25% Off All Signed Limited Editions

Happy New Year! To celebrate I'm having a January sale with 25% off all my signed limited edition prints. Visit my online shop to see what is available. Thank you to those of you who have already picked up a print.

In the meantime, here's some new artwork I finished last week:

'Leaving The Wild Wood' watercolour and gouache, 24 x 31cm

Christmas Card Packs

'A Winter Guest' is one of seven available designs

Another shameless plug! Love From The Artist.com are producing A6 size Christmas Card packs (x5 cards for £6.70 incl P&P) from a selection of artists on their website, and my artwork has been included!

Here's the link - https://www.lovefromtheartist.com/ArtistPacks?id=34

Merry Christmas

Watch out for that tree, Santa!

Polar Bear Santa would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas (and so would I)!! If you decide to leave out some biscuits and milk for the big bear, please remember Mrs Claus has put him on a strict diet, so the vittles will have to be digestives (without chocolate) and skimmed milk only. Do not, under any circumstances, serve mince pies or sherry - you have permission to save those for yourself.

Here's the linework on watercolour paper just before I started to paint. See if you can spot any changes I made later on as I painted (there is extra holly).

More Paisley Rabbit And The Tree House Contest

Here's a short follow up to my even shorter post last month. Below you can see the completed single page illustration of Mr Otter sat in a muddy puddle after failing in his first tree house building attempt.

"All under control - nothing to see here."

The next illustration I have been working on (and expect to be still working on it for weeks ahead) is the cross section of Paisley's magnificent tree house. The rough design for the tree house was a challenge, so goodness knows what state my brain will be in when I complete the final illustration. I can see myself sitting in the corner of the studio floor, staring, slack-jawed and unresponsive. Some people would probably not notice any difference in me!

One tree house to rule them all...

Propped up against my studio wall, and measuring over a metre in height. This watercolour is a challenge on all levels.

The Wind In The Willows

Over the past 3 months, and in-between other jobs, I have been working on a collection of 30 watercolour illustrations for 'The Wind In The Willows', to be published by Guomai in China.

Mole's house is getting a bit of TLC

It's a dream job for me, Kenneth Grahame's book has been a rich source of inspiration over the years. I just wish I had more time available to me to produce large illustrations instead of mainly spots. I think I will keep adding to this image bank in the hope I can get another book published in the future containing even more artwork.

Ratty sets out in the winter air to find his friend

You can see many more of these illustrations on my new website - click here

New Website www.chris-dunn.co.uk

Things are on the move. Please check out my new website. I will be adding more and more artwork and information over the next few weeks, and I'll eventually have a nice little shop for you to take advantage of (if you so wish).  

Circus Parade

A fortnight ago I finally finished 'Circus Parade'. Apologies for not posting the finished painting until now. Anyway, better late than never...

Circus Parade
90 x 50cm
Watercolour & Gouache

I hope it meets your approval. The painting was certainly an intense experience, especially when it came to painting the audience. Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through it!!

At the moment I am undecided as to whether I think this final painting was a success, which is my typical response upon completing a large painting that took longer than a week to paint. However once I have a good break from seeing it (about 2 months), I will be able to assess it properly.

Cushy Cushions!

You can now buy cushions featuring my illustrations through 'Signature At Home'. The cushion backs are a nice purple, but eventually the red backs (as seen in the photos) will be available as well.
Just search for 'Chris Dunn'.

Here's the link - http://www.signatureathome.com/search?q=chris+dunn&submit 
Photos by http://www.photo-sensitive.co.uk/

'Circus Parade' Work In Progress

For the last six days I have been working intensely on this large 90 x 50cm watercolour painting. It might not be a mural but it's large enough for me!

Fuzzy photo time! Still using the drafting I was given when I was a school boy.

You can see I returned to the usual sepia tonal under-painting to maintain a warm hue throughout the image. I decided if all the action is inside a tent lit by gas lamps, without natural light, then all the shadows are going to be warm.

Fuzzy / wonky photo! Note the reflected warm light on the underside of the elephants.

Once the under-painting was completed, I blocked in all the local colour for every single character and object. In the process of 'blocking-in', I suddenly realised I needed to roughly outline most of the audience, using sepia, in order to create a mass of shapes that would convince the viewer they were looking at a group of seated animals. This took a  l  o  n  g  time, not surprisingly, but as I introduced local colour, when I returned to 'blocking-in', the effect was as intended and so worth the effort.

Final fuzzy photo! The current state of the painting, waiting in my studio for Monday morning.

