The 2020 FIDE Candidates Collection Framed!

The 2020 FIDE Candidates collection is now framed and I have it on display in my art studio.

My Sunset's On Fire

See, this is what happens when I go in without a real plan.  After all that experimenting with triads, I wanted to have a go at a painting using only three primaries.  No earths, no opaques, no white or Payne's grey.  Just three colours.  And I thought I'd give triadic left a go after it performed so well yesterday.  So that's Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta.

I started with the idea of dropping colours on randomly and seeing what happened but ended up with a sunset, so went for painting the tried and tested mountain pass with closeup hills on the left and right and distant hills in the middle.  I've done this so many times before.

I contrasted the hills a bit, making the one on the left darker and the one on the right lighter.  The one on the right also has more visible, angular brushstrokes in it, the one on the left being more "blended".  To make the light look right, I glazed over with Prussian blue at the end to put the left hill and most of the path in shadow.

There were some accidents along the horizon that looked like houses, so I turned them into houses, then added some faint houses behind them as the houses were otherwise looking too sparse and too evenly spaced.  And as a finishing touch I added three birds (an odd number) in one of the hotspots, about one third down and one third in from the right.

And I'm shocked at how this planless piece of work turned out.  It looks amazing to me.  So fiery.  I need to (a) try similar exercises with other primary triad combinations and (b) try painting other subjects with this triad.  I just worry that this Summer's work may have peaked too early.

This one has been gifted to one of my nieces.

Summer Swatching

The weekends are getting warmer and, although I did some painting a couple of weeks ago, I don't think the painting season has really started until I've done the annual paint swatching exercise.  There are some artists out there that like to do huge colour charts with all the two-colour combinations from their palette.  And a 16 by 16 grid of painted squares isn't for me.  I mean, yellow plus yellow is going to make yellow, isn’t it?

So what I used to do was three mini versions of this with all the red/blue, red/yellow and yellow/blue combinations.  But what's the point of this?  I like to work with three primaries on each painting.  I'm not going to deviate from that just because I can perfectly match a particular secondary by deviating from my chosen three.  So that's why I've done something different.

I've looked at the eight possible combinations of my six transparent primaries.  For each I've painted out a square with the three of them and explored the three secondary colours.  Six of these already have colour key names of the (secondary, temperature) form, where I choose the two primaries closest to the secondary and then either the warm or cool version of the opposite primary.  The other two are triadic colour schemes, based on equally spaced primaries rather than picking two that a4e close together.  I've called the triadics the right and left triadics just based on how my palette's laid out.

Right, let's go...

Green warm.  Well, there's a grey there rather than purple but it's nice and vibrant.  The orange is more of a brown though.  This one can be saved for when I need greens but not oranges or purples.  I don't actually mind it.

Purple warm features my two favourite primaries (a blue and a red).  The orange is passable I guess but the green is muddy.  This is one for blue, purple and yellow paintings when I want the yellow to really zing.

Orange cool.  You know, I quite like the way this one hangs together.  The green's nice and understated and goes well with the reds, oranges and yellows.  There's no purple but who needs it with these colours?

Purple cool.  Another long standing favourite with the ultramarine and magenta starring.  I prefer this to the purple warm.  The green is now much better.  There's not really an orange but the yellow and red combine to give a sort of brick red.

Triadic left.  A new triad.  Wow!  I'm amazed by this.  All three secondaries look great, despite all of them being made up of primaries that are two spaces apart.  The orange and green in particular are exceptional.

Orange warm.  Great oranges, reds and yellows, and obviously I like the blue.  But the green and purple are both muddy.  Could this be because Indian yellow and rose dore are both two pigment colours?  Hmmm...

Green cool.  Transplant yellow and brick red, as noted earlier, make a brick red.  It's hard to see here but the Prussian blue and magenta make a passable purple.  It all sounds good but the colours feel a bit muted to me.  The jury's out on this one.

And another amazing triadic combo.  These have really surprised me.  This one has a great green, a great orange and a purple-grey that would make a good rainy sky.  I need to give this combination a go.

