Favourite Paintings from 2016

I've seen a few artists on social media posting their favourite pieces of the year, and as all my work is wrapped up for the 2016 I wanted to jump in and join, but... I've done a lot of work this year (with many, many paintings I'm not yet cleared to show) and picking my single favourite? That's tough! So, I thought I'd look back and pick a handful - not necessarily the most dramatic, or even the most popular, but the ones that, for various reasons, I enjoyed the most.

For the Middle-earth pieces: © 2016 Sophisticated Games and Cubicle 7 Entertainment
Middle-earth, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the characters, items, events and places therein are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Saul Zaentz Company d/b/a Middle-earth Enterprises and are used under license by Sophisticated Games Ltd and their respective licensees.

For the other pieces: © 2016 Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd

The Adventures of the Kai cover - a fun montage piece, and as it was a cover I had a little longer than I can normally take for my paintings. I really liked the concept of the ravens rising from the documents, too (a concept I cannot claim - I believe the brief for this painting was written by Jon Hodgson).

Agtah - fairly simple, it was fun to put together and turned out well.

Elves of Lorien - the perspective! Halfway through I was kicking myself for choosing this route, but it was good to see it come together and read clearly. It's not something that's even appropriate very often, but flattening the planes in this way did work here.

Hobbit Pipe - yeah, this is possibly my favourite all year :) Simple, clean, clear, and very representative of Hobbits, and perhaps the Shire. Given that I live in Shropshire...

Magnamund Menagerie - a second cover in here, and this one might yet change (which is why the image has text on it, as this is the image C7 revealed). I'd already painted each of the characters as individual spots - I don't think any of those are cleared to show yet - so putting this disparate crew together for a villain-centric painting was a lot of fun. It matches up with a previous cover, the Heroes of Magnamund piece - whereas that had heroes charging right, this darkens the sky and has villains moving left.

Master of Sound (Lesser) - a creepy piece, but I love the contrast in skin types and I was glad my AD (Scott Purdy) signed off on the uncommon raking light.

Measureless Aeons - when I painted this for Cthulhu Tales, it was about trying to tell the story of something so much greater than people, while still keeping a sense of scale. Hopefully I hit something close, but I feel it's fairly heavy on the elements of story, possibly because so little is explicitly laid out.

Office Desk - black and white allows different kinds of storytelling from colour pieces, and here it was all about the story. I could lead the viewer through a short narrative, telling them everything they needed to know about the scene with the placement of a few objects on a desk.

Riverblade Gives the Mission - the initial sketch for this wasn't mine, it was my AD's (Jon Hodgson). I love the different way that two people, with the same goal, can approach the same problem in completely different ways. Also, for me there's something really nice about trying to get the quieter interactions between characters - a wide-mouthed battle-yell is fine, but even in dramatic adventuring there's scope for so much more in addition.

Thank you for looking, and I'll see you again with some fresh paintings in the New Year!