loyalty should lie. Don’t know about you guys but I thought that scene was great which lead to me trying to illustrate it in my own way. Enjoy.

This is a painting inspired by the movie ‘The Machinist’.

This movie is great. As Dom will recall… 1am, knackered, monged out but ‘The Machinist’ certainly didn’t send him dozing. He was so keen that he had to remind himself to stop asking questions throughout the film. But as I was saying, yes it’s sick but visually this movie is supreme (so is the story itself). Especially that bit where he does the skeleton dance at the start.  I love to draw but personally it’s best when you’re drawing something strange and physically eery. That’s really why I did this.

It’s a primed piece of wood and I started sketching with pencil then, using oil paints, put on a base painting with shades of dark blue and grey and the odd bit of off-pink. I was actually going to put some colour but it kinda worked. Hand was tricky… Did a crap job with the hand painted in a similar style as the body so I rubbed that out and painted my own hand on it. Then Katy, my flat mate, and myself, partly, drunkenly spilt her instant noodles over the damn thing. I had no idea it was there till a few days later. I actually left a few of those stains around the hand there. Anyways, enough chat, hope you like it.

Christian Bale in 'The Machinist'