Local colour down, I started to really render each individual character in the parade as best I could, starting from the left and moving across. I'm still in that tight rendering process now, but I'm happy with my progress. At this rate, I should be finished late next week - unless I run away to the circus.

Solo Exhibition Pound Arts 4 March - 23 April

If you are in the area please visit, entry is free. Below is a video by the wonderful Corsham TV all about the exhibition.

Paisley Rabbit And The Treehouse Contest

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen my latest book illustration project, 'Paisley Rabbit And The Treehouse Contest' written by the wonderful Steve Richardson.

https://www.facebook.com/Paisley-Rabbit-and-the-Tree-House-Contest-1388441301462594/?ref=hl

However for those without Facebook accounts, I thought you might appreciate a post or two featuring some artwork.

Paisley excitedly tells her brother all about the treehouse building contest between her and her school friends.

During Halloween, Jimmy Squirrel goads paisley as the contest heats up.

So far I have completed just two colour illustrations (above) but I have roughed out the rest of the book. Below you can see just some of the drawings ready to be transformed into watercolour paintings.

Paisley and friends meet up to discuss plans for the contest.

Paisley finds help in the big city

Treehouse building gets underway.

There is a lot of work ahead, but I'm really excited about this book so I'm sure time will fly as i work on it. Every so often I will blog my progress with the finished illustrations, and don't forget you can follow me on Facebook to see more regular posts.

For more great children's books by Steve Richardson, visit his author page on Amazon.

'Barging Through' Rough Drawing

'Mason's Joy' is causing a lot of disharmony on the canal.

This will be the final painting in my series of animal characters influenced by 'The Wind In The Willows'.

The setting is based on Horton bridge, on the Kennett And Avon canal near Devizes. In order to get the appropriate photographic reference, I took a very nice five minute drive, with my son Arthur, down to the bridge. Then with my two year-old in a harness on my bag, I trooped around the tow path with my camera in hand. While I took photographs, Arthur commentated on his surroundings - he especially liked the boats but he didn't think much to the police-badger.

'Warming Up' Finished

Warming Up
Watercolour & Gouache
51 x 39cm

After a break from painting to work on other jobs, I have finally finished Mr Badger's kitchen. I'm very pleased with the final result but it does feel like I took longer on it than I should have. A possible reason for the drawn out painting process could be I decided to have red and black tiles, and a complicated Persian rug on the kitchen floor.

Below you can see a few photos I took as I painted. Sorry about the blurry shots, what can I say, having a wild badger model in your studio while painting can make your hand shake.

The beginnings of my rough drawing, getting the basic layout and positioning of the characters.

The finished rough - notice how I have changed the perspective, especially the fireplace horizontals. I realised I had to use two point perspective to create realistic diagonal kitchen tiles and so the two vanishing points positively affected the rest of the composition.

Once the under-painting was completed I then blocked in colour with a medium sized round brush.

I had nearly finished at this stage, I just needed to fully render the wash bucket, fireplace, food stocks and rug.

School Playground

 'School Playground'
Watercolour & Gouache
66 x 50cm

After working on other jobs and taking a week off to teach a summer school course, I have finally finished 'School Playground'.

I'm pleased with the overall result but I do think I could have developed the relationship between the characters and first school further. Maybe by depicting a young animal going through the doorway or a few heads poking out of the windows? I'm not sure, but it is certainly something I will keep in mind for future similar paintings.

Enough of the internal soul searching... here are some pictures showing my progress.

Rough Drawing

Concentrating on the background after finishing the sky and trees

For this passage I was closely copying a photograph I had taken a few days previously

School finished, working on the playground now.

Bit by bit I worked through the characters

Keep painting...

... and painting

... and finally pull out the gouache paints.

The school is based on the old Corsham Primary school which is now the Pound Arts Centre - where I have my studio! Next door to me are two other artists, the superb Penney Ellis and the extraordinary Caroline Rudge. We have an open studio every Monday, so please feel free to drop by and say hello if you are in the area.

See if you can spot any of these animals in the playground. The two young rabbits might be hard to spot.

School Playground WIP

No painting today as I am preparing for my upcoming illustration workshop at Marlborough College Summer School. However here are a couple of photos of the painting so far.

The drawing has been transferred and cleaned up with a 2H pencil.

Here the sky and trees well on their way and I've just started to block in the school and playground.

More WIP

I've spent the last day and half working on this and it's finally starting to come together.

Picnic By The Lighthouse WIP

Day One: Drawn up, masked and wet in wet blue sky

Day Two: Defining clouds, more masking fluid on the grass and blocking in

This is the sister painting to 'Rescue From The Storm'. The same lighthouse from a different angle and much more pleasant weather conditions.

