Cyril Blake

And today's second work is Cyril Blake, played by the late Stephen Lewis.  I think we all know where this collection is going now, yeah?

While it's immediately obvious who this is (for a change), the likeness isn't great.  But that's why I've named this one the way I have.  It's my take on Blakey, not a portrait of Stephen Lewis.  And, while my source photo was one showing the satisfaction of schadenfreude, this has come out with an expression of terror, which I guess fits in just as well with the theme.

I made a mistake early on, using black around the edges of the mouth (did a I tell you I like to do darks first with markers?  Well I do).  It made the mouth stand out too much and meant I had to use much more black than I was intending in the rest of the drawing.  Still, I think it came out just about OK.  The cap is really good.  Skin tones are interesting and include green, blue, pink and violet as well as greys and normal skin tones. The pink sky at the end seemed like the best colour or contrast with t(e blues of the buildings and the greys of the uniform - I think that worked well.

In the end, it's OK, nothing special.  But, as usual, I'm saving final judgement until I see all six together.

Arthur Rudge

I almost made it through the whole of December without doing any artwork, which was a bit worrying.  I thought I'd better get back to it before the rot set in.  I thought I'd kick off with some marker portraits after reading that Jake Spicer book.  I even challenged myself by deliberately choosing a pose with the head tilted back.

This is, of course, Arthur Rudge ("You STUPID great lump!") played by the late Michael Robbins.  He lived in Hitchin for a good few years, making him a local hero for me (I was born in Hitchin and only moved out of the area when I was just short of 23).  He's the first of a collection of six, in case you hadn't guessed.

I think the likeness is reasonable today but better if you know who it is.  The telephone has been merged into the shadow on the left.  While the shape of the phone isn't great, this does give me the opportunity to tinker with the face shape by extending the black shadow shape in places - this is starting to become my favourite trick.

Anyway, that's Arthur.  More to come.

Draw Faces In 15 Minutes: Jake Spicer - Book Review

In that last post, I talked about all the new art gear that I opened up on Christmas morning.  Great stuff but there were no art instruction books in there and my Amazon wishlist was feeling a little bit bloated with books, so I thought I'd ease the pressure and buy myself one.  I picked this one out for two reasons: (i) the ridiculously low price, and (ii) it being a book on portraits, so more in line with my winter work than my summer work.  It's a 128 page paperback.  Smaller than a normal art book but big enough.

I had a slightly bad feeling when buying this one that it might be a bit lightweight, like the urban sketching handbook series.  Thin on pages and thin on ideas, doing little more than regurgitating all the tips that all similar books have in common and having nothing extra to add on top of that.  I was wrong.

After giving us all the usual stuff about materials and how to draw, the book starts getting interesting.  Jake's has a numbered step approach to portraiture that starts off quite blurry before adding detail and them more detail on top of that.  I liked how some of the steps in the process were about rubbing out most of what was already down on the paper, leaving faint lines as indications of where to go over in more detail.  That struck a chord with me.  I've not seen other authors talking about rubbing out and adding improvements.

Another thing I liked was the structuring of the book.  Rather than just go through portraiture in one big long chapter, Jake gave us a chapter on how to do a basic portrait.  Then another chapter on improvements that could be made to this process.  Then another chapter on extra things like getting a likeness and on how age and gender make faces different.  This is the best way to learn.  You need to walk around the mountain before you climb it.

The book's aimed at people using graphite pencils or maybe charcoal but, because there wasn't much in there about graduated shading, pretty well everything also applied to markers and inktense pencils, which suits me.

The book feels like it fills a hole.  Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and Keys To Drawing are a great introduction to drawing and The Big Book Of Great Drawing Secrets went into lots of detail on realism but there's room for something in between.  That's the hole that Jake has filled.  Two other areas I look out for in books are whether the art within them is an inspiration and how easy they are to read.  The artwork in this one isn't what I'd call inspirational - it's there to instruct rather than to amaze, which still makes it worthwhile.  And for ease of reading, yeah, Jake easily clears the bar on that one.

Overall, I was expecting to give this one no more than three palettes.  After all, it's small and thin with silly handwriting and a cartoony face on the cover.  It doesn't look like a serious art book.  Just something that somebody threw together for a laugh.  But it's not.  There are plenty of ideas in there, often giving concrete examples of things you could spot if you just sat and observed.  And from what I've seen, it does fill a hole in the library of art instruction books.  Let's go for four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Christmas Stash

As life slowly reverts back to (the new) normal, it's time for me to show off what new art gear I got for Christmas.

First up is a Meeden watercolour easel.  It's really lightweight, with all the metal parts folding down into something tiny in a bag that would never lose you a game of Buckaroo.  There are two big white bits that don't fold down but can be carried around in a bag with all the rest of my gear - they're not that much bigger than the watercolour blocks that I paint on.  Anyway, on to features.  The white panel at the top can be put to any angle, including horizontal, so is definitely good for watercolour.  And then there's the other white bit that could be used as a palette but which I'll be using as a shelf for my palette, brushes, water, etc.  I definitely need a shelf there.  When the sun's out again, I'll be doing lots of plein air painting around the village rather than just working from photos at home.  And if I make it to Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard again, I'll fit in a bit better - last time I was one of only two that turned up without easels.

