Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Co. Galway 

(as it might have been in 1600 or thereabouts)

Here are two parts of one long panorama painting. I only have an A4 scanner at home so it's the best I can do for now. I feel uneasy about this painting because it goes down a treat with the public and yet it is the very antithesis of what I promote - painting from life. This is done from a composite of photos stuck together and traced. I don't care in the slightest if that is cheating - if I want to make a nice image of something then I just do it, whether that means sitting in front of it in God's fresh air or struggling with a pile of good photos and a lightbox. It happens that I was trying to make an image for a kids' book at the time (useless at making up stories so it went nowhere) and so I wasn't fussed as to how I produced the image. But that was two years ago: I don't think I could face a pile of photos now, it's such a boring way to draw...

Oh, one other thing - the reason I said it is painted as it was in 1600 is that I got info on what it would have been like at that time, and one of the things was that there was no spit of land from the castle to the shore then - it was a little island. Very cool, no? Easy to defend I guess! Must have been lovely...