There’s some stunning trompe l’oeil going on in Sandra’s picture. The mixture of classical painting, seen in the battle scene at the top of the image, and modern subject matter is a tough one to carry off, but thanks to Sandra’s use of the illusory trompe l’oeil effect, which makes the background figures literally leap out into the space shared by the dancer in the foreground, it has been achieved perfectly. The combination of a battle scene with Liberty at the centre, exhorting the masses to fight for freedom, is an interesting juxataposition with the frivolity of the dancing figure on the neon-lit stage and produces a fascinating composition that’s beautifully painted.

Elsewhere over the past week I’ve enjoyed the surreal serenity of Gramofon Falls by George Piatygorets, and the sketchy Conceptual stylings of Dolly’s House by David Taylor. Other close runners for the Pic of the Week were the charming Girl With Pigeons by Patrick de Vries, Cuyler Smith’s Metamorphosis with its restrained yet attention-grabbing colour harmony, and Sterling by Jarrod Clark.

Atmosphere is one of the things that can make or break a painting. This image by Colin Everett practically oozes atmosphere, from the blood-red moon in the sky to the brooding castle overhanging the ghoulish graveyard below, with its piles of skulls in the foreground and the eerie, threatening figure dramatically uplit by what under any other circumstance would be a cheerfully glowing lantern. This juxtaposition of warm, glowing light with the deep red darkness is one of the things that really adds to the creepy, threatening effect of this image. It’s the kind of image you might have seen in a Victorian children’s book, and indeed it deserves a place in one so that it can terrify generations of kids to come.

On the Painter forums this week I’ve been following the progress of Benedict, by Joe Cummings, from value sketch to full painting. It’s a marvellous caricature, at once completely lifelike and utterly unrealistic. One of my favourite elements has to be those ratty little teeth! Meanwhile I’ve been watching Damian Jones’ concept art with interest, and I’m particularly taken with Buzz Droid, with its well-thought-out structure, andcombination of dull yellow metalwork and a glowing, iridescent central panel. Two of my other favourites this week are Careless Whisper by Reinaldo Quintero (I’m a huge fan of anime and manga) and Goddess of Night by Angela Jarman (I’m also a huge fan of elves). Kristina Gehrmann’s Death of Guiliano is also a great piece - even if it was done in Photoshop!

UK readers who haven’t yet entered the Coffee Shot competition from Coffee Republic on our website now have until 20 November to submit your entries - just click the Coffee Shot button to enter and you could win £1000 worth of photography vouchers!

 There’s something very, very Dadaist about this painting from Clark Fitch. It’s almost a scene from an old arthouse beat movie, and indeed there’s a really beatnik look to the piece itself - the formica and glass setting of the room, the kissing couple oblivious to the oddity of the world around them and the upward-sweeping composition of five mime artists in the background, observing and acting. One little feature that I like is that there’s only one unique mime - the two foremost ones are mirror images of each other, and the two furthest back are barely hinted at - just black sweaters and white faces, which makes the raucous, dramatic female mime in pink stand out among them. Dadaism was an art movement about rebellion, and it laid the foundations for Pop Art and postmodernism - both of which can be seen in the technical features of this intriguing piece, like the use of the woodcut filter and the shabby-chic grey and pink colour harmony.

Other paintings which desrve a mention this week are the utterly charming Merry Christmas and Merry Christmas II by Francesco Todini, the strangely disturbing Baby Boss by William Borde, Visit of Autumn by the ever-exquisite Ray Kamizoe and Lady of the Stars by Maggie Barra. And take a look at Anne Pogoda’s newer version of Apple’s Kiss, featured in issue 23 of the magazine. In fact, I’m planning to put that one on my wall!

If you’ve visited the Painter Gallery in the last hour or so you’ll have noticed more redesign goodness in the shape of the new larger image layout. Every time you click on a picture to view a larger version you’ll now get a rather nifty swooshing animation with a black frame. It’s like a miniature unveiling every time!

Please remember that you need to let the Gallery image load fully before clicking it for a larger view, otherwise it’ll just pop up in a standard browser window as ever.

It has come to my attention that some members are posting artwork that has actually been created by someone else. Please do not do this. Our website is for people to share the work THEY have created. We don’t care what skill level you are at but we do care that the work in your gallery is work created by you. Anyone who is found passing somebody else’s art off as their own will be banned from the site.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact either April or myself.

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.