AnaIv

After that last disaster, a quick response.  Figure drawing with the inktense pencils is much less risky than portraiture, so I went on to artmodeltips.com and found a photo of a model called AnaIv that looked interesting.

And here's my interpretation.  The colours are great but what I really like is some of the lines on the body. The centre line down the chest, the line from the shoulder down to the right breast, the creases below the right breast.  These are a result of a new strategy I tried out that I need to remember to keep using.  When it came to painting water over the pencils, I painted in those lines first.  Then when I came to paint over everything else, I generally steered away from those areas so as not to disturb the lines.

I also outlined the figure afterwards in indigo and then went around the outside with water, allowing only a little colour from the figure leak outwards.

The biggest mistake I made was to include the support straps in the drawing.  This would have looked so much better with them left out.

Anyway, if you're only as good as your last painting, I'm a much better artist now than I was a couple of hours ago.  Anaiv is up for sale.

The Sneer

Oh dear.  A portrait of Zinedine Zidane in inktense pencils that went horribly wrong.

The worst thing about it is the mouth.  Oh and the general lack of likeness.  I think this went wrong at the drawing stage, with the lines through the eyes and mouth being at the wrong angle.  They were both too horizontal and should have been more downward sloping, left to right.  In fact, you can probably see where I've tried to correct the mouth by adding a bit more red in the top left and bottom right.

Also bad is the intensity of colour.  There's far too much on the paper.  I must have been a lot more gentle with my self portrait a few weeks ago - I got the values spot in that day.

Because this was going so badly, I experimented a bit by chucking salt onto the wet pencils for the first time.  Something's definitely happened in the hair but this isn't something I'll be making a habit of.

Anyway, this is for the bin.  Not for sale and not being published on Facebook or Instagram.

Sedona, Arizona

Yesterday's High Noon painting was a bit lacking in colour for one of my creations, so I thought I'd do something colourful today: a three colour landscape.  I went for my newest set of watercolours and, after some experimental swatching on the back of that failed panting from a couple of days ago, chose Winsor blue (green shade), permanent alizarin crimson and Winsor orange as my three primaries - the orange counted as my yellow.  These are all colours not in my first choice palette of twelve, or even the preceding palette of sixteen but, being a cool blue, warm yellow and cool red count as a triadic left panting in my terminology.

There's not much to say apart from that.  I drew the picture and coloured it in with the three primaries.  The rocks were looking a bit monotone in red and orange, so I dropped in some of the blue, which had a fantastic effect.  To get lines and cracks in the sandstone, I brought in sepia and cadmium red from the opaques shelf so that I could apply them wet into wet without them spreading everywhere (that's what's great about opaques).  I dabbed on the foliage with the blue and the orange plus some titanium white (which felt necessary), all using a Terry Harrison foliage brush.  Finally, I added the two birds for a bit of interest.  I painted them on first with a neutral mixed from my three primaries, then dropped in bits of red, blue and orange for variation.

And I do like what I've ended up with.  The three primaries form a great power trio but it's that Winsor blue green shade that's  the star both in the sky and on the sides of the rocks.  On the rocks, my A level chemistry tells me it has the look of rusty copper or maybe copper carbonate, so maybe there's some copper in that pigment?

Anyway, decent job today.  It's up for sale.

High Noon

With not many ideas about what to paint and not wanting to keep doing abstract after abstract, I thought I'd have a go at another famous Western.  Today it's a scene from High Noon.

The colour key today was warm orange, with the main colours being Indian yellow, rose dore and French ultramarine.  It's not a colour scheme that gave a great swatch at the start of the summer but I thought I'd give it a go anyway, given that a Western scene will generally be warm and orange.  They weren't my only three colours today though.

After masking out Gary Cooper and painting in the sky (with a dark cloud deliberately put around his head to add a bit of mood, I painted the whole foreground and middle ground with a raw sienna glaze.  It felt like the right thing to do, adding a dry, deserty feel to the painting before I'd even started.  I also did a bit of underpainting on the buildings, using my primaries to create interesting shadowy colours in the shade and brightening things up with Indian yellow where they were in the sun.

