Global Tiger Day
Global Tiger Day!
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
It’s Global Tiger Day And here’s the first verse of William Blake’s famous tiger poem.
And here’s my tiger! I do occasionally work conventionally with my hands, a brush and paint, and this is one example. Funnily enough it was used to illustrate a poem for a client, so I feel the William Blake poetry is appropriate. I do take on small commissions from individuals, as well as companies.
This has been hand-drawn and painted using artist’s quality watercolour paint on handmade watercolour paper. I actually prefer working this way, but digital art is often a more practical way of working, but it does rather depend on the commission. Some publishers require you to submit final artwork in ‘layers’, which, of course, is only possible if you have created the artwork digitally. So you can see what I mean!
A tiger is a beautiful, majestic animal and so a pleasure to capture in paint. In addition to the tiger, I also created sock-wearing storks, flying fish and tiny little car jugging away over some puffy clouds. All the for same Alice in Wonderland style poem.
Tigers are also one of the many hundreds of endangered species on this fragile, beautiful (and from an astronomers and physicists point of view) rare planet! The number of cosmic accidents that have happened over billions of years that enabled Earth to exist are mind blowing! If anyone got to watch the recent BBC series, The Planets (which is spectacular by the way) then you will know what I am referring to in my diary today. That alone makes you realise how lucky we are as a species to even exist. Here’s a very interesting article about this wonderful king of the forest: WWF.
