Noel Fielding

When I heard in Friday that Noel Fielding was going to be this week's model for Portrait Artist Of The Week, I knew I had to have a go.  Not because I’m any great fan of his work but just because he makes such a good subject.

I decided on Friday that he'd be getting a black background and a black top, with no distinction between hair, top and background apart from the odd dark blue highlight in the hair.  That seems to have worked well.

One other thing I've done differently this week is to work from live moving pictures rather than a still.  I had too many wifi problems with the iPad this morning.  With a different model, this could have caused me big problems but with a model like Noel, it's just a minor inconvenience and it was good experience,

This is my best PAOTW entry by far.  I've got the likeness, some personality, my own style and some quirkiness with all the black.  It's up for sale.

Robert Vaughn

I take it back.  It's Robert Vaughn, not Steve McQueen that's hardest to draw.  I did a lot of drawing and rubbing out before ending with this where I think I have the proportions right but no likeness.

I went for an interesting colour scheme on this, using much more black than normal and ending up with an almost monotone drawing.  The colour scheme does seem to have given him a bit of personality, although it's not clear what that personality is.  Ruthlessness?  The PTSD that he exhibits in the film?  Who knows?  Whatever it is, the clothes probably go some way towards projecting that personality, just as they do in the film.

The camera on my iPad keeps giving this picture a bluish tint wherever I snap it, which is odd.  In reality it's grey rather than blue.

Anyway, not a great portrait but an interesting one.  When the seven are collected together as a set, this one will bring something different to the table.

Charles Bronson

I was late out of bed this morning and it looked a bit too hot outside so I'm back to drawing with markers this morning.

I'm back to the Magnificent Seven and today it's Charles Bronson's turn to model.  While the likeness isn't great and the background is a bit planless, I think it's recognisable as Charles.  I went over some outlines in a dark grey for the first time in a while to keep him stand out against the background.

Not too bad really.  Four more to go.  I think Steve McQueen's going to be the tricky one.

Brad Dexter

Back for one more of The Magnificent Seven before I put the markers away for another week.

Number two in the collection is Brad Dexter who played Harry Luck.  He's not come out as well as James Coburn did.  Maybe it’s the coat, which looks too flimsy to cope with someone like Harry who's carrying a few pounds of what I like to think is muscle.

On a separate subject, it's a bugger to see my light blue marker on the wane just after I had to replace three of my greys.  Maybe I'll check my flesh tones before putting in another order.  And maybe I'll look into getting one extra colour, with black and cool grey 4 currently occupying two slots each and my blender having an eye on one of those when they're vacated.

Will Young

This week's model on Portrait Artist Of The Week was Will Young.

Look, I'll keep this short.  This is terrible.  I have trouble with well kept beards, let alone the Jackson Pollock style mess that Will was wearing this morning.  Still, the black background looks OK.  A bit starry with the tiny white gaps.  And it was a chance to use one of the black markers, which doesn’t happen often.

I think I'd better leave right now.

James Coburn

Back to the markers and it's time to start on a new series of portraits.  I've done a series of chess players and a series of quantum physicists.  I'm sure I'll be going back to do more at some point but I want to do something different.  So I'm going back to my beloved Westerns and what better a subject for a series of portraits than the original (and best) Magnificent Seven?

First up is James Coburn Who played Britt, an expert at throwing knives.  He went quite well and may even be recognisable.  He looks like trouble too.  I'm looking forward to seeing how this series goes.

461 Ocean Boulevard

Back out in the garden painting today and this is what I came up with.  It's 461 Ocean Boulevard, the house that Eric Clapton lived in while recording the album of the same name.  Apparently they had to change the address of the house because so many Clapton fans kept turning up there to see it.  And the house has since been demolished.  See, in the U.K. a house like this would get listed status because of its cultural links.

I'm still using just three colours.  Today it's the cool orange trio: Prussian blue, Indian yellow and rose dore.  I think they worked out well.  Even if I cheated at the end and added some highlights and detail with a white inktense stick.

The best bit about this is the colours in the house and the lawn.  Although I was always going to be using just three colours and although I was always planning to draw this house at some point, I was inspired to do this by YouTube legend Teoh Yi Chie.  This morning over breakfast, YouTube recommended a particular video to me (link https://youtu.be/W33pXVJgTVY) in which he painted a building using only three colours.  What I especially liked (and what I used in my own painting) was how he made colours interesting by varying the mix throughout the wash.  It's something I do sometimes but should do more.

