Here's my latest picture, entitled "Toy Universe - No. 2". The second piece of the series.

Here's my latest picture, entitled "Toy Universe - No. 1". It's my first purely abstract piece for a couple of months.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE…

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It's available as a one-off original, in the form of a 7.33 foot wide canvas print.

The print will be framed over a solid hardwood block and heat-sealed for long-lasting protection against almost any wear and tear.

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here are some perspective views and close-ups…

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Something is most definitely coming. I'll post up a link in the next few days.

Thanks to tanakawho from Flickr for the use of some textures. The internet is a wonderful place.

So here it is - the complete set of Star Wars Russian dolls I made for my brother's Christmas present…

I bought a set of blank Matryoshka dolls online and painted them with acrylic. It took several evenings to finish, whilst watching the original trilogy. There was quite a bit of cursing here and there, and the hair-drier came in very handy, but I think it turned out fairly well.

I tried to choose characters that lent themselves to the shape and size of the dolls, whilst trying to think which ones my brother would like best. Darth is roughly six inches tall, Yoda's about an inch.

One of the tricker elements was painting on a rounded surface. I wanted the light-sabers to look as straight as possible to the eye, which meant painting them in a curve. Not very intuitive, but it seems to work okay.

The worst bit, though, was the varnishing. It was the day before Christmas eve, and the nozzle on my spray-on varnish snapped off, which meant I had to direct the spray with my fingertip. And because the varnish was under pressure, it was freezing my hand. Just when I thought I'd got it sorted, the varnish dried pink!

Christmas Eve was spent scraping off the varnish with my fingernails, thinking I'd ruined the lot. When you're an artist, the risk of messing up a perfectly good piece of work is always at the back of your mind. It just happens from time to time, but it always feels heartbreaking. And so I was imagining the look on my brother's face as he opened his present, only to find a sticky, flaking mess of pink.

I had to repaint some patches here and there to bring out the colours again, and then apply a paint-on varnish I had knocking around.

Thankfully, the second varnish was clear, but unfortunately it was also slow-dry stuff. After more hair-drying and central heating it finished drying on Christmas morning.

I wrapped them just in time for giving - each one wrapped individually and nested inside it's parent. And to my relief, it was a hit with my brother and the rest of the family.

Maybe, if I get chance, I can buy an even bigger set and paint some more characters sometime, though whether I could cope with the stress is another matter.

If you want to see some close-ups and different angles of each character, here are the links to their individual posts:

Darth Vader Matryoshka Doll

Stormtrooper Matryoshka Doll

Obi Wan Kenobi Matryoshka Doll

R2D2 Matryoshka Doll

Yoda Matryoshka Doll

Today's Star Wars themed Matryoshka doll is an R2D2.

It's the second smallest-sized Russian doll after yesterday's Obi Wan Kenobi.

Again, more fiddly than I anticipated, but I think it works okay…