Ciarán Brennan

Portrait of my niece Ciara ,  a Christmas present for my sister.

A selection of Life drawings from the last year or so.

I got photoshop cs5 recently and wanted to try out the mixer brush tool so I did this painting based on the photograph of Tanya Dziahileva wearing a Alexander Mcqueen dress. The new brushes are great , really easy and fun to use. I started by painting this pretty realistically but its just too much fun dragging the brush through it and messing it all up.

Some of the Backgrounds I painted/Photoshopped for the Quinn Direct Late Late show stings.

Its been windy in Ireland lately, the election posters have been billowing on their poles, but its ok because this new batch will sail Ireland into calmer seas.

I’ve been working on lots of silly parodies of famous images for practice and amusement, here’s two that are finished , the bottom one is just a photo manipulation but the Da Vinci one is digitally painted so it may appear as a speed painting on my Youtube channel sometime in the near/distant future.

Two backgrounds I completed at Piranhabar last year. The top one was for the ‘2fm come together’ ad and the bottom one was for an opening sequence for a talent search tv show called ‘Fame the Musical’.

Iain McCaig is one of my heroes, the following is an Exerpt  from his book Shadowline :

As I moved to the front ,  I noticed that the students were pulling on their black T-shirts. By the time their heads poked through, they were all kids again. I looked suspiciously at my T-shirt.

“Put it on!” McCaig said.  “We’re all ten- year- olds when we’re drawing. It’s the rule.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Cause before you were ten, you probably never thought about whether you could draw or not. You simply did it. Drawing was as natural a way to express yourself as speaking. Then you hit ten and you got stupid about it. Drawing was important and if you could’nt do it like Leonardo, you didn’t do it at all. So , I’m taking you back to ten, so I can un-stupefy you.”

“Suppose I don’t want to learn to draw?”

“You don’t have to. You already know. You draw perfect people and creatures and worlds every night in your sleep. I’m merely going to show you how to do that while your awake.”