Acrylic Paintings with Pencil Sketches

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Mr. Hook's Acrylic Painting Style
Acrylic Paintings with Pencil Sketches

This is a collection of acrylic paintings which I utilized for my senior exhibition during my final year at college. You’ll find various book cover concepts, complete visualizations of alien creatures and a self portrait of me dressed as a Roman soldier. This is what happens when you give me a set of acrylic paints, fine haired brushes, some illustration board, and let me choose my own subject matter. Proceed at your own risk.

Treewalker Climbing

The Treewalker is so named for its ability to climb trees. Treewalkers often band together in order to graft artificial branches into the sides of massive tree trunks. They grow the branches in ascending spiral patterns so they can reach the trunk's upper limbs, allowing them to travel from tree to tree.

Treewalker Anatomy Sketch

Piggy Up a Tree

If you are familiar with Orson Scott Card's award-winning science fiction novel, SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, then perhaps you will apperciate my attempt here to depict a "piggy" in its natural habitat. Trying to visualize the author's description of life on the planet Lusitania, I struggled to design a creature which would plausibly "resemble" a pig yet clearly not be a pig at all. The "night stick" the piggy is holding is meant to illustrate its access to forbidden technology. There is also an explanation behind the gate and the church steeple in the background, but you'd probably be better off just reading the book yourself to glean their narrative significance.

Piggy Anatomy Sketch

Prince Caspian

This is a book cover concept for Prince Caspian -by C.S Lewis. It depicts my favorite scene from the book where the dwarf Cornelius takes young Prince Caspian atop a castle turret in secret to explain to him that Narnia is not just a fairy story, but a real kingdom which the young prince is destined to rule one day. I tried to portray this fantasy scene as literally as possible, trying to work every detail mentioned in the story into the scene.

Purple Dragon

This is an illustration concept for a children's story called The King's Head and the Purple Dragon written by Frank L. Baum. The dragon has just glued the head of the Magical Monarch of Mo to the body of a woodsman. For the dragon's scales and wings I used colored pencil to draw directly on top of the acrylic paint layer. In retrospect, I wish I had moved the dragon's right claw over a little so that the glue bottle wasn't so close to the edge of the picture.

Civilization Falling

This is a self portrait depicting myself as a Roman foot-soldier who has just lost a battle in the ongoing struggle against civilizationary decline. I did a fair amount of research on ancient Roman military history to make the armor look as authentic as possible. Otherwise, this painting is done in a more "painterly" style than most of my other acrylic pieces.