Another good thing about this one is that I've kept values under control and not gone in heavy handed.

While the sky may look pretty good, it's the thing I was last happy about.  When I got to the end of the painting, I saw that I'd left a bit of sky white near one of the chimney pots.  It stood out like a sore thumb, so I felt the need to tinker.  I started by going over the white with Indian yellow to match the surrounding sky.  But the yellow was too bright, even when I tried to blend it into the rest of the sky.  So I ended up having to glaze over all the sky (and the palm trees in front of it) with Indian yellow, which did make the day look sunnier and did make the house stand out a bit but also made the sky a bit green in places.  Still, who's to know?

Overall, I count this one as a success.  It's up for sale.

Judge Rindler

My latest entry for Sky Portrait Artist Of The Week is "Judge" Rob Rindler.  He's the first celebrity model that I've heard of so far.  I've not been watching the program live, so I've no idea what he's like as a person.

I thought I'd be a bit different this week and not do any black outlining but include some weird colours in the fleshy tines.  I went for blue, yellow and two shades of green.  Pink was a possibility but in the end I saved that for the background.

And I have to say I'm really pleased with how this worked out.  There's a haunted look staring the viewer straight into the eyes.  Stare back and you can see into his soul.  This is the sort of photo progressional photographers spend hours trying to get right so it can appear on the front of the model's autobiography.  And yet I managed to get it done in half an hour!

This one's up for sale.  I doubt Rob has many fans out there but maybe his mum will see this post if I'm lucky.

BBC Life Drawing Live

I've been watching Life Drawing tonight on BBC4.  Unlike Sky Portrait Artist of The Week, this is really fast paced.  I've ended up with four drawings.  It would have been seven but I couldn't press the red button quickly enough to get model cam working in time to paint three 60-second portraits.

I also ended up filthy with all the pencil sharpening and page priming that I had to do (page priming is rubbing a pencil lead all over the paper, then rubbing it in/around with a bit of toilet paper).  And don't be me started on how many times they announced that we needed some weird medium for the next exercise, like charcoal or red coloured pencil.  I can't say it was a pleasure to participate from home and wonder whether I'd have learned more by watching.  I ended up feeling more frazzled than entertained.  If they really want to teach us how to draw, maybe they'd have been better off spending a couple of hours going through a single drawing with people at home joining in.

Oh well.  I'll just wait and see now whether any of these make it into the BBC's online gallery.

Rankin

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It’s portrait artist of the week again.  This week it's John Rankin Waddell, aka Rankin, famous portrait and fashion photographer and director.  He seems like a good guy, having some interesting artistic banter with the artist painting him live.  I'd go for a beer and curry for him any time.

The idea of drawing a hand holding a photo of Rankin came to me in the shower this morning and I'm hoping it's inspired enough to generate a bit of interest from the judges.  Without that idea, there would be nothing special about this one.  There's a vague likeness but nothing more than that.

Goldfinch On Cheese

I've saved the best until last, and here it is.  Goldfinch On Cheese.

It's quite a normal landscape compared to the other two paintings but it's still crazy.the star of the show is the goldfinch and the piece of cheese that it's sitting on.but there's also that celestial body on the sky That is starting to look like a very weird tree now that I've painted in the gap between the two shapes just below it.  And the colours in that hillside always were amazing, and the orange rectangle on the left keeps things interesting over there.  I thought the hillside was looking too big a shape, which is why I added that random looking square shape on to of it.  And of course I have a couple of diagonal lines to keep things varies and some shapes without straight edges.

There's just so muck to talk about with this one.  It's all a bit hallucinogenic too.  It would have made a great album cover back in the days when album covers mattered.  I like this one.

We're Going To The Zoo Zoo Zoo

And here's my second of the day.

The big mistake I made on this one was to paint over everything with watercolour ground.  It ruined the sky behind those mountains: that sky and those mountains were a tuning point for me in my artistic journey.  The first good piece of art I'd ever done and I had to go and ruin it.  The watercolour ground was dragging over green colours from elsewhere, so I had to paint over the sky with more blue, which I've done and it looks pretty bad.

