Sea Of Pain Fine Art Productions- Brett A. Jones

Here in no particular order is just a few of the excellent works created by just some of the more committed students of my self-taught drawing methods.

All work presented is subject to copyright and cannot be reproduced without the express permission of the individual artists.

Pam has been coming to many, many lessons and workshops since I began teaching back in 2008. In fact she was asking me for freehand drawing lessons well before I started even doing them, and has since become very accomplished with her freehand drawing (and painting) over the years, winning prizes, holding exhibitions and selling work.

Kelli Williams has done multiple six-week workshops over the years and has attained a high skill level in freehand drawing in general and the very finest detail in particular over that time, which has since extended into the highly demanding and painstaking genre of miniatures. The drawing of the guitar player is conventional sized but the other three are truly minuscule, each being only a few centimetres across. She has won prizes in both Drawing and Miniature sections and sold work.

Bob Henderson did one of my three full-day workshops in Gympie in 2016 and understood and applied everything I taught very quickly. He was already highly skilled, being adept at such unusual and diverse disciplines as Pyrography and metal casting and machining (having built working miniature petrol engines from scratch), so was already no stranger to using his hands and mind to create extraordinary things. He came to the drawing workshop with the stated intent to 'finally learn to draw freehand properly after all these years', as you can plainly see from the images he did exactly that!

I met Susanne Schmidlins at a competitive art show in which we had both received an award and hit it off straight away as sometimes happens. She has since done a couple of my workshops and been mentored by me via email for a few years. She already had a quite competent skill level but has improved exponetially since picking up on and sucessfully applying my system of freehand drawing. Her favoured medium is pastels but I long ago tranferred my graphite madness over to the blunt lumps of colour myself and have been happy to pass on what I know to her and give her honest constructive criticism when asked, she like everyone has battled with many unforseen problems outside the studio but continues to improve artistically all the time. She has won art show prizes, exhibited her work and has been featured in a large article in Artist's Palette magazine as well as being "Artist of the Month" in another issue.

I met Jacob Ditchmen when he was 15yo when he started regularly attending the weekly classes I used to hold at my studio back in 2008. I recognised him very much as a kindred spirit (freak of nature) in many ways over a year or so and eventually during 2009 offered to be his mentor, opening up my studio to him so he could have as much quiet studio space and intense instruction as he needed, the only stipulation being that he couldn't interfere with my own ongoing work.

It turned out to be a good decision as over the next couple of years he often spent many days in a row working his absolute guts out as his obvious gift quickly developed into the all consuming obsession it was always meant to be. He slept on the back of the studio ute in the workshop but quite often worked right through the night and into the next day without taking a breath. Sometimes he would become so immersed (consumed) in his work over a long period I would altogether forget he was even there. He tried very hard to 'get his ticket' in the arts at tertiary level but found (unsurprisingly) that he just did not fit into the mould of an 'uni art student', clashing and disagreeing so badly with the entire system it became untenable for him to continue.

He then entered into the battle of his young life over the next few years trying to find himself his own place in the sun in the tattoo industry which as anyone who has ever tried will tell you is all but impossible unless you are bred into that world from birth. He relentlessly persisted until he won through and is now a highly respected and very much in-demand tattoo artist in Brisbane, which was always his ultimate aspiration.

He is the first of only two to ever graduate from the Sea of Pain School of Art, I'll always be glad I acted on my instincts when I did and took him on as a protege during the most formative years of his art career and as you can see from the images representing a very small sample of his large and ever growing body of work, his career is now on a steeply ascending path that could take him anywhere. He has since started his own business "Inside the Sun- Tattoo Art by Jacob Ditchmen".

I'm very proud of his ongoing acheivments won through a combination of the intense creative gift he was born with, his mentorship at the Sea of Pain studio, moral support from his family and his incredibly tough self-imposed and ongoing work ethic.

Jim Dowling is one of the private students I have had fly from interstate to take advantage of the one-on-one format of private sessions at the Sea of Pain studio in Hervey Bay. A few years ago he came for three days in a row of intense drawing instruction and flew straight back to N.S.W and attacked his drawing board with intent. Since then we have been in contact via email and I have given him quite a bit of follow up feedback and advice about his drawing. He already had a pretty good start with his drawing before I met him but wanted to know more about the whole freehand aspect as well as very fine detailing, suggesting lifelike textures, light effects etc.

Despite battles with various serious health obstacles including spinal surgery and the dreaded 'C' word he has stuck very much to his guns on his own terms and attained an incredibly high level of virtuosity with his original freehand fine art drawing.

He is the second and only other ex-student ever apart from Jacob to graduate from the Sea of Pain School of Drawing which is self evident once you look at the standard of his work. Graduation standard to me simply means there is no longer anything I can teach the recipient about hyper-realistic freehand drawing. You don't get a diploma or a hat with a sandwich board and a curtain sash but you most definitely can draw freehand to the highest standard which is exactly what Sea of Pain Drawing School is all about. Jim made the grade in spades as you can see for yourself.

Genevieve in particular was one of those rare people with the ability to comprehend and apply new techniques very quickly and by the end of the course both had gained a great deal of new drawing methods to add to their existing knowledge and never looked back, they have since both won many prizes in competitive art shows and produced much professional quality beautiful original artwork.

I first met Gemma when she was 19yo. In Brisbane she met and quickly become deeply fascinated with Jacob Ditchmen's tattoo designs and freehand fine artworks, and deeply empathetic toward his overall philosophy and work ethic. After getting to know him and finding out about his deep connection with Sea of Pain Fine Art Productions she went to the source and contacted me out of the blue with a cheeky request to become my second protege. I told her that was extremely unlikely but she was more than welcome to book a few private lessons if she wished. A year or two passed with her repeatedly driving from Brisbane and flying from Melbourne (once her work took her there) up to Hervey Bay for ever more advanced tuition. I got to know her very well over that period and even more so since then and now very much fully recognise her "Creative Monster" status as being up there with the likes of Jacob and myself, not to mention her indefatigable persistence and pathological commitment to the premise of becoming a Sea of Pain protege, which was always a fait accompli it seems. Here then is a sampler of her work. With my permanent ongoing support and guidance I look forward very much to seeing what masterpeices I know she is capable of creating over the next few decades or so.

Jose bought one of my limited edition prints of a Laverda motorcycle (Clockwork Orange) many years ago, he already had an interest in drawing and put it on the wall near his board. Then he bought all four "Drawing with Brett A. Jones" 100 page magazines and immersed himself entirely in the concepts described within. We've stayed in contact over the years since and he makes no bones over the fact that the amazing freehand drawings he does now are a direct result of reading my drawing books cover to cover many times and applying it in his work. It's a fascinating concept to me that skills I taught myself over years and then described in illustrated articles could be taken up and interpreted so successfully by a man on the other side of the world (Spain) with such obviously outstanding results. And truly outstanding they are which is why I'm very proud to have his beautiful work on display here. Good on you Jose, may you have many more years with a needle sharp Lumograph in your hand.