And then I got on with painting all the middle ground and foreground (but not the figure at this stage) using my three primaries to create neutral colours and to vary them around rather than keeping them fixed all along the same face of a building.  I also used some titanium white for window frames and balcony posts.  I then painted in the figure in abstract style using the three primaries.  Today, rather than going for the outer space look, I used the primaries to try to be a 3D effect, like in my Butch and Sundance picture a while back.  I also tried to hint at a sheriff's badge, a belt and a v-necked waistcoat.

But then while waiting for the figure to dry, I noticed a couple of problem.  First, the painting was looking too colourful.  Not something I normally mind, but this seemed at odds with the painting's roots in a black and white film.  And second, the figure didn't stand out enough against the background.  So to tone down the background and to offset it against the figure, I glazed over the whole background with Burnt sienna.  It's a shame that beautiful blue sky had to go, but needs must.  I also added a few more tweaks, repainting the horse bar (on top of the burnt sienna glaze), adding white highlights to it, adding white highlights to one side of the figure and giving the figure a good dose of salt (being careful not to get any salt on the background).  The highlights all looked too bright so I tried to wet them out without making milkshake.  The trick was to brush the underlying pant into the white and not the other way round.

And in the end, hmmm...  Perspective looks off.  It all looks cold, as if it's a fight at dawn rather than at noon.  And the figure isn't distinct enough against the background.  There's a strange glow around the figure's right arm which could be a good thing or a bad thing.  What is good though?  Bits of the figure (the legs and the hint of a badge).  And that horse post on the left is great - it really stands out against the background.  In fact, if I crop out Gary Cooper, the resulting painting with the post as the main subject looks great.  And I never used to be able to draw boring foregrounds but there's just enough variation in that road to make it interesting.

It's up for sale.

Oh, and this got a like on Instagram from Gary Cooper's daughter, Maria Cooper Janis!

The Tree Of Life

My second painting of the day was a lot more successful.

The underpainting was again in ultramarine blue, raw sienna and burnt sienna.  With two Earth colours in there, I can't claim to have painted it in a particular key. I tried to paint some sort of branches using the burnt sienna, just to give myself something vaguely concrete in there.  The three colours looked a little calm, so I added in some quinacridone magenta as an afterthought.

Once it dried, it was all quite light valued and the branches didn't really stand out.  So rather than spattering or painting whole cliffsides with inks, I used the inks to bring out the branches.  I used a lot of sepia but added Earth red and Indigo in places for variety.  And I added in a lot of gold ink, which doesn't add colour but does add sparkle.  I also used a bit of white but was careful not to overdo it and create milk.   After adding granulation medium, I found the inks were wanting to add new branches of their own, so I encouraged this.

The last step was the spattering, but rather than using inks again, I used the four heavy duty opaque watercolours in my collection: titanium white, cadmium red, cerulean blue and cadmium yellow.

The end result isn't too bad.  I don't know which of the four possible ways the painting should hang but I find myself leaning towards the way I show it here.  It feels like the white bits and the bigger red lumps belong on the tops of branches.  Whichever way it hands, though, the inks and paints have created strange ambiguities in there that could be weird forest creatures.  For a start, it looks (this way round) as if there's a huge creature standing on the branch with its arms in the air, and something smaller down in the bottom right, dancing in flared trousers.

I think this counts as a return to form.  It was given away as a present to my sister in law.

One For The Bin

All my artwork, good or bad, goes up on this website.  That's why I'm showing you this abomination.

I saw a Jean Lurssen video this morning in which she started off with a blue and yellow underpainting, then spattered on some inks and ended up with something amazing, looking like a closeup of a bit of hedgerow.  I thought I'd have a go at something similar.

I started off OK, with an underpainting of French ultramarine, raw sienna and burnt sienna.  But I felt like adding some green, so I added some green inks in the middle, along with granulation medium.  And there was too much green, so I had to blot lots of it out.  Then, when I tried spattering the ink using a palette knife, I found the ink was too watery.  It didn't spatter like Jean's.  In the end, I managed some spattering using a toothbrush but it wasn't great.

