After some more work, it’s starting to fill the 81x60cm MDF board.

This detail view (at 30 hours) shows one of the most complex passages of the artwork.

And now at the 40 hour mark you can see the sheer amount of detail required for this particular painting. What I have done at the top centre-right of the image below is draw in these large areas of flat color (they are skylights) because it helps in not making any lines in the wrong square. I also use a fifth square – blue dot in the middle system to help with ‘navigation’ as well.

Detail view shown below at the 40 hour mark. It has been slow for the production of my artwork at the start of this year due to a variety of reasons, and I am keen to get stuck into my work.

The top section is quite difficult in some of the passages. I have had to use an eraser and if you take a good look at the image below (photograph taken at 50 hours) you can see afew dark smudged areas.

I am on the final stretch. Images below are at the 60 hour mark.

I have finally finished (the drawing) after spending 74 hours.

The HMS Astute is a nuclear-powered submarine in the Royal Navy. It is an outstanding achievement of modern engineering. Her builders BAE systems boast that it is “the largest and most able attack submarine that the Royal Navy has operated, with a performance to rival any in the world”. HMS Astute was launched on 8th June 2007 and this photo was taken by Christopher Morgan-Jones. The submarine is 323 feet long has a beam of 37 feet and a draught of 33 feet. It also weighs 7400 tonnes. She is capable of hitting 29 knots (54 kph) and has a crew of 98. The HMS Astute is nuclear powered and its powerplant never needs refueling and the limitation for time away from port comes down to the supply of food on board. Her service life is 25 years.

The HMS Astute is capable of destroying other ships and submarines with torpedo’s as well as launching her Raytheon Tomahawk Block III land-attack cruise missile’s. These missiles utilise high explosive warheads and not nuclear warheads. The Tomahawks can fly 2,500 km at 880 kph. This makes the HMS Astute a formidable weapon.

Please note – due to me using a $99 camera there is a slight color shift in the image. It appears slightly cooler than in real life. I will try and update the image.

The drawing can be seen here.

The techniques used can be seen here.

The next stage is to lay in some of the myriad of colors that make up the rest of the image.

And some more work..the HMS Astute starts to appear more real.

And some more – to bring the work up to the stage where just about the entire MDF board has some sort of color. This is only a laying in of initial colors for most parts, however some areas are quite complex and you are forced to paint them with a little more accuracy than the broader areas.

At the 50 hour mark you can see that I have started some of the detail work of the hull of the submarine.

The work doesn’t seem to progress much at this stage (60 hours) but that’s because there are a multitude of what I call color & spatial corrections. This refers to the abstract nature of hyperrealist painting. There are some things that I have decided to modify slightly from the source image - often they are just to make the composition ‘read’ easier or due to the low resolution of the original I don’t understand exactly what ‘it’ is. There is one part where I have used other images to decipher what exactly ‘it’ is – the front beam, painted in blue has the words “Astute” but the source reveals nothing of the small text below. So I have added in the following URL – www.royalnavy.mod.uk.  This is extremely difficult requiring not a OOO brush but a 10/0.

And now I am on the home run at 70 hours.

The painting was completed after 82 hours and can be seen here.

I moved to Yarra Glen in late 2007, and stayed for two years. I was constantly delighted with the beauty of my surroundings. I decided to make a series of contemporary, realist, landscape paintings. As a teenager the school I attended had a subject called ‘art appreciation’. At the time I thought I could be learning something more important, but now when I look back I realise it provided me with a lot of insight into art and has had a profound effect on me as a contemporary artist..

Early Australian landscape painters struggled to communicate the unique flora and fauna, as well as getting the harsh Australian sunlight correct. It took artists like Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton (who were the main painters of what is known as the Heidelberg school) to get an Australian landscape down on canvas correctly. Our sunlight is distinctly different to that of the northern hemisphere.

In creating ‘cows in a paddock’ I used a source photo that was taken at the height of a long drought. The grass was quite dry and yellow. I was wanting to make a ‘happier’ looking painting, so I deliberately made the coloring more greenish than yellow and therefore making the painting appear to from a more ‘lush’ time of the year.

I lived just up the road from this vantage point and if you are familiar with Yarra Glen you will realise that this landscape features parts of the local cemetery.

Photorealism can be used to not only convey beautiful shiny reflective things but communicate an idea. As a keen observer of the politics of the world I was strongly in favor of the Australian military deploying to East Timor in order to stop the horrific violence being enacted upon the local Timorese population after a successful vote for independence. Immensely proud when they did deploy, I have shown a sunburnt Australian soldier on top of a vehicle manning a machine-gun. Another soldier stands further back as they patrol the streets of Dili, the capitol.

This piece is about an idea – of war and aggression and right and wrong.

It was difficult to paint the flesh tones of the sunburnt soldier in the very bright sunlight and the creases in the uniform – it ended taking 166 hours all up. When it was done I sold it to the lady who lived in the front unit who bought it for her boyfriend. They broke up, she left for another state in a hurry and he was left with the packing of her things for the removal van. He packed it in a way that when it arrived it was badly scratched. As I paint with a system of very thin layers of paint and then use very find wet and dry sandpaper to keep the paint surface totally smooth it was returned to me months later to be repainted. This took 18 hours! However when I tried to contact the owner she had moved on again and I took ownership again I guess. I decided that I would never sell a painting to anyone again unless it was framed behind glass due to the very easily damaged surfaces.

This (and Fast, Beautiful, Dangerous which was done at the same time) were difficult pictures to do as I had to have surgery to my left hand due to being assaulted by three young men. The surgery was botched very badly and I had to undergo constant, painful hand therapy which yielded next to no results and made my life very hard. The depression of not being able to work, and no action from the doctor who’d operated on me, was immense. This was the lowest period of my life and I really struggled but my art helped me get through it. Later I had the finger completely amputated.

I’ve painted another beautiful part of the town I live in – Yarra Glen. As you come into Yarra Glen from Lilydale there are a few of these trestle bridges left from the old railway line. This one thankfully wasn’t burnt down in the recent bushfires that devastated the area.

Photorealism empowers an artist with a limitless array of potential paintings. I decided early in 2009 to paint some of the scenery of the town I lived in – Yarra Glen. This is a painting of some the old Yarra Glen railway station, which is now long abandoned. I walked past this beautiful scene every day. I like these rural scenes because they are a counterpoint to the more conceptual pieces. Living in a rural town on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia is an inspiration that the world can be a nice place.

Photorealism enables me to paint people I have never met. This is Neda Agha Soltan the young woman who was murdered in the streets of Tehran. She has become the symbol of the Iranian revolution and hopefully that revolution will bring about a less brutal regime. The image I started with wasn’t very high resolution so areas like the eyelashes aren’t at the standard I’d usually work with, but there’s little I can do. I have searched high and low on the internet for a better image but with no luck. I also believe that Neda should have been awarded the 2009 Nobel peace prize instead of the war criminal Barack Obama.