I'm hoping to pick up my brush again on Saturday, which seems like an age away!

Woodland Party "Behind The Scenes" Final Instalment

For my previous posts click here, Part 1 and Part 2

Below are a series of progress photographs taken as I worked my way through the painting.

Moving on from basic blocking in of colour.

You can see here I am starting to get past the local colour stage and really moving into finding form using colour. For example look at the fox playing skittles. He is lit from the top by the warm glow of the lanterns (lots of cadmium yellow, yellow ochre and burnt sienna), however the majority of his head is facing away from the light so he is picking up the cool colours of the wood in shadow so (more prussian blues and greens).

I could have been more thorough by adding an aardvark and zebra.

By the above stage, I had just about painted the furry aspects of each critter to a suitable standard. Believe it or not, I had a folder of animal reference on my laptop that I methodically worked through from A to B (or badger to wild boar). I didn't move on to the next creature on the list until I had completed the one before it. I found it helped to break down the painting into manageable chunks by creating these small milestones to tackle each day.

It's hard to tell from the above photo, but by this stage I was concerned with the lack of depth in the image. I decided to darken the bottom edges with cool colours to hopefully lead the eye further into the middle of the scene. The bottom edge now acted like the sides of a stage design by framing the scene and providing more perspective. Note how in the final image below I darkened the sky in the far right background, again to push that further away from the tree in front.

I also completed the lanterns by deciding to keep it simple by using just yellow ochre where I could. I felt they would glow more if I depicted less detail, as if they are so bright they would be over-exposed in a photograph.

Woodland Party
Watercolour & Gouache
66 x 45cm

Job Dunn (pardon the pun)! I was pleased with the final outcome as it came very close to realising the fuzzy image I had rolling around in my head at the rough drawing stage. However I wasn't pleased when I had removed the painting from it's board, scanned and stitched it together on Photoshop, only to find I had forgotten to paint the skittle ball being held by the rat! As you can see I fixed that and then double-checked the whiskers on every animal, which is normally the thing I forget to do at the very end.

I hope you enjoyed this series of posts. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, either on the blog or Facebook.

Woodland Party "Behind The Scenes" Continued

See my previous post here.

My drawing was approved so it was time to start work on the painting.

The process to get the finished drawing on to stretched watercolour paper can be a bit tedious but it has to be done. Firstly I enlarge the scanned rough drawing in Photoshop and then I print the image on A3 layout paper. The layout is just thick enough to go through my printer and thin enough to act like tracing paper. This enables me to trace on the reverse of the printed image, with a soft pencil and then place it on the watercolour paper and transfer using a bone folder. Some people like to use biro pens for transferring because it's more accurate, however rubbing with a bone folder is very quick.

I remove the print and find the soft pencil has transferred enough to give me a ghost image on the stretched paper. I then go into the drawing with a 3H pencil and very carefully outline everything I need and tidy up any areas that are not legible. By using a hard pencil, I'm able to erase the softer lead and wash watercolour over the top, all without losing the important line work. If I were planning to keep an area very light I might not use a pencil at all, just because the pencil line might show and distract from the overall image.

Once the line work is completed I start an under-painting in sepia watercolour (see below)

The finished under-painting. If you look carefully you can see lots of the original line drawing, especially around the lanterns hanging from the oak tree.

The under-painting serves me well throughout the whole painting process. It maintains an overall warm hue as the majority of the painting will be in transparent watercolour. Also it helps to create tone and define characters in a complicated scene, and it provides me with a useful beginning step into colour because I know, whatever colour I glaze on top, the under-painting will hold the composition together for me. There is nothing worse than having to re-draw a section because the paint has washed away the initial compositional drawing.

Colour decisions being made - there's no going back!!

Under-painting finished, time to get out the colour palette! I start by blocking in the local colours (i.e red for the badger's jumper, green for the leaves), at this stage I'm not thinking about reflected warm or cool light. I have a good idea how warm the final painting needs to be, so I make sure there are lots of yellows, reds and browns, however when it comes to the clothing I either make it up there on the spot or research some old Edwardian photos to get an idea of pattern and arrangement of colour.

Working mainly on the background.

There are so many decisions being made at this stage, such as how best to depict bark on the tree trunk, does it need to have a warm into cool transition, how much light do I need to show around the lanterns, how much detail in the lanterns is required, what colour should the sky between the trees be and why did I decide to paint such a complicated image?! That last question kept on being asked.

TBC