The Fairy Tale Book

These are some of the illustrations from my most recently published book. I'm really, really happy with how these came out (of my hands, my talented, talented hands!).

I'm currently working on a book in colour for O'Brien Press, which I'm really enjoying.

Here's The Fairy Tale Book on Michael O'Mara's website.

Copyright Michael O'Mara.

Some bloke

I've been posting a lot of pencil sketches of late and I've got some inked sketches I'd really like to post next time. I've been trying out my Deleter nibs, I really like the G nib, the line quality isn't so far removed from my pencil work.

Sketch of a lady

Happy Paddy's Day! This lady is just a sketch done on scalubrious* cartridge paper.

*Turns out this isn't a real word just something my parents used to say a lot. I had a devil of a time trying to find the correct spelling. From context I believe it mean luxurious, typically, but not exclusively in reference to food. Of course I'm being sarcastic the paper is like KVI brand.

Fork it over!

I now have a nice relaxing schedule, comparatively so, so I have time to do things like blog and sketch and blog those sketches. Here's a sketch I did on the back of a bright yellow folder. 

The last thing I was working on is to be shown in Bologna to buyers, so I might not be going to the Bologna Book Fair, but my work is.

Sketches in colour no less.

The big guy here has been painted with watercolour. It goes onto Moleskine sketch book paper kinda weird, it beads a bit when you first paint on it and it never really takes the watercolour properly, it can smear after it's dried and then rewetted, as I discovered today.

The lady was inked with a brush pen.

Sketches

Some more sketches from my Moleskine. My personal favorite is in the bottom right hand corner.

More Sketchy-Wetchys

Life Drawing

It's been 8 years since I last did life drawing. I wish I hadn't left it so long, not because I'm unhappy with the results, but it was so enjoyable to do, I've been missing out all this time.

Flowers for my Birthday

My Dad got me flowers for my birthday. They're just beautiful, great colour combo too. With my experience with colouring I appreciate this sort of thing (should I be adding smilies here to indicate my glibness).

There may be further birthday related posts for a while, it's the only thing I've got to discuss other than work.

More sketches

I have some life drawing to post and I will when they're scanned. But these puppies were ready to go:

More from the Moleskine

I've been super busy the last month and I was ill too, but finally I have a little free time to blog and stuff.

Here are some Cthulhu-esq sketches I drew on my birthday with my new 0.7 mechanical pencil. It's a pentel graphgear and it's really snazzy. I love drawing with 0.7's, you can get a lot of line variation out of them.

Cat-Lizard-Thing

Here's a little picture I made on a website where you can do a bit of collage.

In recent news I co-starred alongside my Dad in my brother's college film. It's a superhero's origin story. It involved running around for four hours in the cold and rain down by the much sanitised, now colourfully lit docks.

Flying Monkey

The Wizard of Oz was on twice over the Christmas break and I found those flying monkeys rather charming.

My first Published Card

After years of painting cards for my family's birthdays and the likes, I have a card that's available in the shops.

I only had one day to paint this and I painted it much bigger than it would be printed, A3.

Some of my Dolls

I started painting my Munny up, he's in the early stages at the moment, the very early stages! He's going to have a blingin' medallion, which I might use gold leaf for.

Beside him is my new kokeshi, which Dad got me for Christmas and behind them are my Little Apple Dolls. I have one more who's not in the photo, her name's Animula. Not my choice, I would have called her Black-Eyes-Like-A-Shark's-Eyes.

My First Review

Sweet! My first review (that I know of, I'm sure someone's made their feelings about me known somewhere before). This was in BookFest for the Children's Book Festival. The review is for the book The Henny Penny Tree by Siobhán Parkinson.

Dublin Comic Con & Hellcat Colour Sketch

I've not fully recovered from the Dublin Comic Con because I'm a delicate flower, but it was a great night. Or nights for other people who were partying a lot harder than I was. I really need to build up my stamina or maybe I should just not sit on concrete steps in cold weather while waiting round for people.

Anyway, here's an old colour sketch of Hellcat. She all twisty like a cat. Yep, cats are like that, all twisty and stuff. That's cats for ya.

Sketches in me Moleskine

Here are some sketches I did last night while watching Shaun of the Dead. As you can see they are totally inspired by the movie. I don't know why there's a turquoise tinge over the whole thing, if anything it should be yellowish.

Kokeshi Dolls

Here's some more Japanese inspired stuff I've done. My little kokeshi dolls.  Traditionally they're painted wood, but these I made out of paper clay. The smallest is little over an inch high, she was the first one I made. I've made three others for my family. The one on the left needs a little more sanding before she's fit for painting.

Noh Mask

I really enjoyed painting this. I always thought these masks were for kabuki theatre but they're for noh theatre which is a few hundred years older.

I wanna paint more of them, especially the hairy noh masks.