At the end of this long experiment, my four favourites are the two triadics and purple and orange cools.  Each primary appears in there twice, so all colours in the palette are worthy of their place.  There is a pattern there, though, that I need to use a warm blue and cool yellow or vice versa.  So Prussian blue with Indian yellow or French ultramarine with transparent yellow.  The choice of red doesn't matter as much.  As long as I get the blue and yellow two spaces apart, I’m into one of my top four triads.  This is a really valuable insight: if I ever write a book, there's going to be a chapter on this and it will get people talking.

Draw People Every Day, Kagan McLeod - Book Review

Time for another book review.  Today it's Draw People Every Day by Kagan McLeod.  It's a hefty feeling 196-page paperback.

It's a strange book that I find quite jarring.  It claims to be made up of short lessons when, in reality there are three huge chapters in there on line, tone and colour,  Those chapters are divided up a bit into things like figure drawing, figure drawing from reference, portrait drawing, portrait drawing from reference but there's no feeling I get at any point that the book is anything other than one single 196-page long chapter.  There's lots of repetition in there and lots of tips that would be better off appearing in other places in the book.  There are all these great example drawings in the book with a bit of text next to them but it wasn’t clear where the text bits fit into the overall narrative.  In other books, you can read what's on the page, then what's under the drawings but in this book, you can't do that as the text on the page often continues into the next page and who wants to stop in the middle of a sentence to look at the pictures?  Even the introduction, which I was expecting to be all about equipment, started getting into stuff that belonged in other places.  And sometimes the tips next to the pictures related to stuff the author talks about in other places in the book: there wasn't always a great matchup between the pictures and the text.

So it was all a bit of a badly written mess really.  If you ever sit down to take notes on this book you'll understand.

The best idea I got from the book is of starting a people painting with some loose gestural colour strokes then, only after this, to start adding some lines, some detail and some darker tones.  He must describe something like this four or five times if I count the explanations under the pictures as well as the descriptions in the text.  This technique is also covered by Bill Buchman in his book though, and Bill has lots of other useful ideas.

I'm just feeling so tired after making notes on this book that I need to stop here before I start rambling like Kagan.  I'm downgrading this book to one palette after reading three figure drawing books in August 2020.  This one doesn't come close to the same heights as Legaspi, Huston or its closest cousin Buchman.

🎨

Super Blood Wolf Moon

Today was going to be about bright colours.  I was still in my orange fixation but was also wanting to give the viridian another good workout.  I decided the was to do this was to make viridian and my six transparent primaries the stars and to prep my paper with gesso.  That sounds to me like the way to get the most vibrant colours imaginable.  Of those seven colours, five are single pigment, rose dore and Indian yellow being the two exceptions.  With all six primaries starring, I can't claim to have painted this one on a single key.

The gesso went on last night.  It went over most of the paper but leaving a band for sky at the top.  Rather than painting it on, I spread it on with a palette knife and then did some pattety pats with the knife all over to get a bit of texture.  And it's a great texture - the green field on the right looks like a cabbage leaf.

With all six primaries in starring roles, I didn't want any of them to steal the glory in a blue or orange sky or a sunset.  And I definitely didn't want to bring in Payne's grey or raw sienna.  So I went for a night sky using a dark colour mixed from three primaries - I think they were French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow but can't swear to it.  I masked out the moon first and spattered on masking fluid for stars.  Some paint got under the masking fluid on the moon, which is why I had to colour it in and how I got to a super blood wolf moon. As well as painting the sky in that dark colour, I charged in the three primaries in places for a bit of variety.  I think I dropped in some Prussian blue too.

And then there's the fields, with all the best oranges and greens I could think of and some other colours to make up the number.  Left to right, row by row we have:
- viridian and Prussian blue with the green and blue also charged in
- Indian yellow with an imperceptible amount of rose dore charged in
- viridian and French ultramarine, both also charged in
- quinacridone magenta and French ultramarine with the French ultramarine charged in at the top
- French ultramarine and transparent yellow, both also charged in
- (second row now) rose dore with a bit of Indian yellow charged in
- rose dore and Indian yellow, both also charged in
- viridian and transparent yellow, both also charged in
- rose dore and Indian yellow
- (bottom row) Prussian blue and transparent yellow, both also charged in
- cadmium red (I was starting to run out of ideas) and Indian yellow, both also charged in
- Indian yellow, with more rose dore charged in than before

And then finally, it would have been easy for me to add all the trees and foliage around the edges of the fields in sepia but instead I used Prussian blue, rose dore and Indian yellow.  I had to mix and use them pretty well direct from the tube to make them work.  I felt like an oil painter.