Next up are three granulating primatek Daniel Smith watercolours, Mayan blue genuine, hematite violet genuine and green apatite genuine.  I had my eye on these after watching a couple of Jean Lurssen videos and, indeed, those three swatches come from her videos, the first two here and the third one here.  The granulating quality of these paints is amazing, as is the way that the green and purple seem to separate into separate component colours as they dry.  I'm really looking forward to trying these out.

And finally, I now have an 18-colour Mijello palette - the blue one rather than the fuchsia.  I'll  waiting until the sun comes out before I fill it with colours so have time to think about what will go in there.  There's room for my existing squad of twelve colours.  The extra six will probably be my three regular opaques (cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia) and the three new Daniel Smith colours.  That leaves no room for Payne's grey (a colour that I used to use for skies but have gone off in recent years as I've moved on to using the same three colours in the sky as in most of the rest of the painting) or titanium white (which would probably get contaminated in the palette).  The tough choice will be over how to arrange the colours in the palette: whether to leave the Daniel Smiths occupying three guest slots on the end or whether to treat them as official squad members and housed alongside similar colours.  I’ll have to think about that one.  Maybe I'll decide after giving the Daniel Smiths a go.

A cracking stash, you must admit.

My Feet

And here's the last of the Bert Dodson exercise drawings that I'll be sharing.  I think all he asked us to do was to make ourselves comfortable and draw our feet.  So that's what I did.  I think this one came out pretty well.

Paul

Another exercise from the Bert Dodson book.  I was tasked with drawing a portrait of someone with a head pointed downwards so that the face was a bit flattened.

I found this photo of Paul.  A guy who was at Christ's at same time as me but that I didn't have many dealings with.  I spotted his Facebook avatar when he was commenting on a friend's post and immediately thought of the Dodson exercise that was on my to do list.

As with so many people that I didn’t mix with in college days, Paul's one of those people that actually feels like an old friend when we go to the same reunions.  A good guy.

My Eyes

It's been a couple of years since I first read Keys To Drawing by Bert Dodson.  My original plan was to attempt every single exercise in the book and to post the results here as one big combined medley of drawings.  At some point though (probably when Bert started telling me to do five drawings all on the same theme) this plan fell by the wayside.  I was left with a bunch of pencil drawings that haven't seen the light of day since.  And as it's been a while since my last work, I thought I'd post up the best of the drawings here.

First up is this one.  Bert asked us to draw our own eyes.  This is OK but I've done better since in my latest self portrait and a couple of oil pastel drawings of my separate eyes.

H2 2021:Survey Results

Thanks to everyone that's voted.  It's time for me to accept that I'm unlikely to get many (or any?) more responses in, so it's time for me to look at the results and raise the odd eyebrow.  There have been 18 responses so far.  People are welcome to keep voting on this poll or indeed any earlier polls.  I've no plans to close any of them.

Here are the links to all the polls:

- H2 2021

- H1 2021

- 2020

- Portraits with markers

- Summer 2019

- Q1 2019

- Summer 2018

And here are the results from the H2 2021 poll.  First up, no votes for these three.  I had all these three down as flops, so no argument from me there.

Then these paintings all got one vote.  If you had all these as a collection on the wall, your tastes could definitely be described as eclectic:

Two votes for each of these.  Some decent figure drawings in there, and they seem to look better alongside each other than they do individually.  The figure drawings don’t tend to score well in these polls.  Maybe I just need to accept that they're fun to do but will never sell.  The four mathy portraits in the middle were in the poll as a set rather than as individuals.  In terms of watercolour and oil pastel, we're still sitting around at the bottom of the barrel.

Then it was three votes for these.  I was surprised the balancing rock in the bottom right came out so low.  The first raised eyebrow.

These works all got four votes.  We're definitely reached that weird bit in the results where there's stuff that I'm really proud of sitting on the same shelf as stuff that felt like dross.  I don’t like the top left and bottom left paintings here but the four down the middle felt like big successes at the time.  These surveys always throw out shocks like this.  Oh, I was pleased to to see the Bond villains getting so many votes - my marker portraits don't tend to do that well in the polls.

On to five votes.  The one in top left was more popular than I expected but, otherwise, I think we're getting to the better paintings now.

Yes, we're definitely getting to the better ones, and the leaders are all strung out.  In sixth place with seven votes was this oil pastel painting.  Good to see this one coming out so high after I'd only been using oil pastels for a couple of months.

In fifth place with eight votes, it's another oil pastel painting.  It doesn’t jump off the page as much as the woodland scene but Hartlip Church paintings are a bit popular.

Fourth with nine was this one of Clare Bridge.  This was done back in the summer and there were a few paintings that did well in the previous poll where the colours on the shadows set the mood and temperature of the while painting.  I need to get back at some point to doing paintings in this style.

In third place with 10 votes was another Hartlip Church (third so far).  Some great colours in this one, especially in the tree on the left.

In second place on 11 votes was The Far Country, a James Stewart Western.  Not the greatest foreground but I really like that mountain on the left and the way the colour of the sky sets the temperature.

And first with 13 votes was this one of Hartlip Church.  No surprise at all to see this one come out on top.  The greens and reds in the stonework do it for me.  Very proud of this one.

EvaE

More figure drawing.  Today's model is EvaE, making her debut.

