Scanned stencil art.
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Roller Skating Robot Santa Christmas card
Scanned stencil art.
Christmas Beetle Christmas cards
Originally designed as stencil art styled Christmas cards, now available on a whole lot of gift items.
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Christmas beetles Anoplognathus pallidicollis can appear in large numbers approaching the Christmas holiday season in Australia. They are large beetles, often appearing shiny gold or metallic green.
The original versions of these Christmas beetles were hand printed by sponging paint through stencils. The prints looked lovely but didn't scan very well thanks to a very thick bumpy paint application. I needed clean well defined digital files to sell the artworks online, so I actually scanned the hand cut stencil forms and coloured the resulting shapes digitally. So these beetles are a bit digital and a bit hand made. I do a lot of combining digital and hand made art. Hopefully I am good enough at this that it is hard to tell where the digital ends and the hand made starts.
Celebration Sunfish, probably a Christmas card
The Ocean Sunfish, also known as a Mola Mola, loves a reason to celebrate. Christmas, holidays, birthdays, whatever the occasion it will be there dressed as a present with a big bow on its head.
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Not quite sure why those jellyfish look so happy. Sunfish eat jellyfish.
When I drew this I had it in mind that it was to be for Christmas card. Now that I look at it I can see it would work equally well as a card for birthdays or in fact any celebration. A versatile sunfish!
painting a Troodon for Dinosaur Hamlet
Dinosaur Hamlet is my entry to the 2015 Illustrators Australia 9x5 art show.
It took much longer to paint than anticipated, and being no expert with acrylic paints I battled with the medium throughout the entire process. Oh well, the battle is over, the painting is completed and has been delivered to the gallery in time to be part of the show.
The theme this year is 'Playtime', so I painted a Troodon, which is small relatively intelligent bird-like dinosaur from the Cretaceous period. It poses with a dinosaur skull as if performing the famous 'Alas poor Yorick' monologue from Shakespear's Hamlet. An obvious response to the theme, don't you think?
This Illustrators Australia 9x5 art show will be up until 5 Dec 2015. More than 60 illustrators have each done an artwork in response to the theme 'playtime' on a 9x5 inch ply board. So if you are in Melbourne get along to the Abbotsford Convent and have a look. You will be glad you did!
Oh, and I illustrated and designed this year's invite featuring a playtime kitten. Inspired by Miso the wonder cat attacking my toes in the middle of the night.
And finally, here is an animated gif of the Dinosaur Hamlet in progress, so you can see how I went about painting it. It took a lot longer than this gif does!
lace monitor makes lace
Her name is Anna. Go Anna!
This lace monitor was originally one half of a spot-the-difference puzzle in a book of Aussie Puzzle Adventures. I think she is sweet enough to be crocheting out in the big wide world on her own merit. So now she is on Redbubble and Society 6 as prints, gift cards, t shirts and the like. Long may she craft!
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Puzzle illustration - Collect Ten Flowers for a Pavlova Picnic
Collect Ten Flowers for a Pavlova Picnic!
Help the handsome Yowie find his way through the maze to a picnic with the beautiful Bunyip. If he collects 10 flowers along the way she will give him a great big slice of pavlova. Yum. This is another of my Aussie Puzzle Adventures
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What are these strange beasties?
Yowies and Bunyips are Australian mythical animals or cryptids.
Yowies live in the darkest unexplored reaches of the Australian bush. They are big hairy ape-like beings similar to a Sasquatch or Yeti. Bunyips are dangerous magical creatures that inhabit isolated rivers and billabongs.
Both are to be feared and treated with the utmost caution, unless you are have brought flowers or pavlova.
Both are to be feared and treated with the utmost caution, unless you are have brought flowers or pavlova.
Puzzle illustration - Who threw which boomerang?
Can you tell who has thrown which boomerang?
Here’s a hint, the patterns on their helmets are coded to the boomerangs.
Who threw which Boomerang is another Aussie Puzzle Adventure
Thorny Devil
The Thorny Devil is available on its very own range of gifty items.Also known as the Moloch or Thorny Dragon, these little lizards live in the Australian desert.
They are covered with spikes.
They are super cute.
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It's a stick.
And when you throw it... it comes back!
Despite the old stereotypes most Australians live in cities not in the outback, we almost never ride to work on kangaroos and most of us are not expert boomerang throwers. Though as it happens I actually do have a collection of returning boomerangs, some of which seem to be missing. I must have thrown them away. I wonder if they will come back?R :)
Puzzle illustration - Spot the Tawny Frogmouths
Of course you can, but you have to admit they are pretty good at hiding.
Spot the Tawny Frogmouths is one of my series of Aussie Puzzle Adventures.