I knew this painting was going downhill fast, so I tried adding loads of ink and granulation medium to try to turn it into one of my textured cliffsides.  This kind of worked, but I still wasn't happy.  The sky had lots of green and spatters in it, which didn’t make sense, so I tried adding some trees.  It just made things worse.  So finally I experimented by glazing the sky all over with transparent yellow and the hills with burnt sienna.  While the painting was still horrible, the glazing wasn't too bad and I may try that again another time.  But I need to remember to make sure any white ink is dry because if it isn't, it turns everything milky.

Oh, and there's some decent texture in the hills. That came from using too much ink and having to dab it dry with a paper towel.  Again something to note for another day.

This one's for the bin

Led Zeppelin

 And here's the complete Led Zep collection.

The four drawings are all in different styles but work well as a set.  Four different colour backgrounds, heads all pointed inwards, the two with hard black edges diagonally opposite each other.  There are two recent pictures and two from the band's heyday, which provides a bit of variety, and both pairs are in opposite corners.  All with their props, making their roles in the band pretty clear.

Likeness-wise, although none of the four are perfect, they're instantly recognisable as Led Zep when they're all put together like this.

This is up for sale.  I may have to order a frame on line, so delivery times for the framed collection won't be super quick.

John Paul Jones

And here he is at last, John Paul Jones.  The only bassist to have ever given me any trouble (Geddy Lee, Jimbo and Roy are three of my greatest ever portraits).

But John Paul Jones has been a right bugger.  I started trying to draw an older, more mature, JPJ.  He should have been easy with some strong facial lines, a pouting bottom lip and eyes that always seemed to be closed.  But here's what I ended up with in my first two attempts:

I should point out that the first of these was drawn before Robert Plant, when I still had some flexibility in choice of background colour and was not committed to blue.  Neither drawing is a remote likeness of JPJ, so I took this as a message from the gods that I needed to give up on the mature version and draw a younger version.

I also adopted a different strategy for the younger version, starting with the big shadow shape on one side of his face and extending this out into his hair and onto the jumper.  It was my way of steering away from going straight for the facial features.

It all ended up kind of working.  I like the tilt to the head, the spaced out look and the contrast between thick edged shapes and the thin black lines of the jumper pattern and the guitar strings.  I don't like that there's not much energy and expression in his left hand, something that's normally a personal strength in drawings like this.  Likeness-wise, I think it's OK, although there's some Noel Fielding and Jeff Beck floating around in there too.

But the real test will be how well the whole Led Zep collection fits together.

Robert Plant

Next up in the Led Zep collection is Robert Plant.  Those curls were always going to make this a difficult job but I don't think this came out too bad considering.  Maybe the forearm should be slightly bigger.  And   the face looks a little chubby.  But if I can draw a present day Jimmy Page and a 1970s John Bonham, why not go for a 2030s Robert Plant?

I didn't add a black outline to this one because I didn't want to spoil what I had.  With Jimmy having the black background and John Henry having thick black outlines, maybe JPJ will need outlining with a black rollerball for maximum variety.  I did make sure, though, to give one side of Robert's face a really hard edge, which I think looks good.

Anyway, just John Paul Jones to go now.  I've had one go at him and was terrible.  I'll have another go tomorrow.  Must remember to include the black rollerball outline and probably a blue background.

John Bonham

Next up in the Led Zep collection is the late John Bonham.  He's going to look like the odd one out in this collection, being drawn in his heyday rather than in the distinguished later years that he never saw.

I think this one's come out marginally better than Jimmy.  While there are no drumsticks in the picture, there's still a sense of energy.  More energy, in fact, than in the source photo that I started from.

I'm starting to like how this collection is coming together.  Two more to come later this week.  It might not be tomorrow as I have some bookshelves to fix first.

Jimmy Page

Before I get back to the paints, some portraits with markers.  And after the Rush collection turned out so well, I thought I'd go slightly more mainstream.  Not as far as Take That, which really would be selling out, but just a little step inside to Led Zep.