There are some good bits of composition here though.  I liked the way the leg above the foot lines up with a line in the bit of tree just above it, so kept that.  Then I noticed that the bottom left triangle in the mountains was pointing towards the elephant, so I trimmed down a green trapezium into a parallelogram for an arm and cut another piece of paper into a hand shape.

I also like how I've ended up with two letter is with dots above them.  These could be interpreted not just as letters but also as people.  In fact they look more like people every time I look at this one.

So, yeah, not bad.

It's Quiet Out There...Too Quiet

So, as I said, I've been cutting up failed paintings And reassembling the best bits into new works of art.  I've cone up with three new works.

This is the first.  I glued down currents with PVA glue and later painted in the few gaps that were left (after applying watercolour ground first).  I also thought I'd have a go at bringing things together by letting some purple sky leak out into neighbouring shapes and filling in the missing section of a tree in the left that started with a top and bottom and no middle.  The tree works; not so sure about the purple.  There's good use of contrasts there too: diagonal lines vs horizontal and curved edges vs straight.

I like the colourful stones and the (cut off) moon in this one.  I just wish I'd positioned the stones a bit to the left so that the guy could stand on them without losing his balance.  A pretty bad error, that one.

I'm Cuttin' Up Here

It's time for a long overdue project.  The folder that I keep all my artwork in is full and I need to make some more room.  So I've taken 14 pretty awful paintings that will never sell and cut them up into pieces of varying sizes and shapes that I'm going to attempt to assemble together into collages.  I have no idea what the collages are going to look like.  Maybe they'll be landscapes, maybe people, maybe abstracts.

I'm going to glue them pieces onto card, maybe after cutting them into even smaller bits and probably paint watercolour ground in the gaps, then do some painting over in an attempt to bring it all together.    This is one big experiment.  Anything could happen.

Statistical Physicists

And here are the four of them together.

Back in my uni days, Statistical Physics was the course that came up trumps for me in every paper of my finals and when a long way towards getting me a first.  These four physicists were the big names in that area.  Statistical physics was all about doing things with bosons (aka Bose-Einstein particles) and fermions (aka Fermi-Dirac particles).

I can't help thinking how much more harmonious this set would look if Einstein had a blue background.  Oh well.  This set will be going up for sale once lockdown is over.

Albert Einstein

Back to the physicists and I think everybody should recognise this guy.

While I think I've got the likeness (for once) I've messed up in other ways.  I was planning on giving him a blue background (a different colour to Fermi, Dirac and Bose) but messed up and gave him a blue jumper, so had to go for the garish green background instead.  Then I had trouble with the shading on the jumper and went for the black marker on the left of the drawing,  big mistake.  The black has killed everything.  And then I went for brown in the jumper instead of blue but you can't tell because I've gone in with more black.  And I made the background darker on Einstein's lighter side when I should have made it darker on his lighter side to maximise contrasts.  Oh well.

This might be the last portrait for a while - some of my greys are running low and needing replacing.

New Court, Christ's College, Cambridge

I saw a great stock photo on LinkedIn the other day.  There was a sky in it that was yellow and pink on the left and blue, pink and purple on the right.  I had to have a go at incorporating a sky with those colours into a painting.

So, in terms of planning, the first decision was the colour scheme.  I want to have a go at painting with all four of the primary triads that I identified as winners a couple of weeks ago.  With purple being such an important colour, that ruled out orange cool and triadic right.  And my last painting used triadic left.  That left me with purple cool, so I was using French ultramarine, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta.

The second planning decision was the foreground.  I didn't want to take the easy route again with a random landscape (which we know normally means a symmetric composition with a path between two hills).  But I did want something that wasn't going to distract from the sky.  I wanted the sky to be the star of the show.  So I picked the ugliest price of architecture I could think of that was worth painting: New Court at Christ's College Cambridge (the finest educational establishment in the country).  New court is a brutalist Dennis Lasdun design that is known around the place as "The typewriter".

So anyway, I did this with three colours.  At one point I added some titanium white highlights but they didn’t work and have long since been painted over.  I tried not to make the values in the sky too dark.  8 wasn't entirely successful there but at least I managed to make the buildings darker.  New Court was done in countless lathers, starting with some random red, yellow and blue underpainting and later adding blue to the darkest bits and shadows, yellow to the brightest bits and generally just tinkering around.

I added some salt at the initial underpainting stage that leaked into the sky and created what look li’e some disturbed birds taking flight.  That was a happy accident.  Some of the later glazes also had salt applied.