It was originally in of a puzzle book of mine called Puzzles Down Under, published by Black Dog Books in 2009. The publisher has since reverted the rights, allowing me to make the puzzles available as beautifully printed posters gift cards, art prints and t-shirts. So you can expect a lot more of these puzzles very soon.
| Visit Pixbyrichard on Redbubble to shop for Spot the Tawny Frogmouths on gift cards, posters, cushions and stuff |
Stencil print - Rufous Songlark Sings
The Rufous Songlark is a small bird native to grasslands of Eastern Australia. Each Summer the male bird sings almost constantly.
This 2 colour stencil design was originally cut and hand printed to be part of the Bimblebox 153 Birds Project. 153 printmakers have each represented one of the 153 birds known to use the Bimblebox nature refuge. This nature refuge in central Western Queensland, Australia, is to be destroyed as it is in the path of a mega coal mine.
The prints contributed to the 153 Birds Project now form a touring exhibition raising awareness about the plight of the nature refuge and the potential threat these vast coal mines represent to the biodiversity of the region.
| Visit Pixbyrichard on Redbubble to shop for Rufous Songlark Sings on gift cards, giclee art prints and home decor |
spruced up the website
My aim was to make a site visually clean and simple to navigate. All the information a potential customer needs is on one page. No need for a separate landing page, folio page, contact page or about page. The website is built with blogger so folio images are easy to update and the responsive blogger layout means all should look fine on a mobile device.
You will notice inky octopuses in the side bar. These tentacled critters were painted as decorative devices to visually break up the text and give the site some added personality. I took photos of the octopuses on the drawing board. Here they are...
a bench for my studio space
I made a bench for my studio space. The working surface is a lot higher than is typical for a work bench allowing me to comfortably draw at it when standing up.
I have to admit most of the work was done by the local hardware store. I asked them what I should do to make a cheap standing height bench to be used for light work, mostly drawing. They suggested the basic construction you see here and sold me a light hollow door, 3 metres of 70x35mm pine which they cut to the required lengths, some screws and drill bits. All that remained for me to do was drill pilot holes and screw the lot together. Even I could manage this.
And because I am much better at illustrating diagrams than I am at timber constructions here's a very basic isometric projection of how the bench went together.
And because I am much better at illustrating diagrams than I am at timber constructions here's a very basic isometric projection of how the bench went together.
illustration of a decorated cat skull
have collaborated with a gallery show of t-shirt art called Wear Art Thou.
As a member of Illustrators Australia I was invited to join in on the fun. The invitation came in May, but being distracted by work I only remembered the show when there was just 10 days left to think up a design, create the artwork and enter. Ahhh, pressure!
In a lunch break at work I scribbled a quick list of ideas then discarded most for being unsuitable for a t-shirt, or simply being too tacky. The idea remaining was to illustrate a skull.
In a way it is actually two paintings: the first an airbrush style illustration of a cat skull, the second a naive painting of leaves and flowers appearing to wrap around the skull. The texture in the background is a photograph of the cement floor in my studio space.
This artwork was created to sell on line on a variety of products, so here comes the sales pitch...
Cat skull decorated with wasabi flowers is available to purchase on line via Redbubble
on t-shirts, throw cushions, tote bags, posters, prints, stickers and gift cards.
Easy to order and delivered to your door
aardvarks and flying saucers
It looks like an acrylic painting but is actually rendered with the mixer brush tool in Photoshop.
Just in case you are interested, this is the rough sketch. I scanned it and 'painted' over the top.
I like the juicy brush stroke detail the mixer brush tool can make, however it is not as intuitive or as fun as using a real paintbrush
Christmas aardvark
Cover art for another Ethel zine. This one features an aardvark in a Santa hat, packing a box of books.
Ethel the Aardvark is the bi monthly fan-zine which goes out to members of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club. I am one of the two editors.
It is by far the nerdiest publication I have ever had anything to do with, which I have to say is something I enjoy.
Bah Humbug Christmas card art
A hand painted visual pun combining the boiled sweet known as a humbug with Ebenezer Scrooge’s famous catchphrase 'bah humbug'.
I realised after posting it online for people to buy as printed Christmas cards or t-shirts that not everyone was going to get the gag. It depends on whether or not you know of two things: boiled sweets called humbugs and at least passing knowledge of Charles Dickens' story A Christmas Carol. So if you get the joke, pat yourself on the back and feel smug.
If you didn't get it, thats's okay. You are not alone! Upon finishing the quick painting it was shown to a room full of friends who all looked at me in confusion. Oh well.
The Bah Humbug card art is not at all intended as anti Christmas sentiment, rather it is a wry acknowledgement of how stressful the lead up to Christmas can be, especially for those of us not organised enough to shop for presents in October. I always end up buying gifts at the last moment. Bah!
Following are the initial concept sketch and the acrylic on craft paper painting. You can see the painted image was digitally edited before posting it on-line as final art. This was because the craft paper, while nicely textural wasn't very Christmassy. So I gave the background a lustrous green hue. Seems to suit it.
This design is available on Erdbubble as beautifully printed
Bah Humbug Christmas cards or a Bah Humbug Christmas t-shirt
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