First up to get the Artistic Actuary treatment is Jimmy Page.  It's based on a more recent photo of Jimmy, in his old and distinguished phase rather than his younger days.  I've managed to get a bit of that distinction and wisdom in there.  The likeness isn't perfect but I think this is down to those weird looking hands.  If I crop the picture right down to the face, it looks a lot more like Jimmy.

Still, this isn't a complete work.  There are still three more band members to be drawn and they should all be judged as a set rather than individually.

The Vulture

Well, I think I set off with the right intentions.  I wanted to do another portrait and wanted to take the easy route with a bald gentleman.  I couldn't think of any good real life subject so settled on a fictional character.  The idea was that I'd start from something approximating a comic panel and that my impressionistic colour scheme and face drawing skills would get the subject to look less comicky.

So the starting comic panel is a Steve Ditko panel from Amazing Spider-Man #2.  A great portrait of the Vulture, with the humped shoulder and foreground hand adding an extra bit of character.  I added the separate Vulture silhoutte in the sky based on another panel in the same comic because the top right corner of this work was looking a bit boring.

And I don't like the final result.  I tried to reflect some green in the skin tones while also making them interesting with reds and blues but it's all gone wrong. He looks like a gentleman of colour for a start.  Then there's the ear colour that doesn't fit in, the hand that looks like it's gloved (which it wasn't), the poor likeness and the cartooniness of those huge Ditko eyes.  The ruff is pretty good though. And the use of red to downplay the garish greens worked in places.

This one's a flop.  If anyone wants it, just let me know but I'm not putting it in the shop window where it would make me look way too amateurish.

Annual Self Portrait 2020

I fancied another go with the inktense pencils but, rather than doing another female nude, thought I'd have a go at a self portrait.

And, actually, these pencils work as well with portraits as they do with figure drawings, encouraging me to use all sorts of crazy impressionistic colours.  Portraits are much easier with these pencils than they are with watercolour - probably as easy as they are with the markers.  With this one today, I applied something I learned from the James Gurney book and divided the head into three bands.  The top band has more yellow in it, the middle band more red and the bottom band more blue, green and grey.  At least that was my opening plan.  I went in quite lightly with the original pencil drawing and added more pencil after after each coat had been wetbrushed and dried.  I could have carried this on forever but you can see on my bottom right jaw that the paper was starting to protest at this treatment.

I'm quite happy with this one.  It's my best self portrait so far.  Not cartoony for once (apart from that ear) and more attractive than usual.

I don't expect even my most ardent fans to want to see my face on their wall, so this one will just be stashed away rather than put up for sale.

Winter Is Coming

I thought I'd have another go at turning an abstract underpainting into something recognisable.  This time, though, I made three changes.  The first change was that I only used a spattering of masking fluid with no big masked shapes after the shapes didn't work out well last time.  The second change was to the colours.  Lemon yellow and the pthalo blue with another name didn't really fit with the other colours, so were both left out.  Cerulean blue and Winsor yellow came in as replacements to join Winsor orange, Winsor red, permanent rose and French ultramarine.  Sap green and olive green were given bigger parts to play than last time. I think there may have been a little bit of Winsor violet in there too.  The third change was in the randomness of the colours.  This time I put lots of greens along one of the longer sides in the hope that I could end up with something looking like a landscape.  Finally I added some lines on both sides in ivory black using a flat brush that could turn into trees.  Then I applied the salt and French stick wrapper and left it to dry.  Here's what I ended up with:

I was pretty pleased with that underpainting.  There were plenty of textures there and it was already looking like a landscape.  Those black trees had pretty well disappeared, which I was secretly happy with.  The plan was that on day two, I just needed to harden some foreground horizon edges and add some interest in the form of trees, people, animals or buildings.  With a tree probably covering up that vertical black line on the right.

So I hardened my horizon, added a couple of trees and added a wolf or dog.  To do this I mainly used sap green, French ultramarine, Winsor orange and permanent rose, although I did start with some olive green bits in places.  I kept the Greenland-shaped watermark in the middle at the bottom, turning it into whatever you'd call a golf bunker away from the golf course.  In glazing over the foreground, I tried to put in interesting gradations and to stick with the red and green areas while adding blue, yellow and a neutral grey in places to liven it up.