I came in today with two objectives, both around reverting back to techniques that I've used successfully in the past.  The most important one of these was to apply the water using a sculpting mindset rather than a colouring in mindset.  There was definitely some progress on this front, most noticeably on the shoulders but also the breasts and left arm.  The legs and right arm aren't quite there yet.  Still, there's a big improvement.

The other objective was to use a lot less colour and show a lot more white.  This didn’t work out so well but if I can keep sculpting shapes rather than colouring them in, I'm a little less concerned about using too much colour.

The colours today were bark, violet, iris blue, poppy red and leaf green.  I keep finding myself drawn towards that left arm and at how the green and blue work well together.  Green, blue and bark are a definite winning combination.  If red or purple are to be added to this, they need to be added in very tiny ways.

Where this one suffers, though, is in the proportions.  Even though I used a grid method to get the shapes down, the waist and hips look much too narrow.  That's even after I applied some artistic license to widen the hips and to tip the waist up slightly more sharply.  Notice, by the way how the waist and hips tip in the opposite direction to the chest.  That's called contraposto and it's pretty essential to figure drawing.  Anyway, yeah, the waist and hips look too narrow.  Or maybe the waist and hips aren’t the problem and it's just that the right side of the body below the breast needs to be a bit narrower.  I'm still not sure.  Hands aren't great either.  What did work in the original drawing, though, is the twist in the body, with Eva's right shoulder thrust forward.  The success there is partly down to making the shoulder a bit bigger but also to me adopting that sculptor's mindset.

Overall, though, this is a marginal fail so won't be going in the shop window.  Bad hands, bad proportions.

The Allman Brothers Band

 

An idea came in the night to me.  It was to use inktense pencils to draw some sort of skyliney landscape but negatively, leaving trees and buildings white but only colouring part of the sky around the edges.  Part of the building could be coloured but only if there was something like a tree in front of it, in which case the only bit of the building that was coloured would be the but just around the edge of the tree.  The subject of the landscape could my house, or maybe a Cambridge college.

Anyway, that was the dream.  I deviated from it on all sorts of ways, starting with the subject.  I couldn't find a good landscape subject, so I went instead for a photo of The Allman Brothers Band.  The photo is from the early 90s and looks like it's from the same photo session as the covers on the First Set and Second Set albums.  From left to right we have Jaimoe, Allen Woody, Dickey Betts, Greg Allman, Warren Haynes, Marc Quiñones and Butch Trucks.

I started off the way that I was expecting my landscape to work.  I just went randomly around the outline of the one big shape using all my brightest colours: sherbet lemon, sun yellow, tangerine, poppy red, chill8 red, fuchsia, violet, bright blue, iris blue,vsea blue, teal green, field green and apple green.  I then deviated from my plan a bit by filling in the gap between these pencils and the edge of the paper using Earth colours: mustard closest to the colours, then baked Earth and finally willow at the edge of the paper.

Then I added the water.  With such a big area to cover, there was the danger of paint drying too quickly for  the whole shape to work together.  So I watered it in outwardly radiating stripes.  I painted in one set of alternating stripes, then filled in the gaps.  I think they work.

Then I looked at the painting and thought that the white shapes looked too white and underworked.  So I decided to add some quite faint details,  I started with any facial hair or any long hair that wasn't touching the edges.  This I did using the yellowish colour that was in my still wet brush.  I then added some faint lines to this in poppy red and, still not entirely happy, then added some random things like belts, hands in pockets and trainer decorations, which was just enough to make these white shapes start looking like people.

It's possible in a painting like this to actually get some good likenesses.  The three in the middle look pretty good to me.

Overall, I rate this one as successful and am putting it up for sale.  The craziness of the idea, the radiating lines, the likenesses and the subtlety of those marks in the figures all seem to work.  It's good to do something different with the inktense pencils once in a while.

KylieB

I have a new model today.  This is KylieB. I thought she looked cold in the source photo, so I thought I'd make the photo cold too and avoid all my reds.

So for colours, I started with willow in the darkest areas, then leaf green, then mustard.  I thought at this point I needed some more dark areas that weren't green, so I brought in baked Earth.  Then I filled in the background with iris blue and sea blue, which looked like the two coolest blues in my set.  I marked in edges and creases with willow,  I also threw in some mustard in the foreground just for the hell of it.  I decided at this point I needed some blue in the figure, so I spotted in some little bits.  I also wanted something in the figure fighting back against the cold and didn't want to use reds,  he’d for the purple and added this in the darkest places.

I then added the water and realised that the purple was a mistake.  So, after letting it dry, I added some bark to all the darkest areas and added the water.  This improved things slightly.

Still, it goes down as a marginal failure.  There's some great mixing and cauliflowering going on in places but the background is too uneven and pencilly and the darkest bits don't blend well enough into the lighter bits - they have sharp borders and look too much like outlines.  I've also realised that I've dropped a good habit that I need to bring back again.  In my best figure drawings, my water strikes have been following the curves of the body, adding volume.  But for some reason I've stopped doing this.  My water strikes have all been applied with a colouring in mindset rather than a sculpting mindset.  I need to stop doing this.  I've written an instruction to myself on a piece of paper that I've put in with my pencils.  My next figure painting will be much better.