Before I get to the denouement, a word about rose dore.  Rose dore is struggling to hold its place as the warm (orangey) transparent red in my squad.  Quinacridone red, which I've not yet tried out is putting it under pressure.  The quinacridone has the advantages of being cheaper, single pigment and non-staining.  I've heard that the quinacridone disappears pretty quickly as it takes a lot of paint to get to something strong enough to use.  But I tell you what, that rose dore has exactly the same problem.   Provided the quinacridone can make oranges as good as these rose dore ones, then it's going to get a seat in the plane.  Anyway, when the rose dore runs out, I'll be giving the quinacridone red a tryout.

Anyway, I like this one.  The colours in the sky are great and those on the landscape jump off the page.  This was never meant to be a realistic painting, so there was no need for me to dull them down with a glaze over the top like I did with these sandstone pillars yesterday.  And the gesso worked a treat, adding those cabbage leaf textures and making the colours zing.  One downside for me is that I keep catching that patchwork of colours out of the corner of my eye is and they remind me of some bedding I used to have.  The other is that this one could be accused of being derivative of the painting on the front of that Stephen Quiller book that is sitting second of third on my wishlist (I'll accept partially derivative).  Needless to say, though, this one's up for sale.

We Will Make Them Give Us Light

After throwing my heart and soul into that last watercolour I wasn't ready to stop for the day.  I needed to "warm down" by doing something more abstract and just enjoying some colours.  I couldn’t do a big painting as I've applied a load of gesso to my main pad and need to leave that to dry.  So I dug out a wirebound pad of 5 by 7 inch watercolour pages.  I bought it in anticipation of maybe heading out at some point for some plein air painting but that's not going to happen.

This was a Jean Lurssen style abstract landscape.  Look her up on YouTube.  If she ever writes a book, I'm buying it.  She's a real inspiration.

Anyway, I started with an overcast sky.  I've  not done one of these for a while.  Raw sienna first, then dropping in some Payne's grey with a little bit of quinacridone magenta.  And then for the steep foreground, I went for viridian green and quinacridone magenta.  After getting the orange out of my system in today's first painting, I wanted to give the viridian a good workout.  And then it was a case of randomly dropping on acrylic inks and encouraging them to run around with granulation medium and a lot of paper tipping.  Finally I added the trees in sepia acrylic ink, drawing them with the pipettes in the bottle lid rather than using a brush.  It was all a pretty relaxing, brainless exercise to help me wind down.

I think it looks good.  The waterfall green ink adds shimmers in places and the sky really seems to be lower than usual, adding a sense of menace.  I may have overdone the trees but I was enjoying them.

The name of the painting is taken from the lyrics to The Trees by Rush in honour of the late, great Neil Peart.  May he rest in peace.

And this one's for sale if  anybody likes it.

Bubble Horse Horse Bubble

It's a bank holiday, the sun's out and I'm back on the watercolours for the first time in months.  I've been pining for orange over the last couple of weeks but was feeling torn about what to paint.  I'd seen some great ideas in Hazel Soan's watercolour rainbow about how to paint sandstone pillars.  But I was also in the mood to paint a purple sky.  How could I do both?  The answer was a diptych.

I found a great reference photo that a friend (let's call her Bubble) had posted on Facebook and my original plan was to paint two versions of it side by side.  One with blue sky and orange rocks, the other with orange sky and blue rocks.  Because it was important that the two underlying drawings be near identical, I started by drawing a couple of shapes on cardboard and cutting them out to draw around.  It was only after doing this that my plans changed.  I was originally going to do two paintings divided by a white band (using masking tape) but then I name up with the idea of turning the shapes over to get a symmetrical painting.  And if I was going to do that, why bother with the white band down the middle?  Just let the two run together!

The main three primaries today were rose dore, Indian yellow and French ultramarine.  It's in the key of orange warm, which makes perfect sense given the subject matter.  The sandstone on the left started with a burnt sienna wash, then has some rose dore and Indian yellow charged in and finally had stripes of cadmium red drawn in wet into wet.  The cadmium red was the big Hazel Soan idea: the stripes blur a bit but (because cadmium red is opaque) it doesn’t go crazy and you can still see the stripes.  This is why I have opaque colours in my palette!