And then I looked at the painting.  Something still wasn't right.  The masked spatters were looking like falling snow and the scene was feeling cold, so I thought I'd add some snow.  There's no way a pan of (semi-transparent) Chinese white was going to do the trick, so I went for (opaque) titanium white.  I used it straight from the tube to maximise opacity.  At first just added it to tree branches and to high spots.  It took a couple of applications to work as the first dried to a grey.  And then I experimented in two ways.  The first way was to use a wet rigger brush to drag the pure white highlights downwards.  This created some great grey snow.  The second was the dry brush technique, where I loaded up with undiluted white paint and dragged the brush sideways along the paper, so it only touched the peaks of the rough paper surface.  That also worked well.

I'm pretty happy with it.  Now that it's dried, I can see that the horizons on the left are a bit too white, with the white graduating too abruptly into the green underneath, as if the horizon's been drawn on with a thick white pen.  Otherwise OK though and would look good on anybody's wall.  It was sold to an Edinburgh-based entrepreneur.

Skyfall

After a bit of a break from them, I picked up the paints again yesterday.  I couldn't decide what to paint is thought I'd start with some random abstract stuff and hope that something popped out of it.  The first step was to spatter on some masking fluid.  I was near the end of the bottle and wanted to finish it off, so I was quite heavy handed, even pouring a bit on at one point.  I also used a small brush (an old one that I only ever use with masking fluid) to join some of the blobs together just for the hell of it.  Here's what I ended up with:

Once that was dry, I wet it all over and chucked on some random paint.  I used warm and cool versions of all three primaries, so this isn't in any particular key.  I was using the experimental palette and went with lemon yellow, Winsor orange (which I was counting as a warm yellow), Winsor red, permanent rose, French ultramarine and Winsor blue (green shade) which every other paint manufacturer calls pthalo blue.  I also dropped in a little bit of Winsor violet, permanent sap green and olive green just for the hell of it.  In doing this I tried to keep colours generally cool on one side and warm on the other.  Finally I sprinkled on some salt in places, then covered up about two thirds of the painting in French stick wrapper, squeezed the wrapper around a bit, weighed it down and left it to dry:

And here's what I ended up with:

And that's where I stopped for the day, giving myself time to look for ideas within the painting.  I guess this way round there might be a tree in the bottom right with a forest pixie leaping over it but forest pixies aren't my sort of thing.  One of my nieces suggested turning it upside down to end up with some trees on the right and yellow mountains in the middle but this felt like the sort of thing that might have worked best as a suggestion and that might have been ruined by being brought out.  There are no hidden gorillas or Brazilian villages there, though, so this represents quite a challenge.

It's worth pointing out at this point that there are some textural successes there.  There's a salt-induced snowstorm in the bottom right, some interesting back runs along the top, something looking like a stitch in the top right and some sharp edges and spotty treadmarks from the French stick wrapper at the bottom.

So with no obvious shapes to bring out in the painting, I thought I'd add a silhouette to it.  Going through the ideas I'd collected, I found a still from Skyfall and used that.  The three colours I used in this final stage were French ultramarine, Winsor orange and permanent rose (after checking that they mixed to give a decent neutral colour).  I put in two rows of grasses, the top row with some of the ultramarine and some of the rose and the bottom row with ultramarine.  I mixed together all three primaries for the figure, varying the mix as I went along and trying to make it more blue at the bottom so I could blend it into the blue grass layer.

It was looking a bit empty, so I added a couple of trees in the neutral mix, making the one on the left more violet and the one on the right more green.  And then I was left with the issue of all those empty white streaks.  I decided to add a bit of random colour to them using all six initial primaries.  What I've ended up with isn't perfect but is an improvement.  I guess it could look like flames or an explosion.  Oh, and I added more salt because, well, salt.

What I've ended up with something that's just different.  What is it supposed to be?  Let the viewer decide.  I know a lot of viewers will decide it's Wolverine and I'm not going to argue with that.  This one's up for sale.