As a finishing touch I added a couple of people coming back from shopping and some people and railing shadows.  They're not the best carrot people I've ever done though.  And it was difficult to contrast them against the background - I really should have placed them somewhere else rather than in front of the shadows.  It might also have looked a bit more inviting if I'd left the doors open rather than closed.  Oh well.

The building in the background on the left was added as an afterthought.  I really should have added it earlier.  I may have just about managed to achieve a value for it that’s somewhere between the sky and the foreground.  Maybe I should have thought some more about perspective on that building, though, and on making sure the top and bottom of its rook didn't line up with any horizontal lines on New Court.

Overall I guess it's OK.  I was hoping that either the colour scheme made New Court amazing or that it just looked ugly against an amazing sky.  In the end it's somewhere between the two.  In the end it's a decent effort but not one that will break into my top 20.

It's been sold to that same Christ's old boy as my painting of the front of the college.

Drying Brushes

I thought I was being clever using old unpaired socks to dry my brushes while I was painting but found that they just got wet too quickly and didn't do their job.

So I've borrowed an idea (I think it was from Zoltan Szabo but I'm not sure - I'll update this post if and when I ever find out) and stuffed one of those socks with toilet paper and rolled it up.  It's doing a good job so far.

One other thing I'm doing is keeping the rolled up sock in this piece of packaging that came with the new laminator the other day.  It keeps the sock still, keeps the table underneath it dry, can be used as a support to lean the paper against, can hold drying brushes in a vertical position when you punch holes for them and can be kept on the shelf with the sock in it.  Using that packaging was my idea.

Satyendra Nath Bose

The latest physicist in the series.  This is Satyendra Nath Bose.  The man who bosons are named after.  And I guess a few sets of headphones too.

After that terrible Bernardine Evaristo this morning, I was relieved when this one came out looking so good.  Considering this guy had dark skins and a complete lack of facial lines, I feel I've gone way past expectations on this one.

It looked a bit weird at one point with the left side of the face in shadow.  I found that darkening the background on the right helped bring it back from a bad place.  The lighter side of his face is now against the darker background and vice versa.

All of these old physicists are being done from black and white photos by the way, so any clothes colours are entirely my responsibility.

Bernardine Evaristo

I had my first go at Sky Portrait Artist Of The Week today.  Award winning author Bernardine Evaristo has been sat there on a Facebook feed while thousands of people at home paint her.

I've drawn her with markers.  It's not good.  I think her jawline yneeds to be a bit pointier.  Actually, I always knew she was going to be tricky, which was why I found a still to work on with Bernie adjusting her glasses.  Face to hand poses worked out well with the chess players so I thought it might be worth a go with this one.

The sickly green background and name at the bottom aren’t enough to save this one but they will be enough for me to spot my artwork if it appears in the background on next week's program.

Paul Dirac

I'm on a roll.  Where there's a Fermi, there has to be a Dirac.  Unfortunately this one isn't as good.  I had some trouble with Dirac's left eye and it's ended up being a bit grey and smudgy.  It looks as if he's been in a fight.

Dirac's biography (The Strangest Man) is on my wishlist at the moment.  Maybe I should push it up the list, get it for my birthday, read it. If I read that he got into a punchup with someone, or even that he just had verbal disagreements, then I'm going to claim this is him after meeting that letter guy.   It's always possible.  The Amazon reviews suggest Dirac wasn't great at relating to other people.

Genius though.  He put the mathematical in mathematical physics.  Years before anybody discovered antimatter in the lab, Dirac had "discovered" it by solving an equation.

Enrico Fermi

It's time to start a new series of portraits.  As I felt good about drawing all those chess players, I'm going to go for another intelligent bunch of people.  It's going to be famous physicists.

First up is particle physicist Enrico Fermi.  He looks good.  He's exuding a mixture or brains (like a James Bond villain) and Italian style (and I'm really not sure how I managed that).

I expect I'll end up doing all these physicists portrait style and maybe selling them in sets of four, single framed.  They could end up in themed groups or as pick-and-mixes where a buyer can just pick four favourites.

Although I do like the idea of a Bose/Einstein/Fermi/Dirac foursome after it was my knowledge of Bose-Einstein particles (aka bosons) and Fermi-Dirac particles (aka fermions) that came up trumps in all four of my finals papers and got me a first.  Let me ponder...