On the right, I started with French ultramarine, charged in some quinacridone magenta (as I thought purple would work better than blue and as rose dore is probably too warm to make purples).  And then I dropped in the cadmium red stripes again.  There's also some quinacridone magenta in the background hills on that side.

The horseback riders, who were originally masked out, were painted in neutral colours derived from my three primaries, with primaries charged in in places.  I tried to make them more blue on the left and more orange on the right.

Then there were the shadows.  These were mixed from the three primaries but in slightly different variations with more blue on the left and more orange on the right.  Note how even the direction the shadows point is symmetrical.  I also added the shadow colours as glazes over the sandstone arch - without this they were looking just a bit too vivid, even for me.  And in the rock in the middle, I added some variety with a blue edge down the left and a yellow edge down the right.

Overall, I'm really pleased with the whole concept and with the sandstone pillars (which I really need to try again).  The two horse riders don't look great but I think everything would look a whole lot better if I'd used more water in the background hills and much more water in the sky.  It's values that are the problem today.

Good idea, bad execution.  One for the reject pile.

2020 FIDE Candidates Tournament - The Collection

And here's the collection.  This is the format in which I want to get them all framed. and that may mean getting a specialist framer to at least prepare the mounting board with the eight apertures.

There's a balance there of coloured, white and patterned backgrounds.  A balance of rollerball and marker delineation.  A balance of left facing and right facing players.  And this is balanced over the page, not just through the collection.  Even the best and worst portraits are spread evenly.

There are also bits of uniqueness there.  One player has his name there.  One has a thought bubble.  One has a green face.  One is in such a dark place you can't tell where his hair stops and the darkness starts.  And these pockets of uniqueness are spread all over the page too.

I'm ridiculously proud of this creation.  It's not for sale though - it's on display in my art studio.

Fabiano Caruana

And here it is, the last one in the collection.  It's world number two Fabiano Caruana.

I thought I'd go for a bright green background as that seems to work when I combine all eight portraits together (see next post!).  There's a sense of harmony about this one with the green in the shirt being used as the background and the blue in the suit also being somewhere in that hair.  It seems to work well.  That blue is also in the glasses frames: in reality the frames are dark blue but my dark blue marker just doesn't work well with my other colours - it's too dominant.

I really like this one.  There's the harmony, as I say, And as well as looking good, it's right up there with Kirill Alekseenko for likeness, I've yet again managed to get a bit of personality and concentration in there.

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

And today's second portrait is Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.

A longer shot, this one, with more of the body showing (looking for variety).  The first player to have his name on the portrait (more variety).

There wasn't really very much special about the source photo to start with, so I though I'd add a background.  Rather than another plain background, I wanted to follow the approaches with Ding and Grischuk and use a pattern on the background to bring out a bit of mental intensity.  So I started with diagonal stripes parallel to the line between MVL's eyes and the board.  Orange would have complimented the suit better but that would have made this one too similar to the Giri portrait.  I didn't especially like the purple stripes, so I put some yellow in the top right for some variety.  Didn't like that either, so I went all over the background in yellow and made the purple stripes wider so that there were just a few thin shafts of yellow sunlight coming through.  I also left a white glow around the board.

Not a great one, this.  But let’s see what the eight of them look like together before I decide whether any need replacing.  Only one to go now.

Anish Giri

It's the weekend and I'm back to drawing portraits of the with players in the FIDE Candidates tournament.  Today it's Anish Giri, a player with a reputation of drawing a larger than normal proportion of his games.

At this point I have half an eye on what the final collection of eight portraits will look like all together, so I'm trying to get certain aspects of the mix right.  Before now, only one of the five has a single colour background. only one is delineated in rollerball rather than marker and only two are looking left.  So that's why today's player has a single colour background, is delineated in rollerball and is looking left.  I've picked an orange background to compliment the blue whistle Anish is wearing.  And I thought I'd add the caption.  He'll be the only player in the final set with a caption, so it adds a bit of individuality and character.  And he won't be the only one with individuality - remember Grischuk's skin colour!

Likeness-wise, it's not great but I'm resigned to likeness not being the most important aspect of this collection- it's going to be about personality and about concentration.  Those are what are going to make this collection a winner.