Anyway, yes, this is a flop and doesn't go in the shop window,

H2 2021 Poll

I reckon it's that sort of time.  I've created another of my biannual art polls.  If anyone can spare a couple of minutes to vote, I'd be very grateful.  You just scroll up and down 41 artworks, highlight as many favourites as you want and hit send.

This should be interesting; there really is a bit if everything in there.

To access the poll, just click here.

The Christ's College Maths Fellows 1982-86 Collection

And here are the four of them together in all their glory.  They feed off each other and the likenesses all improve when they're together.  I feel emotional and nostalgic looking at these four all together.

The individual portraits can be found at:

- https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/11/profession-peter-landshoff.html

- https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/11/doctor-richard-maunder.html

- https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/11/professor-joh-wilson.html

- https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/11/professor-frank-kelly-cbe-frs.html

They're up for sale.

Professor Frank Kelly CBE FRS

Last up in the Christ's College Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection is Frank Kelly.  He may have been lecturer for my course on Markov Chains: I'm struggling to remember.  But what I do remember his supervisions on probability, statistics and optimisation.  He explained everything well and he would drive us really hard.  When we submitted answers to questions on example sheets, he expected us to answer every single question when other supervisors turned a blind (blinder anyway) eye to any laziness.  Academically he's into random processes, networks and optimisation, which I think means he's the go to guy when road, rail or telecom networks are being developed.

Frank was born in 1950, meaning he was in his very early 30s when I came up to Christ's for an open day. He looked and talked more like a 25-year old, though, and seemed really cool and chill.  It was meeting him that confirmed to me that I'd be applying to Christ's.  And he's always been cool and ridiculously young looking.  He's now over 70 and looks like he's in his 40s.  Not only that but he looks like a really cool guy in his 40s.  He was Master of Christ's college from 2006 to 2016.  What a time that must have been, being a student at the college with the coolest master in Cambridge.  I still, by the way, have a couple of handwritten notes from Frank filed away, one congratulating me on my first in my finals and the other thanking me and a friend for inviting him and his wife Jackie to our (premature) joint 21st birthday party.

Although I gave up on the probability and statistics after year 2, I did, of course, end up as an actuary, so diverting back towards Frank's areas of expertise.

This portrait gave me real problems.  I had two really unsuccessful attempts at a portrait from a different source photo before changing.  Even with third third attempt, the likeness is pretty bad.  At times this one looked more like Frank Lampard or Tony Curtis.  In the end I finally settled for this one though.  If you cover up the mouth (again!), the likeness improves.  Maybe I just struggle with people smiling, which explains why I can't draw a guy who always likes to smile for photos.

There were some small hints of blue on one side of Frank's face in my source photo and green on the other, and I needed no encouragement to include some blue and green in his hair and skin tones.

This one's not going up for sale as an individual work but will instead be included in the Christ's Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection.  I'm also going to put this one up on the Christ's alumni Facebook page and am looking forward to seeing what the reaction is.

Professor John Wilson

Allow me to present Professor John Stuart Wilson.  Our first pure maths supervisor and the guy that dragged us all kicking and screaming from freewheeling A level pure maths into the rigorous world of university pure maths.  It was a painful process, I can tell you, but we made it through.  He was also an excellent university lecturer: I attended his course on vector spaces.  His specialist area in maths, though, is group theory; this means that our paths diverged from about midway through my second year.  He's actually quite a gentle soul at heart. I remember a conversation with him at a mathy dinner when he was struggling to get over to me the beauty that there was in pure maths.  If we had the same conversation today, knowing all that I know now, I'd be firing back with the beauty in applied maths: the way that expected return in equities disappears in the Merton-Black-Scholes theory, the way that a weird solution that Paul Dirac found to a differential equation led him to predict the existence of antimatter, that sort of thing.

Anyway, like Doctor Maunder a couple of days ago, Doctor John is really into his classical music.  He's actually a composer, which you have to respect, and which I've reflected in those musical notes hovering over the portrait.

Did I say Doctor John?  That's how we all referred to him behind his back.  Someone spotted a letter in Private Eye about herpes that had been sent in by someone calling themselves Doctor John and they wondered whether it was our pure maths supervisor.  And the name just stuck.

Anyway, about the portrait.  I was working from a black and white photo, so decided to start off with grey tones.  I thought this would bring out some of the white highlights in his hair but it also clashes against the personality of someone who only (mathematically) believed in black and white, with nothing in between.  I added a few proper flesh tones to the greys later on.  And I added a dark background, which helped me improve the shape of his chin.

Likeness-wise, if you cover up the mouth, the eyes and hair are unmistakeable.  The mouth isn't quite right though.  Probably a mistake to have him smiling.

This one will be included in the Christ's Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection.  The collection will be put up for sale but is too niche for there to be any reasonable likelihood of it selling.

Doctor Richard Maunder

Second up in the Christ's Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection is Richard Maunder.  This guy was an absolute legend.  He was a pure mathematician, into stuff like algebraic topology and manifolds.  Not my sort of area at all but, in my early days before I dropped all the pure maths, he delivered a great lecture course on group theory and was my pure maths supervisor for a while.  I liked how he showed us enough of the maths for us to be able to fill in the "mathematical rigour" in between the lines.  He had a great dry sense of humour too.  I can't imagine him ever being negative about anything. 

