I thought I would try a portrait with no colour in the reference so I could primarily focus on the tonal aspects. As it turns out frankenstein's monster really lends itself to some nice texture and the palette knife.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A simple portrait painting using mainly the oil brush but really pushing the tonal contrast, I was quite happy how this turned out and is really the style I want to try and achieve for my portraits.

An improvement on my original Dark Willow effort, much better blending and overall refinement on this one, I think now I have really moved on from my pastel techniques to that of using more of an oil brush.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

I really wanted to change up the colours here, to obviously keep the essence of Buffy but to shine a much different light. Also to have a sticker spray configured to cast a splash of blood, for dramatic effect!!

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

The initial reference was just of a frog ornament which I thought looked interesting and had some character. It took me a while to figure out the colours, including exporting to gimp. It was only when I started to apply blend mode layers using the bucket tool that the piece all started to come together.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A paint over and update to one of my first pastel type paintings in ArtRage, it is always useful to attempt this to see if I am actually making any progress on my art journey. I can now see a lot that was wrong from my original effort.

Something very strange, I just was having fun and playing around with just about all the tools in ArtRage.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Sometimes I like to take a reference of an innocent children's toy and then tweak it to extraordinarily creepy levels.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A simple still life, and in the style of an old master, hence the dark backdrop. Surprisingly this didn't take too long, I held off applying the higher tones and the saturation for as long as I could so the luminosity of the orange tones could come through. This was just about the first still life I have done using ArtRage and actually surprisingly I enjoyed it, it was nice to have no pressure to achieve the likeness of a portrait.

A spliced painting taking my dragonfly painting as a background and then the lizard painting to adapt into a dragon, this gave me the opportunity to experiment with the ArtRage editing tools.

I found a cute picture of a teddy bear online reading a book and thought that it could look pretty cool if it had a bit of an edge, like if it was a little evil for example.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Initially I was just going to follow the reference of a lion faithfully while applying a little texture, but as it turned out I decided to give him a little bit of an edge by colour dodging a red highlight around the eyes and a little rim light.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A fun still life from a challenge suggested on the ArtRage forums to simply render a pear using just the oil brush, surprisingly I had quite a lot of fun with this one

A Sand Snake from Game Of Thrones, I really don't think I caught the likeness and it really isn't done in my own style. I think I ended up focussing too much on the airbrush to achieve a blended skin tone.

A simple reference copy, and I think the key to this painting was its simplicity as I seemed to hold better control over the oil brush and palette knife and to achieve the right background colour.