Art by Ben Hartnett

It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn an aeroplane! I felt like doing some random painting so I sat down with Twistedbrush Open Studio and this is what turned up. The aircraft isn’t any particular type, although the Sea Fury and Spitfire came to mind while painting. It took maybe two hours to do.

This is my new profile picture for Threadless.com, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s sharper, brighter, and more eye-catching than my previous attempt. I also had a much larger version to post here but there was I problem: I painted it in the free version of Twistedbrush (Twistedbrush Pro Studio). It has an odd saving system which seems to make it very easy to lose a lot of work, as I discovered; I scaled the picture down and couldn’t undo, plus it apparently wrote over the file I had saved in case of this event. In hindsight, my foresight was wasted.

Twistedbrush also appears to lack the ability to select part of a layer and move it, which I wanted for an eye adjustment. Plus, while it can save in .psd format, it doesn’t seem to save layers in .psd. There’s more but these are the main problems so far. This is all unfortunate since I really like the software. The brushes feel nice, the interface feels accessible, and there are some cool ideas in how different things are implemented. I think I’ll see if the negatives have been corrected in the demo of the full version. There’s still lots of potential here.

Yes, it’s that time again. Not having a computer of my own that wasn’t dead, and the other computer I could have used being occupied by someone else, I decided to use my trusty coloured pencils. The stripes were added at the last minute in simple photo-editing software.

I try to complete these Intense Titanium pictures in an hour. Usually it takes longer, sometimes by quite a while, but this time it was right on the button. A figurative button, of course, although it could be argued that several buttons were used (but not harmed) in the creation of this picture.

I recently joined threadless.com and had to come up with a profile picture. My first effort was a response to a challenge by a friendly welcomer and was fun but I decided to change it. The above picture of a rusting brain was painted in the free version of Twistedbrush with a Graphire 3.

More for the mighty jewellery store! This pic simply introduces two new titanium rings in the range. I did this one in the free version of Twistedbrush, with a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet. I didn’t use a pencil sketch this time.

This portrait was drawn from photographic references on very smooth, white paper. Not the best choice of paper when it comes to pencil stuff but it worked out okay!

Another one drawn with oil pastels. The smell isn’t pleasant, though!

This drawing was finished in December 2008. I’d planned to use it as a first step in the process of finding a good colouring technique. I was going to reproduce the same image in colour in both traditional and digital forms. This picture was the first thing that came to mind which had a variety of materials in it, including smoke, shiny and dull metals, grass, sky, and so on.

I ended up thinking through the various media combinations I was considering and decided that none of them would work as a long-term technique for the style I wanted, so this drawing is all there is of the series! I think it took about five hours in several small sessions (excluding the initial blue pencil rough). I used a 2B mechanical pencil and a black Polychromos pencil.

E-newsletter art for Intense Titanium, with an emphasis on the hypoallergenic properties of titanium earrings. This means that titanium doesn’t cause allergic reactions like other popular metals. How do you draw something that isn’t happening? I could have showed someone’s gold earrings causing a disturbing reaction but I didn’t think pus-filled infection was the way to go! I just went for a general feeling of health and vitality.

This picture shows another change in colouring method. I used oil pastels, since I couldn’t find my coloured pencils and I didn’t have access to a computer set up for painting! These pastels encourage boldness with colour and make it hard to get caught up in detail (I generally really like detail). I touched up a couple of things digitally, using a mouse.

The Skinz rings have various patterns which I managed to put into the background. The idea I was given was that the rings help to express something about the individual, so I tried to get across the idea visually with the tiger-stripe ring. I drew the picture in pencil and coloured it digitally.