But I can't talk about this guy without mentioning his other big interest too, which was classical music.  He played all sorts of instruments, he would compose music or finish off the work of other composers and (get this!) he would build his own musical instruments.  It's only now that I've found out that the harpsichord that would sit against the wall of his room where he gave supervisions was one that he'd built himself.  And he was such a modest guy that at mathy drinks and dinners we'd only talk about maths.  It's a shame I never got to hear him talk about his music.

As for the portrait, my source photo was in black and white and very close up, so I've done a close up and repeated my technique from the Emilio Largo portrait and used three shades of blue.  Unlike with the Largo drawing, though, I've not drawn in outlines, instead adding a contrasting background colour.  The good thing about leaving out outlines is that I can subtly change the shape of the face by creeping in a bit with the background colour.

The likeness is only vaguely there - leaving out the hair makes things difficult.  But there's something of the character there - a little bit of joy.  Once the four portraits are put together, he should be recognisable.

Doctor Maunder died in 2018.  If you knew him, you'd know he's resting in peace.

Professor Peter Landshoff

It's time to start a new portrait collection.  I was feeling a bit short of ideas and a bit out of form so thought I'd do portraits of the four maths fellows from my days at Christ's College, Cambridge, 1982-86.  The idea is to just get a bit better at portraits without the pressure of having to come up with something that I can sell.  Because, let's face it, nobody's likely to want to buy this collection even if it comes out perfectly.

First up is Professor Peter Landshoff.  Doctor Landshoff (as he was, back in the day) was the only one of those four fellows to be into applied maths, let alone mathematical physics.  So he was the one whose interests most overlapped with mine.  Unfortunately, though, he was the only one of the four not to be a supervisor (that means the only one not to provide tutorials to two students at a time).  My only real contact with him was to ask whether he'd be prepared to put his student entertainment budget towards the Christ's mathy dinner, and he was always willing to do this.  And while I never had any Landshoff supervisions, I did enjoy his lecture course on Electrodynamics in my first year.  Oh, and he co-wrote the go to book on quantum electronics.  A top guy.

I tried to continue the good work from the Bond villains collection by including some unorthodox skin tones.  Today it was pink and lime green, although the impact of them has been damped down by greys and flesh tones.  Likeness-wise, there's definitely something if him there and I think he'll be easily recognisable once grouped with the rest of the squad.  There's a little bit of my Knights Templar headmaster coming through as well though.  This also happened in my Doctor No.

Anyway, Professor Landshoff's not for sale.  The Christ's Maths Fellows collection may go up for sale at some point but without any expectation of being sold.

The Return Of Thea

It's been sixteen days since my last bit of artwork.  Sorry about that.  I've been playing some correspondence chess, watching the T20 cricket and reading an especially long John Irving novel that I wanted to finish.  So I'm a bit out of practice and am expecting to serve up a clunker.

This is Thea, making her second appearance, and once again not being given full justice.  The pencil colours today were deep indigo, chilli red and leaf green.  I started with the indigo because there were some really dark shadows in my source photo that I wanted to capture.  I had ideas about this being mainly a chiaroscuro work, with indigo being the star and other colours being mere herbs.  It didn't go that way, with more green and red in there than I was originally intending.  I tried to bring out the chiaroscuro effect more by wetting the indigo first and not letting go other colours bleed into it.  This was a big mistake and there are too many really hard edges on some of the indigo shapes.

But there are some great shapes and curves in this one.  Thea's going up for sale.

Katya

Ok, it's been a while but I'm back painting again today.  I suspect that it's going to be too cold to paint outside until the Spring, so there won't be any oil pastels or watercolours until then and that I'll instead be cozy indoors using the markers and inktense pencils.  Anyway, today it was the inktense pencils.  Give a big hand to today's model Katya.  It's her first time so make her feel welcome.

As usual, I started with a pencil drawing.  Recently I've been trying to copy the photos by dividing the paper up into squares but today's was freehand and I think it looks OK.  Then came the colours.  Today it was deep indigo, then violet, then bright blue, then shiraz and finally leaf green, which is becoming a real favourite, adding exotic flesh tones while contrasting against the red.

After I activated all the ink with water, I realised that the bottom of Katya's bottom leg was wrong.  I think I'd treated a big shadow area on the leg as if it were a big shadow on the table.  So I added some more ink there and it's gone on maybe a bit too thick.

I also couldn't keep my hands off the huge empty area on the paper, so I added Katya's name just to be a bit different.  While it emphasises that the model here is a real human being and makes you wonder what she's thinking, I don't think it really works.  I'd have been better off leaving it empty.

Overall, not too bad for the first painting in a while.  But not good enough to go up for sale, being spoilt by the caption and the bottom leg.  A shame because this was a fantastic pose by Katya.

Landscape Artist Of The Year 2022

I've entered Landscape Artist Of The Year again.

For my main landscape submission, I chose Hartlip Church In The Snow (https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/09/hartlip-church-in-snow.html).

I was allowed to submit a second landscape and a third painting that doesn't need to be a landscape.  From memory, I think I went for Glean a'Chroin (https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/05/glean-achroin.html) and I Am The Eye InThe Sky (https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2020/10/i-am-eye-in-sky.html).

So three very different paintings.  I could have picked three similar paintings (and I suspect the judges like that) but that wouldn't reflect my diverse style.

