I am excited to announce a new direction for my artwork. I have a fresh artistic style consisting of hand-drawn pencil on paper with some digital enhancements. It blends the rough, sketchy look of pencil I love so much with the clean visual impact of digital processes.
I have been illustrating my own stories with delightful results, and I look forward to offering this style for commercial projects as well.
If you are interested in having your project illustrated in this style, please reach out to me via email or Upwork. You can see example illustrations on the Artwork page.
Following the client’s brief I created a coloured geologic illustration of the earth’s crust at the Southwestern Oregon coast including tectonic plates, the ocean floor, land topography, and magma flow. I had a blast learning about volcanoes and associated land formations.
Have you ever seen an underwater volcano erupting? Both terrifying and mesmerising. Check it out!
Geologic Illustration of Southwestern Oregon Coast by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Oct 2024
A client commissioned me to create a victory illustration to be shown when a player wins a solitaire card game. Bonus points if you can find all the hidden suits 😀 ♦ ♣ ♥ ♠.
Victory Bunny by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Jun 2024
Back in December I was commissioned to illustrate a 50-page colouring book about giraffes. You can see the long-necked adventures in the following three-part collection.
Artists, scholars, naturalists . . . prepare to drool. Nicholas Rougeux – expert data visualizer – has taken the incredible works of historical artists and made them effortlessly accessible in an online format. Below I have highlighted his projects that have most captured my fascination.
Discover a vast array of knowledge from 1851 spanning Zoology, Military Sciences, Architecture, Mathematics, and so much more, beautifully depicted by over 13,000 illustrations. The image quality is exquisite and the web-friendly formatting has interwoven the text with the pictures for seamless referencing.
You’ve probably never experienced rocks in this way before. Artistically arranged by colour this collection of high-resolution illustrations makes my mouth water: highly educational and inspirational.
Nicholas presents John Gould’s 537 species of humming-bird illustrations in mesmerising swarms of lively colour. Prepare to get lost in the intricate details of these delicate beauties.
This is a smaller project, but still beautiful and stimulating, especially the posters. I love looking at each of the instruments in their groups. I’m a sucker for gadgets of antiquity.
Please also visit Nicholas’s main website to see more of his mastery: https://www.c82.net/. Each project has comprehensive posters that make great wall art.
The skilled artist Karl Kopinski did a livestream with Proko discussing his character design process and answering viewers’ questions. At the end of the stream a very interesting question was addressed, essentially, “At what point as an artist do you stop striving for photorealism and embrace your own style?”
My Summary
Part of your development as an artist is recognizing what you do well that makes you unique and interesting, and not always striving for photorealism: your strength might be line quality, lighting, etc.
As you gain years of experience, simplify your art and engage the viewer by letting them do some of the work; like style, it’s not something that can be forced or else it looks contrived; it requires confidence in your abilities.
You don’t always have to prove you’re amazing at what you do; there’s always someone better than you; tell your story in your way.
God granted Daniel favour with his master and the boys were served vegetables and water for a ten day test. Appearing fairer and stronger than the others, their diet was changed permanently and they joyfully ate the food of faith.
Pulse and Water by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Mar 2024
The pagan king offered the boys flesh of the fattest beasts, his own choice wine, and the finest dainties Babylon could produce, but Daniel purposed in his heart not to defile himself with these temptations.
Meat and Wine by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Feb 2024
For Israel’s disobedience God allowed their enemies to enslave them. The Babylonians were wicked and did not fear the God of heaven and earth. King Nebuchadnezzar conquered with power and pride.
Israel’s Captivity by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Jan 2024
After the time of preparation the king asked the boys many difficult questions, and in every area they were found to be ten times wiser than all the king’s counsellors. God had richly blessed their faithful obedience.
Before the King by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Sep 2023
God’s people turned from Him and worshipped idols made from wood and stone, iron and bronze, silver and gold. They worshipped things created instead of the Creator.
Israel’s Idolatry by Nathan Parkinson, Digital, Aug 2023
The quality of Greg Simkins’ work makes me want to be more diligent (i.e. get focused on making more art and waste less time browsing reference or doing lower-priority things).
“Innovation is saying ‘No’ to 1,000 things.” – Steve Jobs
I aspire to create as freely as Greg does. Watching him paint in video form is awe-inspiring. I found the following conversation on YouTube of him with a couple other artists; he goes into some exciting detail about his creative process.
I especially enjoyed the second half of the first hour of this video.
I’d love to show some of his pieces here, but he asks people not to reproduce his work without permission; so while I wait to hear back from him, go check out his website and YouTube channel for more golden art and advice.
Edit: I got permission to feature some of Craola’s art! Thank you to Greg’s team.
Is This Your Card? by Greg SimkinsKitron Part Deux: The Sword in the Scone by Greg SimkinsPiper Pass by Greg Simkins
Learning to draw is an endless journey. I’m always looking to improve my approach and mindset regarding how to learn and produce most efficiently. Tim Mcburnie’s advice on the subject resonated with me. I love the quality of his art.
What I took away
Your need for the art fundamentals depends on what art you want to make. Many current pros just drew a lot without focusing on fundamentals.
Follow an applied fundamentals approach: decide what art you want to make and spend most of your time making it while building your foundational knowledge and skills to support that.
Apply foundational concepts ASAP! Doing endless studies and exercises just helps you get good at exercises. What’s most important is to understand how to integrate/apply the knowledge gained from an exercise or study into your workflow, how you can actually use it to help make art.
Exercises are largely an academic approach; once you understand the techniques/ideas, you can skip doing exercises and apply them directly to your work.
