News and updates

Just a few updates as I've been very busy with one thing or another and haven't been updating the blog enough at all!
Many new paintings and drawings have been completed recently, and I'll give the back stories to some of those soon. I'll also have some artwork on display at Star Wars Celebration in London in July, although I can;t make it myself, hopefully some more people will see some of my Star Wars work - I'm doing a special toy piece for the event. Meantime, here's an older piece from earlier in the year that was very well received - as something different from the many toys I'd painted previously:

This Vader piece was actually quite simple to do, but also a lot of fun. It was quite a fast moving painting, taking less than a day. It's now sold, but is one of my favourite paintings. I was sorry to see it go, but it went to a good home.

I've got the blog app on my phone now, so hopefully I'll be able to update easier and more frequently from now on. 

Quick Vintage Chief Chirpa pencil sketch

Just finished a short pencil study of a vintage Chief Chirpa figure. Good fun to do and didn't take that long at all!

Unknown Man Playing Pac-Man

This was an earlier painting, and was a lot different in style to my usual way of working. There's heavy layers of Gesso, there's ink, acrylic paint, pen and pencil. Paint spatters, texture and movement. I love to try different things, and sometimes they work, and sometimes not, but this was a fun experiment that I think, really gives an early 80's look. 

New painting update!

Looking at new toy lines to try, and testing the waters in gauging popularity, I ran a relatively quick painting of a vintage Action Man which I finished earlier today. 

So far, reaction has been highly positive, resulting in a commission for another Action Man in a different uniform, and many promising comments. The painting was quite fun to do, although the clothing is probably the trickiest part. Getting the face right was fairly simple, especially as I'd opted for a close up. I will of course, post up the second painting when I get that done. Time spent on this was probably around 9 hours.

Vintage Gamer Art - Dan Tearle's pop culture inspired artwork

Welcome to Vintage Gamer Art's official blog! Here I'll be updating on current projects, future plans and some of the methods of how I work.

Today, I'll explain the concept of VGA and how it came to be.

As an artist, and also an avid fan and collector of pop culture memorabilia, a logical venture was to put my love of these things 'onto canvas' (except I never use canvas!) and share my love in a cool, fun way. 

What started as a small experiment in doing something a bit different has turned into a really fun way for me to create art, as it's something I care deeply about, and find easy to produce art based on toys, games and a whole load of things I personally have a connection to. 

I started off with videogame culture, being an avid retro gamer, and my arcade game based sketches were received surprisingly enthusiastically. This was my first sketch, 'unknown man playing Centipede' 

This sketch epitomised the era of gaming I grew up in, and was so '80's' I thought it made a fantastic subject piece. I did several more of these sketches, of which I'll talk about in later blog posts.

Another pocket of pop culture that I love is vintage toys; the toys I grew up with. One of the things I like to do is find toys and games I had as a kid, and I have several shelves and cabinets full of really cool retro items. I love being reacquainted with something I owned, and I began to put these items out as art as well. 

Like many 80's kids, I had a thing for Star Wars toys, and at an off the cuff suggestion of a friend, painted my first vintage Star Wars figure, almost a year ago. 

This led to many requests for other figures and toys, again - I'll talk about these in later posts. 

Right now I'm working on more figures and toys, gaming paintings and many other toy lines are in the pipeline.

My only enemy is time - weekends are my only time spare to work on them, and so my output is limited to the spare time I can make. 

That said, I've produced what I think is a fair amount of work in the short time VGA has been around, and I hope to continue that trend this year, with even more work and exciting subjects to stir memories and hopefully, make people smile.