Just as in previous years, I provided a link to this blog, so if you're one of the judges reading this, hello!  Feel free to click on the links in this post to find out more about the paintings I submitted.

In other news, I'm aware that I've not posted anything here for a couple of weeks.  Don't worry: more artwork will follow soon.  It's just that I'm currently having to spend a lot of time teaching myself machine learning networks and programming in Python.  Call it the day job.

Number Two Twinned With Hartlip Church In The Snow

And here are those two paintings together.

Number Two

Remember Hartlip Church In The Snow from a month or so ago?  I gave it to Barbara next door as an 80th birthday present.  Well, her daughter pulled me to one side at the party and told me that the painting was now up on the wall, on one side of a bigger painting, and that she thought it would be good to have another painting on the other side, maybe of their house…?  So I've picked up a commission.

There was one constraint though.  This painting of the house needed to be in portrait format.  That ruled out any painting of the whole house.  So I homed in on the front door and took some photos laying down on the drive to get some three point perspective going on.  But then I realised the bit sticking out the front of the house looked just like the porch of the church.  Which gave me an idea.  Why not make these two paintings really go together by using the same set of colours and (let's really go for it) make it a snow painting?

So the colours, as for the church painting were cerulean blue, rose dore, raw sienna and Indian yellow: a mix of warm green and cool orange colour keys.  Winsor red also came in later on but, being another warm red like rose dore, leaves the keys unchanged.  And obviously, there's titanium white there too.

So, after putting down a pencil drawing, I masked out all the white door frames, window frames and trimmings.  I also masked out some white snowy bits on upward facing surfaces and put down a load of spatters for falling snow.

Then came the sky and some underpainting.  The underpainting included the big shadow on the house, the shadow of a car on the drive and some initial shadows and Indian yellow highlights on the plants in the garden.  The house I covered fairly randomly in all sorts of yellows, reds and blues.  It looked terrible but underpaintings always do and my confidence never slipped.  I spattered on more masking fluid after the underpainting to get some different coloured snowflakes.

Then it was just a matter of putting two or three coats of colour over all the shapes, gradually creeping towards the colours that I wanted.  In the later coats, I was starting to get some 3D effects going on in the door and a tiny bit of detail/texture in the brickwork and the upstairs tiles.  The rose dore was being a bit of a pain with the red door, either looking too orange or too garish or both, so I found myself reaching for the Winsor red.  The two reds together got me to an acceptable door colour.  I also found that the Winsor red could get me to a better roof colour and to a nice dark for the TV aerial and the outdoor light.  The rose dore was good for the brickworks, though, so I think I needed both reds.

Then came the fun bit.  Off with the masking fluid, leaving lots of bright white.  To tone down the whites, I put cerulean blue on the most shadowy bits of snow and some watery variegated blues/reds/yellows on all the white bits of the house.

Did I say that was the fun bit?  No.  There was even more fun to come.  The painting looked good at this stage and worth framing but I knew from experience with the church painting how to make it better. I squeezed out a blob of titanium white.  With this, I first spattered on lots more falling snow.  Then I want over the top of all my existing snow.  Where there were cerulean blue shadows in the snow, these mixed well with the white.  And, yes I know I've said before that white isn't for mixing.  This is different.  Finally, I dry brushed more white onto the roof and drive using the edge of the brush.  And maybe added more snow in places too.

I think this looks great.  Michelle's happy with it so Barbara will be getting it for Christmas.  I think she's expecting a painting but has no idea what this is going to look like.

And I think that's me done with watercolour until the Spring.  It's just too cold out there.  It's back to markers and inktense pencils until then.

Thea

Still pouring with rain outside: I think I might be done with watercolour and oil pastel until the new year.  So it's more figure drawing today and it's a new model, Thea.

The source photo had a lot of dark, shadowy areas, so I started with some quite thick shading in bark in those areas.  Then I put some willow pencils in the slightly lighter shadowy areas.  And then I got to the  usual point when I fancied putting in some colour, so I added sea blue to the right facing edges, fuchsia to left facing edges and leaf green wherever else I fancied some colour.  This included going over some edges in sea blue and fuchsia lines and adding all three colours to the shadows.  Here's what I ended up with:

I admit the pencils do look a lot heavier than optimal on this one.  I can already sense this won't be a masterpiece.  Anyway, the next step was to add the water following my usual rules: detail with the small brush first, try to make strokes follow curves, brush light coloured pencil marks into dark rather than the other way round.  And this is what I ended up with:

I wasn't happy with this.  There wasn't enough contrast between the dark and light values.  And in those dark areas the bark is dominated by fuchsia and sea blue.  So I took what for me is a very rare third step of adding a second coat of inks.  It didn't feel right to add more bark to darken the shadows, so I reached for the indigo, which is a dark colour that fits better with the other colours.

The final painting is at the top of the post.  The indigo has improved the painting but still feels like an outsider.  Maybe if I'd started with indigo rather than bark, everything would have hung together better. There are some other problems with this though.  The shadow area in the bottom left is too big.  With the inktense pencils, I need to avoid big, monotone, dark shadowy areas like this.  Just lighten them up.  Save the big monotone dark areas for the markers where they really add something.  And obviously the hand isn't great.  So not a success, this one, and it's not going up for sale.

