I Made This..Pete-weyman-illustrations

As you can see, I am a very traditional Illustrator at heart. There's nothing I like more than to convert images to paper, as in this case with a paint brush or two and good old watercolour. Plus it helps when you have good subjects to work from!!

This piece, very much like the one above, spells out what I like to paint; when I get the chance and that is the human flesh. There is almost nothing like it, the texture, the colours, light, shade...you name it, it's got it.

On a slightly different note, painting this I quite easily got lost in the subject. I felt as if I were floating 56-60 miles above the earth, guiding the Canada-Arm into position. Some illustrations can do that, draw you in, not just as the admirer!

Yet again, figures feature alot in my paintings. This was an opening page image for a motorbiking magazine some years ago now, dealing with the heros of 'Board-trackng' as it was called in the USA. A completely different technique and style to the ones above, yet just as affective: I laid colours down and to produce the tonal values on the darker colours, I wet the brush and drew it to a point, then began carefully taking off the colour I'd just laid down.

Hands up if any of you out there have heard of a technique called 'Gum and Arabic'??? This piece of such a distingushed fellow, yes 'Sir Winston Churchill' is of such a technique. You lay down your lightest tonal value in 'Ink' then using the 'Gum' cover over the areas that will be the highlights. Then you lay down the next darker tonal value in ink (being careful not to go over the gum more than once with the ink, as this will lift the gum and disaster!), cover what you've done in gum and proceed all the way till you reach the darkest colour; a near black, where virtually everything is covered in Gum except the darkest. Once you've laid down the last covering of ink and it's dried, you then stick the whole painting under the tap and wash the gum off, revealling, hopefully an image like the above. If you've done it right, you will probably have very little overpainting to do. If not you've got alot of work to do!!

Like the 'Sir Winston' above, this is another 'Gum and Arabic' painting. This time done for a calender illustrated in the unforgetable style (and personally my favourite) of an American Legend..'Norman Rockwell' He was a renowned illustrator of extra-ordinary talent and skill who used to illustrate most notably in his long career for the 'Saturday Evening Post' in the USA.

I used to work in an Artist's Studio and had the pleasure to work with an airbrush artist, with whom we would job share and produce images like this one. A combination of Airbrush and graphite pencil overlayed ontop of the artwork, created this exciting ghosted effect.

This image was created for, as the title shows, 'Portsmouth Navy Days '96' It was designed for a poster and their programme of events over the two days. I was given an open book as to the style and content to be used and decided to produce it in a watercolour style with a text overlay for the title and bottom banner.

(All the illustrations included in this website can be supplied to you on an Powerpoint CDRom which I will glady post to you on request.)