Click here to view Nathan’s Gallery.

For many of us it’s the time of year when landscape painting becomes its most attractive (Well, unless you count hayfever and bugs getting stuck in your oil paint, but that’s plein air for you!). Early summer gives us a fantastic clear gold cast to the light, and with everything in bloom pastoral landscapes are almost irresistible. Nathan’s image evokes some of the great English landscape painters of the 18th and early 19th centuries in its simplicity and combination of smooth blended brushstrokes in the background and more detailed ones up front (The linear and atmospheric perspective at the back could do with a little tweaking but it’s a very good effort!) It’s also reminiscent of the lovely rustic landscapes we see in anime films and videogames these days - warm, idealised and gentle, with quirky country architecture. Nathan’s obviously a very talented young artist, and I’m sure you, like me, are looking forward to seeing many more of his submissions in future.

Speaking of summer, it’s a Bank Holiday in the UK on Monday so Team Painter will be out of our office and (hopefully) enjoying the sunshine! The weekend’s images will be approved on Tuesday, so I for one am looking forward to an extra day’s worth of wonderful paintings from all of you!

We’re pleased to announce the launch of another new Face-Off website from Imagine Publishing! Our sister magazine Retro Gamer now has its very own Face-Off game dedicated to the joys of old games (The Painter gang stayed late at work last night reliving our lost youth and cooing “Wowww, Thundermonk! Echo the Dolphin! Space Invaders!”) If you remember the great games of yore, then check out www.retrofaceoff.co.uk. Unlike our Face-Off, Retro Gamer’s aims to eventually find the best retro game of all time, so if you think your favourite is a winner then get on there and nominate it!

First off, a reminder that you have one day left to enter our Painter 11 competition to be in with a chance of winning one of five copies! Details are in issue 28, so flood my inbox with competition entries while you still have the chance! Winners will be drawn shortly after the competition ends and announced in the news section of issue 31, so good luck in the draw!

Next, issue 30 is on sale tomorrow! Some subscribers will have got their hands on it already, but for those who haven’t, it’s worth the wait! You can see a glimpse of the cover on the website right now; it’s the wonderful Steampunk Alice by Sandra Chang Adair and this retro sci-fi style is the subject of our Paint Like tutorial this issue. Elsewhere Cat Bounds presents the Beginner’s Guide to Impasto while Anne Pogoda showcases her fantasy painting skills in an underwater scene with a difference. Helen Chierego shows us how she created her beautiful Kookaburra Princess painting, and Kelley Harris gets to grips with the subject of light in our Art Study. You’ll also find a showcase of some of the first entries to Creative Challenge 14, and much much more, including the Painter Cheat Guide we mentioned on our Twitter feed.  

While we’re on the subject of issue 30, an apology to Angie Jordan, whose name was incorrectly credited as Angie Johnson in the mag. Sorry Angie! You can check out her work at www.angiejordan.com and at http://digitalblacksmiths.com ahead of her (correctly named!) interview in issue 31.

Enjoy the latest issue!

Click here to view John’s Gallery.

I love fantasy art, particularly the classic, dramatic kind found on the covers of Seventies fantasy novels. This evocative image from John Edwards is exactly that. The dynamic composition is particularly well crafted. We’re often taught that we read images from lower left to upper right, but John has turned that on its head! He’s carried this off because of the position of the druid-like female enchantress - her placement within the armature of the composition is exactly where it should be, but her position on the lower slope of the hill allows John to suggest height and depth. The eagle is nearer us, making its beating wings almost startling (They’re right in our face, after all!) but its relationship to the female figure still draws our eye down to her, to see what all the commotion is about. Juxtaposing her lower position with the control she has over the eagle in the foreground reinforces her status as the most important part of the composition. The use of bright tones means that despite the relatively restrained colour harmony this image is still full of bright mountain sunlight, while the shadowed depths behind the figure serve to illuminate her just as much as the mystic light which radiates from her. A really excellent piece!

In April’s absence, I get the pleasurable job of choosing the Pic of the Week. And it was really difficult – you have all gotten so good! I finally decided on Hal Smith’s Ballerina image. Firstly, the colours attracted me. They are so tranquil and possess a great stillness. This complements the scene perfectly, with the reflection and soft detail. I think the water has been painted extremely well, especially the ripples where the wing and feet touch the surface.

It’s a great example of how a very simple scene can still hold a lot of impact. Excellent work!

Hello all, it’s Jo here, the previous editor of this lovely magazine! I just wanted to drop a quick note to say that April is poorly at the moment and at home. So if you have emailed her and are wondering why she hasn’t replied, it’s because she’s not here!

In her absence, I’ll do my best to approve the images as they come in but if your image doesn’t immediately appear, don’t panic! I promise I will do them when I can.

Bye!

Jo

Click here to view the image.

It was a really tough choice to select just one Picture of the Week today. After all, look at all the submissions from the past seven days! Fantasy art! Zombies! Portraits! Portraits of zombies! And so much more besides. Eventually though I decided that this lovely pencil sketch by Aslam deserves the accolade. Often we’re so busy playing with all of Painter’s amazing brushes that we forget the beauty and power of the humble pencil sketch. Aslam’s image showcases some beautiful linework: strongly delineated but delicate, with a wonderful mix of spontaneity and technical skill. A richly deserved Pic of the Week, I think you’ll agree!

Click here to view the image.

This stunning robot study by Adam Shortt showcases some great Painter techniques like the use of photographic textures as well as a fantastic colour harmony and a composition which leads the eye through the painting on a perfect winding left-to-right path. The gentle facial expression on the large robot and the soft lantern light held by the smaller one makes what could be a scary image into a gentle and friendly one. I must admit, I’ve also got a bit of a thing for old and weatherworn robots, especially big ones - I watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky too much during my formative years probably! There’s nothing like an incredible piece of mecha rusting away forgotten to suggest futurity or an alien world in a sci-fi painting, because the subconscious automatically extrapolates the hundreds of years of technical evolution required to create an iron giant, and the long fallen ages that pass while it rots away.

The latest images for Creative Challenge 14 are now up! You can grab them from the website now and get painting!

 A quick note on the Creative Challenge while I’m here: for some reason, our spam filters will send emails with the subject line ‘Creative Challenge’ to my junk email box if you send them directly to me. While I love receiving all your emails (especially the ones with tales of the Big Tortoise from the last challenge, which I’ll share on this blog in the near future) I don’t want to lose your precious artwork down the spam filter! Please remember to send your creative challenge entries to opm@imagine-publishing.co.uk with the subject line ‘Creative Challenge 14′ (or whatever number it is) to guarantee that I’ll receive them in time. I check my junk mail folder regularly, but it does get pretty packed in there!

Just so you all know; Friday and Monday are national holidays here in the UK so the Painter office is closed, and I won’t be in it! In fact I’m not going to be back in Painter Towers until Wednesday 15 April. I will of course try to log in and do a bit of image approval and some Tweets as well over my holiday, but in all honesty I plan to spend most of it challenging my daughter to a chocolate-eating competition so I won’t be around very much! Another member of the Painter team will be approving images on Tuesday while I’m off, but do bear in mind that it’s not usually part of their job so they may not do it as regularly as I do!

Enjoy the weekend, and I’ll see you all when I’m back on Wednesday!