Frank's Wood, Leith Hill, Surrey

It's getting cold and wet outside so the number of watercolour and oil paintings that I'll be doing the rest of this year is numbered.  Today I fancied having a go with the oil pastels.  This is my first go with the bigger, 12 inch by 9 paper.  It's a scene in Frank's Wood, inspired by a photo by David Hall that I probably found on the BBC News website.  I'm trying to track David down but have had no luck so far.  The David Hall photographer whose work this most resembles tells me the original work is not his; there's another David Hall photographer who I've tried to contact but with no luck so far,

Painting on this size paper is much easier and more fun.  It's all less fiddly. I can just get on with the painting.  I started by adding in rough lines with one of the pastels, then vaguely shaded in the trees, path, grass and bluebells with the sides of four appropriately coloured pastels.  And then I just went out and enjoyed myself.  For each of those four types of shape, I picked out at least three relevant colours from my box and dotted them in.  For the path and the greens, some places were lighter than others and reflected this by using different colours in different places.  Then I used my fingers and some tools to mix the colours together on the paper.

This gave me an underpainting.  This was never going to be the final result as I wanted some texture in the bluebells.  So during the next stage, as well as adding more colours to the trees, path and greens (in particular in any areas that were short of colour and too white looking), I dabbed in some bluebells with the intention of keeping them as dabs rather than blending them together.  I did end up blending some of the more distant bluebells, but that's just sensible: you can't have both the foreground and middleground in focus.  I also did a little bit of scraping underneath the bluebells in places.

When I stepped back, I thought the painting didn't hang together, with the trees, path, bluebells and greenage looking like a disconnected team.  So I added some blues to all the tree colours and suddenly everything looked better again.  The trees, bluebells and greenage definitely all work well together but I wonder whether I should have added any more colours to the path.

Anyway, I rate this one a success and it's up for sale.

JenB, Taking A Breather

Not feeling inspired enough to dig out the watercolours or oil pastels today, so I've been doing some figure drawing with the inktense pencils.  This is the fifth time I've drawn JenB but I'm still struggling to capture her essence on the paper.

For colours, I tried a combination of bark, leaf green, fuchsia, iris blue and mustard.  I started with bark in the darkest places, then moved on to the red, blue and green.  I tried to generally have blue on surfaces pointing to the left and red on surfaces pointing to the right.  And green went wherever I fancied some extra colour.  The mustard was added at the end in the edges of highlighted areas (with the paper left white in the middle).

I added some extra colour in a second coat, mainly on Jen's right arm, which had been looking a little like an elongated flag of green, white and red, and on her face to try to bring out some features.  I'm not impressed with the face though.  I've cropped out the nose but that's still an ugly looking mouth - I think I'll crop out as much as possible of that mouth if I ever frame this one.

I'm going to put this one in the shop window.  I think the colours worked out well.

The Bond Villains Collection

And here's the full set in all its glory.  Rosa Klebb missed out to Hugo Drax in the final cut, as already revealed.  And the second Blofeld keeps his place in the squad.

I think they all fit together nicely, feeding off each others' evil intentions.  The set is up for sale, framed.

Hugo Drax

And here he is, a late substitute joins the team.  As Rosa Klebb limps off in disgrace, on comes Hugo Drax, played by Michael Lonsdale in Moonraker.

The pose had everything I wanted.  Big black areas, negative shapes and something different to include (the fingers).  I almost made it to the end on this one without adding any impressionistic colours.  Then I spotted this and reached for the blue pearl marker.  I slapped a big mark on under the left eye and then reeled back in horror, realising that I'd picked up the sky blue marker instead.  But was it a disaster or a happy little accident?  The use of the wrong blue actually made my impressionistic colours bold and proud rather than subtle and meek.  I added more of the sky blue and then some pink.  Why not?

And I'm happy with the result at the end.  Hugo wins a place in the final eight at the expense of Rosa Klebb.  His red background is again chosen to add some variety to a collection that was looking slightly heavy on the blues, greens and yellows.

Rosa Klebb

I'm up early to finish off the Bond villains collection.  So here's Rosa Klebb, played by Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love.  I'm a bit shocked to discover that Lotte was born in the 19th century.  That makes me feel old.

The gun toting pose and the red background were chosen specially to be different to other drawings in the collection.  I do like the pose, giving me the chance to include some sweeping curves.

And, although this does fit in nicely with the rest of the collection (and a version of the collection including Klebb is up for sale), I don't like it.  The likeness is the worst so far, and for someone with very distinctive looks.  In fact it looks more like a guy in drag.  This feels like a failure.  It's time to call for villain number 9 to take her place…

Emilio Largo

Next up in the Bond villain collection is Emelio Largo, aka Number Two (I believe).  He was played by Adolfo Celi in Thunderball.

I picked a photo source with a large dark area as usual but thought I'd do something different and stay away from the black.  Instead I put in all the dark areas with indigo blue.  I then followed up in all the next darkest areas with sky blue and finally put blue pearl in all the remaining areas that I didn't want to be white, trying to get a three dimensional effect in the cheekbones.

The worst thing about this one is the mouth which came out horizontal when it should have been sloping down to the right but I think I've done a decent enough rescue job there.  The likeness isn’t perfect, with Emilio looking a bit too young and Paul Newmanesque but I don't mind that: this is my take on Emilio and not a portrait of Adolfo.  The blue in the jacket looks good, with some sensible mark directions giving a 3D effect and looking like pinstripes.  And the whole blue monotone colour scheme looks great, imparting a 1960s vibe.

