So, I’ve been wrestling with this thing lately, trying to get a particular vibe into some of my digital sketches. You know, that sort of old, slightly melancholic, almost storybook illustration feel, but with a bit of an edge. I was scrolling through pages and pages of stuff, and then, bam, I saw this series of images. They just had it. The mood, the texture, everything. I did some digging, trying to find out who was behind them, and the name that kept coming up was Owain Davies.
Alright, “Owain Davies,” I thought. New name to me. So, my first step was the usual: fire up the search engines, see what I could find. I was expecting, you know, a portfolio site, maybe some interviews, tutorials, process videos. The works. But honestly? It was like searching for a phantom. A few scattered mentions on some really old forums, a couple of images attributed to him on obscure art sharing sites, but nothing concrete. No clear technique, no “here’s how I do it” guide. It was frustrating, to say the least.
I spent a good few evenings just staring at the few pieces I could find, trying to deconstruct them. What brushes was he using? What kind of layering? Was it purely digital, or was there some traditional media scanned in? My initial attempts to replicate even a fraction of that style were, frankly, a disaster. My drawings looked muddy, overworked, or just plain weird. Nothing like the subtle, evocative stuff Owain Davies apparently produced.
It really took me back to when I was trying to learn how to bake proper sourdough bread, years ago. Everyone online made it sound so straightforward: flour, water, salt, time. Simple. But my loaves were bricks. Flat, dense, sour in all the wrong ways. I bought books, watched countless videos, meticulously measured ingredients, tracked temperatures. Still, mostly bricks. My little starter, I named him “Dough-peless” at one point, seemed to mock me from its jar. I was about ready to chuck the whole thing and just buy my bread like a normal person. Then my grandmother, who baked bread her whole life without a single recipe written down, came to visit. She watched me fussing one morning, sighed, and just said, “You’re trying too hard to make it do what the book says. You need to listen to the dough. Feel it. It’ll tell you what it needs.” And she showed me, not by measuring, but by touch, by smell. And slowly, my bread started to actually resemble bread. It wasn’t about the exact science I was trying to force on it; it was about understanding the living thing it was.
And thinking about that whole sourdough saga made me look at this Owain Davies challenge differently. Maybe I was going about it all wrong, trying to find a precise recipe for his art. Maybe there wasn’t one, or maybe the ‘recipe’ wasn’t the important part. So, I stopped trying to copy his work directly. Instead, I started thinking about the feeling I got from his images. What was he trying to convey? What emotions did they stir up?
I began to experiment more freely with my own tools, focusing on textures I liked, color palettes that felt right for that melancholic mood. I wasn’t trying to be Owain Davies anymore. I was just trying to capture that essence, that initial spark I felt when I first saw his work, but in my own way. And bit by bit, something started to click. My sketches weren’t direct copies, not at all, but they started to have a little of that atmosphere I was chasing. That subtle storytelling quality.
So, this whole Owain Davies deep-dive turned out to be less about finding a specific artist’s secrets and more about a reminder. Sometimes, the most valuable things aren’t handed to you in a neat package. The hunt, the struggle, the trying to figure things out for yourself – that’s where the real learning happens. I still don’t know much about the actual Owain Davies, or if he even exists in the way I imagined. But chasing his ghost definitely pushed me to explore new corners of my own creative process, and that’s been pretty valuable.
