Green Men - The Spirits of the Seasons

I'm so pleased at long last to have finally given my Green Man series the time and attention it deserves. These ideas have laid waiting patiently for so long I had been feeling serious guilt about neglecting them for so many years. But after months of work I can finally say I have done the pieces justice.

Initially I intended to simply create a series featuring as many of my Green Man ideas as possible. However as sketching progressed and the complexity of the pieces grew I decided I would have to limit which ideas I was exploring unless I was willing to dedicate the entire year to the series. After some consideration I decided to transform my favourite ideas into the Spirits of the Seasons.

The series is designed to capture the essence of each season, visually but also the personality and feel I get for each time of year. Spring is the awakening, sleepy and bleary eyed but sending out new growth into the world. Summer is joyous and vibrant. The happiness seems never ending as he chuckles to see the insects go by and the flowers bloom. Autumn is humble and quiet. His appearance is most fleeting of all, yet he knows he is the most beautiful. In creeps winter, grumpy and frostbitten. Sad to have lost his leaves once more and silently waiting for Spring to awaken him and give him life anew.

Creating these characters was quite important for me in the process of developing the series, which I wasn't expecting. It helped me to give the pieces real depth and feeling which is something I really wanted to achieve to do the series justice. Through this process I hoped to evoke some of what our ancient ancestors felt about the seasons and how important these changes were for ancient Britons.

My Green Man series is now available as A4 prints here, with postcards and greeting cards coming soon ...

Art in Focus: Treebeard

Throughout most of November and December I have been working on a top secret piece of artwork to be gifted to some of my oldest and best friends for Christmas. Now that the cats out of the bag and they have the piece I can talk a little more about it’s creation and concept!

As some may be aware, Tolkien is a absolutely huge influence on me, having visited some of his old haunts in Oxford, his grave and an exhibition at the Bodelian in 2018. The Hobbit is my favourite book of all time and I collect editions of Lord of the Rings (and almost anything Tolkien related) whenever possible. So it’s probably natural that at some point I did some Tolkien related art.

Many years ago I designed my half sleeve on the theme of ‘good and evil in Middle Earth’ (kindly tattooed by the super talented Nick Brinsley) and the main focus of this is my imagining of Treebeard, one of my favourite characters. (I always felt a huge affinity with Treebeard and probably wanted to be him more than any other character.)

Fast forward several years and me and good friends went to the Rodney Matthews exhibition Electric Rock near Birmingham to see many prints and originals on offer. My favourite was Rodney’s depiction of Treebeard (which I’ve been looking at in books since childhood). My friend ordered herself this print as she liked it so much. Little did I know she also ordered one for me and kept it safe over 9 months until my birthday! What a wonderful surprise, absolutely blew me away!

So, I got to thinking how I could express my gratitude and give a gift that really meant as much as some of the gifts she has given me over the years! So, I decided creating something was the only way.

I started doodling Treebeard in early November based on what I always saw reading the books (I refused to see Lord of the Rings until I had read the books, hence only seeing The Return of the King at the cinema). He closely resembles the Treebeard of my tattoo as this was also his basis. Just with rather a lot more moss, and of course mushrooms.
On my recent autumnal walks I took lots of photos of tree textures, lichen, moss and fungi to help as reference material.

Similarly to when putting together my tattoo design, Treebeard is imagined, but other elements are based on the depictions in the film. In my tattoo Sauron is based on Christopher Lees portrayal, the Orthanc and eye of Sauron also inspired by the film. Yet in the style of an illustration (in particular the way I tend to draw, which is not photorealism). Merry and Pippin who I chose to include in the painting are loosely based on the movie casting, with similar hair and clothes, but again, are an illustrative interpretation.

Creating the piece was a very enjoyable challenge. The knotwork in particular was infuriating! A very unforgiving art form! The piece consists of a complete pen layer (below) to build the depth of the piece, and then watercolour work to bring him truly to life. Interestingly this was the first piece I experimented in adding some metallic watercolour to bring out certain areas and give them a bit of pazazz. In total the piece took around 25 hours. As usual in the winter months the light is the biggest challenge to most creatives. Unfortunately I had to resort to doing the majority of the work under artificial light, which is never ideal, but I was happy with the results considering this.

I hope my friends are happy with their painting and enjoy it for many years to come!

Work in progress: The Green Man series

For the longest time, in my first ideas book after finishing University I have had scribblings of series which are still patiently waiting to be realised. Every year I declare I’m going to finally start on my own Green Man series and do justice to these nature spirits I dreamed the faces of so many years ago. And every year things happen, other ideas crop up and I continue to keep them on the back burner.

But as this year drew to a close I decided enough was enough. I started working on progressing my thumbnail sketches into full size line work, and then onto paper, returning to my most common mixed media technique using biro and watercolour (as opposed to my recent dip pen experiments).

One daunting issue with this series has always been the sheer number of ideas I have. If I work on them all the series will be mammoth! So I’ve decided to be selective (for now) and initially work on what I’m calling ‘the four seasons’. It’s quite frustrating as I really want to realise a lot of the other characters, but that may have to be a battle for another day!

Because of the detail involved in these pieces they are proving very time consuming. Never one to make life easy for myself I decided to also incorporate some knotwork in the form of borders as a nod to our Celtic history and pre-Christian traditions and beliefs in Britain. This has proved a real challenge and is somewhat unforgiving if you make any errors. Complete precision is essential but tough. I can see why manuscript scholars claimed they would put one error on each page because only god is perfect, it’s near impossible not to make one! (Good cover story lads!)

So far with these pieces I’ve gotten a lot of pen work done, but as ever with this time of year there’s so few hours of daylight in which to work, making moving onto my watercolour layer difficult indeed.
I’m hoping that now with the passing of midwinter and the lengthening of days once more I can begin to get some colour into the pieces and truly bring them to life!