I went into this painting inspired by John Berkey's art. While mine falls quite far from the mark, I'm still really happy with it. This is a scene from the book I'm working on at the moment, and let me tell you, I really regret making a ship the shape of a sea urchin with multicoloured lights going all over it! It was still easier to paint than the explosions, though.

Similar to most of the scenes from my books that I try painting, this was a pain to paint. Why do I keep writing stuff like that? Honestly.

Anyway, this is an angry female rahtuan, a sapient species from the setting of my space-opera series. The two red walls are meant to be force fields of a sort, but that was the bit that was most difficult to paint.

One of the panels of a GM screen I'm making. Each panel features one of the player characters from our Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game sessions, and this is my wizard Alfrida. Unusually for a Warhammer wizard, she hasn't accidentally summoned any demons/turned into a gibbering mess yet. Yet.

She also looted some fancy brocade once and had it turned into a caparison for her horse. That was a pain to paint.

I have an itch to share my WIP painting with someone who isn't my husband. At first I wasn't going to post it here because I didn't want to put unfinished stuff in my gallery, but then I realised I could attach pictures to statuses. So look! I'm nearing the end of my oil study of Makovsky's _Zaporizhian Cossack_ (second image, though I'd imagine that's obvious).

Turns out painting silk is hard and painting braid is annoying, if pretty. I'm slightly terrified I'm going to mess it all up when I try to do the skin. This is my first portrait.

I brightened the colours a little because I figure the original would have been brighter when it was new, but I might have gone a bit far. It doesn't look so great put side-by-side :'(

I'm having a thoroughly miserable week, so I thought I'd share one of my favourite paintings. It's a combination of old and new, both in terms of flora and fauna, with those behemoths of sauroposeidon strolling along in the background.

This is the setting of the book I'm currently writing, and I'm looking forwards to painting a lot more from the same setting. I have another on the go right now, in fact.

I finally finished this study yesterday. It took me over a week, but I'm so happy with the result! Especially given I've never done a portrait with oil paints before, and the last time I did a portrait with _any_ paint was... probably in art GCSE, where they would have undoubtedly forced me to do something weirdly abstract because apparently just painting things realistically isn't good enough.

Anyway, I sort of messed up the colours a bit. Everything's too vivid except his face. This is because I figured the original would have been brighter, so I enhanced the reference photo a bit, and somehow managed to go even brighter than that. I possibly would have got the right colour just working from the original reference!

It did give me good practice balancing lights and darks, though. This is something I'm not that good at usually, as I tend to drift towards using midtones everywhere.

Now, cue me trying a portrait of a fictional character and screwing it up because the only reference is in my head :D

This is a little painting I did of an alien from my book series. The kluqetik are about half our height, inspired by a combination of mantis shrimp and jumping spider. They communicate with rapid series of colours and patterns on their four paddles. Normally, their carapace adopts the colour of their surroundings (often a lilac-ish colour). However, during the breeding season, those who become male adopt vivid contrasting colours like this fellow here. Females become a milky white.

I thought I'd make my first post a painting I did around Halloween last year, inspired by one of Ruth Wilshaw's tutorials. This is a spooky scene from a short story I wrote, set on Dartmoor.

Also, hi Inkblot! I wanted somewhere art-specific to share my art now I've started doing more of it again. I used to post on DeviantArt but obviously that's gone downhill a bit since then. This looked pretty good (though I've already run into two bugs).

Another oil painting I did for the GM screen. This one didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped, especially where perspective and the background's concerned, but it's probably the most 'action-packed' scene I've ever tried to paint, so I'm calling it a win. This is from a WFRPG session where we had the clever idea of hijacking a vampire's carriage during the day, while he was in it, and driving it to a city for the guards to deal with. It would have worked, if it weren't for the halfling failing his drive check and crashing through a wall.

I've been wanting to do a study of Makovsky's painting for a while, in part to force myself to practice drawing people, but mostly because I just really like that painting. I did it in pencil today as a sort of preparatory stage for a later painting I guess. (I.e. I was too scared to try painting it immediately, or even sketch on the canvas.) Turned out pretty well if you don't look too closely at the hands.