This week I came back from a few days holiday to an overwhelming number of potential Pics of the Week, all of which deserve a mention in addition to this lively, colourful piece, which in its use of colour and metallic effects, its stylisation and its use of spiral-based patterns is reminiscent of the work of Gustav Klimt. Also, notice how Le Pullig has made use of colour theory to make each figure stand out against its neighbour - the red and orange shadows on the woman in yellow’s dress are complementary to the greens and blues used on the outer figures; the light picked up by each of these women’s golden earrings reflects in a colour complementary to the headscarf next to it. A really vibrant and well-constructed piece!

The other images I think deserve a mention this week make up a pretty long list, but each one stands out in its own unique way. In a similar, bright and vibrant vein is the tightly illustrated A Beautiful Morning by Pablo Barguero. (There’s a bit of artistic license there with the angle of the sun, but that’s a prime example of composition trumping reality!) Another knockout is Anita Stanhope’s Escape - from experience I can tell you that a yellow satin gown is a phenomenally difficult thing to paint, especially when it’s a) on stairs and b) picking up light and colour, and Anita has managed both beautifully with this eerie and wonderfully lit fairytale image. Carrying on the fantasy and fairytale theme for a moment, Maggie Barra’s Music of the Night is a spooky candlelit piece of high fantasy art, while Jack Frost by Maggie Jones is an excellent example of working with a more unusually shaped composition - in this case circular. Jack Frost’s face is fantastic as well, but one of the best facial studies uploaded this week has to be Tam Rey’s Old Man, after Leonardo da Vinci. One of my personal favourites this week is Destination by Cuyler Smith. A cold, blue-lit image of commuters in an Underground station, it demonstrates excellent technical skills (look at the cut of the clothes and the shine on the background tiles) as well as a really palpable atmosphere - you can almost feel the chill on the train platform. It’s been a really great week for the Gallery with some really high quality pieces of art, many more than I can mention here. I can’t wait to see what you all come up with over the next seven days!

Fully titled Hesitation Like a Surface of the Water, this textured, wet-into-wet looking piece is remarkably evocative and demonstrates some real skill. The base colours of turquoise, orange, lilac and pink appear to have been floated in as washes while the distant landscape, clouds and reflections look like they’ve been done with a dry brush while the washes are still wet. This is a prime example of replicating the unique look and feel of real media in Painter. The small, lonely figure at the centre of the composition has been created with just one or two brushstrokes, yet their stance and by extension their feelings and personality have been captured. Sometimes less is more when it comes to representing subjects! On a side note, one of my favourite movies is the anime film Spirited Away, which contains an award-winning sequence depicting a train travelling across a flooded evening landscape. Ray’s image evokes this scene, one of the greatest ever in animated cinema.

In a future issue of the magazine we’ll be doing a feature on rescuing paintings - reworking ones that didn’t go as planned, fixing problems and building on good parts. Jeff Johnson will be doing the feature, and we’re inviting you to send in pieces that need some TLC for him to work his magic on. So if you’ve got an image that’s gone wrong, or you’re stuck, or you want to improve your piece and give it a professional finish, send it in!

Please send your paintings to me - you’ll find my email address at the front of the magazine - with the subject line ‘Fix my painting’. The deadline for sending them is Thursday 30 October 2008. Only one painting per person please! Due to demand, we can’t guarantee that your piece will get fixed in the magazine, but we hope to fit in as many as possible.

We’ve had a couple of people mention that they’re missing the disc that accompanies issue 22 of Painter. We need to figure out if there has been a batch of them sent out from the printers like this, or if they’ve gone missing randomly on the news stands.

If your copy of issue 22 was missing its disc, please send me an email (or private message on the forum) telling me which store you bought it from and where (store, town, country, or if you’re a subscriber or bought it from the Imagine eShop instead) and let me know if it looks like the disc has been removed or just wasn’t there in the first place - you can tell by looking for the glue we use to stick the discs onto the back page with. A scan or photo would be handy too.

Remember, you can download all of the disc files from the Painter website, so if this has happened to your copy, you won’t miss out on any tutorial files.

Ugly fairies are so much more fun than the pretty ones. Maggie’s Bug Collector is no exception. The googly eyes behind goggles and the buck teeth are the first thing you notice, along with the elf ears and the fascinated, geeky expression, and these create a bizarrely cute, appealing character. What I like most about this piece though is the texturing - the patterned, silky and shiny golden scarf, woolly sweater and velvety jester’s cap are all wonderfully warm and tactile - a really good example of how to paint different kinds of cloth and play up their textural contrasts while sticking to a very restricted colour harmony. The buttons and bells are nice touches along with the rough stitching on the cap. And take a close look at the background - the shadowy twigs are fantastic and the butterfly in the centre of the composition is not quite managing to camouflage itself against the woody background. It’s an image that really bears a lot of second looks - there’s a lot more to it than initially meets the eye…  

The evolution of Jason’s style over the last few months has to be seen to be believed. This detailed, textural piece is a prime example of what constant practise can do! The features of Jason’s subject are much more realistic than in previous works and there are some well-observed touches such as the ruddy colour around the nose and the subtle treatment of the dark, windblown hair. I particularly like the colour harmony of this piece; the contrast between duck egg blue and peachy brown shades is wonderfully complementary and works well with the somewhat battered antique effect that Jason has applied, calling to mind World War II pilots or 1950s adventurers. The textural contrast between the leather and sheepskin on the jacket is nicely painted too.

This portrait study from Cathy Barber displays a wealth of texture and detail. The hair, beard and the wrinkles on the face are all particular highlights, and the twinkle-eyed facial expression is brilliantly captured. A fantastically executed piece and one of which Cathy should be very proud!

Plenty of other images caught my eye on my trek for this week’s Picture too. Theodore Miller’s Elk Brush is another highly textural piece in smooth, clear autumn colours. Gramarye by Maggie Barra is an intriguing fantasy image, as is Ray Kamizoe’s bright, anime-influenced Fairy. Miriam Montagni’s Fantasia piece boasts some incredibly detailed, stylised background patterns which are just delightful, while Cuyler Smith’s Creative Thought is an interesting blue-toned little piece that displays some real skill with light and shadow. And I also got a chuckle out of Frederick Taylor’s The Future comic strip.

We’ve introduced a new feature to the redesigned Painter website. Readers of our sister magazine Digital Photographer might be familiar with it. It’s a fun game called the Face-Off, in which two paintings, randomly selected by the website, are faced off against each other. Choose which ones you like best and check out the top-rated Face-Off images. You can even choose images by section, so if you want to do a portrait, landscape or fantasy and sci-fi Face-Off you can. Have a go by visiting http://www.paintermagazine.co.uk/painterfaceoff/

The new, wider version of the Painter website has just gone live! There’s loads more room for you to check out the Latest Images as we can now fit more thumbnails on, we’ve extended the Latest Galleries and Featured Galleries so you now get to see three instead of two each, and we’ve got a new box to show off some of the top rated Galleries as voted by you. Enjoy the site’s expansive new look and let us know what you think!

This fantastic sci-fi image shows off a lot of skill with Painter. In the foreground, the damaged metal of the hydrant is done very well - the bumpy, scratched texture is very well done. The concrete and smoother metal textures are also excellent, and the dramatic background imagery, colours and lighting really add to the atmosphere of the piece. Plus, it has robots! I particularly like the hulking but oddly elegant forms of Simon’s mecha creations, and their dull metallic colouring and red star insignia reinforces the title of the piece, as we see them as units within an army. This intriguing image raises all sorts of questions about the backstory behind the scene - where is the city, why did the war start, whose side are the robots on?