Overall assessment?  A big success.  Emilio walks straight into the Bond villains collection and sits at the high table.

Another Ernst Stavro Blofeld

Some new blue pearl markers arrived in the post last night.  Without these, I wasn't able to do any drawing yesterday as this colour so proving to be essential in the skin tones for this collection.

I've had another go at Blofeld.  I wasn't happy with the version I had, with the scar being in the wrong side of the face.  This version isn't that great to tell you the truth - you can see where I've overdosed a bit on black at the end in an attempt to rescue a drawing that wasn't going anywhere.  So the black's one problem.  The asymmetric top half of the head is another.  And then there's the green background which I chose to be different to the other drawings in the collection but which doesn't seem to fit well with this portrait.

I might need to do a third Blofeld before pulling this collection together.

Oddjob

Ah, Oddjob.  Played by Harold Sakata in Goldfinger, he was always going to be in this collection once I'd moved on to henchmen.

Once again, I picked a shot with huge expanses of black in it - it's so much easier to do these drawings once all that black is down.  I make no real effort to distinguish separate black shapes within the black.  I'd let the shapes blend into each other in watercolour, so why not do the same here?  But, on the other hand, I do try to follow contours in the direction I make the marks.  It's like cutting the grass at Wembley.  And this has made the black sleeve look good - you just know that there are creases in there.

I'm back to using impressionistic colours within the skin tones (rose pink, lime green and blue pearl) and they all look great here.  But just when blue pearl is beginning to become my favourite colour, the marker's run out and I don't have a spare, which is a pain.

The likeness is better here but not perfect.  The nose should be a bit wider and the line of the mouth should be sloping more down to the right.  Look closely and you can see where I've tried to correct this by adding more black.

I'm wondering whether it was the right move to put everything from my source photo into the car windows.  Could this have been more interesting if I'd just coloured the car windows in a single colour like orange?  Probably keeping the wing mirror as it is though.  We'll never know.

I do like this one, even if the black sleeve is claiming centre stage as the star.  It's not going up for sale as an individual drawing but is being added to the Bond villains collection.

Zbigniew Krycsiwiki

First up today is Zbigniew Krycsikiki, aka Jaws.  My definition of Bond villains has extended to include henchmen.  Jaws was played by Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.  Jaws was a great character.  He had a weird, flat footed way of running that I like to copy.

Just like with most of my marker portraits, it's the black that went down first.  I like source material that has huge black shapes in it so that I can kick of drawings chiaroscuro style and only add colour later in those places where it benefits the drawing.

I had some trouble with the eyes today, which was weird because I didn't need much detail in them, what with them being behind the goggles.  In the end, I just made everything really dark behind the goggles and added some highlights with a white gel pen.  This took several attempts and the paper was starting to show some wear.  I was having a nightmare.  Anyway, I got to something in the end.  And while I had the gel pen in my hand, I thought I'd add some stitching to the parachute straps and some white hairs/texture to the top of the head.  Both of these worked out well.

I don’t think this one has worked out brilliantly.   Maybe that's because this is the first in the collection to not feature impressionistic colours in the skintones.  There's a lesson there.  Anyway, this isn't going up for sale as an individual drawing but is being added to the Bond villains collection.

Francisco Scaramanga And Nick Nack

And here's the second and last drawing for today.  Scaramanga and Nick Nack, played by Christopher Lee and Hervé Villechaize respectively in The Man With The Golden Gun.

This one had a lot of dark areas, giving me the chance of laying down some large black shapes, which is something I do enjoy.  There are some interesting big light green negative shapes in there too.  Somehow using markers makes me more aware of negative shapes.  There are also some interesting contrasts in there between straight and curved lines.  I put some impressionistic blues into the skin tones again - I keep seeing this blue everywhere.

Scaramanga isn't a great lookalike but there's some personality there in the eyes and mouth.  The smugness that follows a job well done.  Maybe there's a bit of Sean Connery in him, but you must admit Sean would have made a great Scaramanga.  Nick Nack gave me a few problems though.  I didn't like the expression on his face, so I’ve extended the black shadow further onto his face into areas where the shadows were quite light.  There's still too much Jimmy Krankie in him though, and there's no way Jimmy Krankie would have made a good Nick Nack.

Anyway, it's hard to say whether these portraits are successes or not until I put them all together into a collection.  Now that I've done one landscape and three portraits, I guess that I need one more landscape and three more portraits for a set of eight, so it might be a while before I can really judge this one.  For now, I think it's interesting enough to be added to the collection.

Doctor Julius No

Now that I've convinced myself these are my takes on Bond villains and not just portraits of the actors that played them, I feel liberated and am going to spend another day on them.

First up is Doctor No, originally played by Joseph Wiseman.  After studying a source photo and liking both the black in his artificial hand and the purple shadows against his neutral coloured top, I thought I'd limit the colours in this one.  There are just black, yellow, purple, two flesh tones and two greys in there.  The yellow and purple contrast nicely against each other and all the white in his face makes him look less than human.  He also reminds me of my secondary school headmaster (RIP Dr Crellin) - it's interesting to see these extra characters slipping in and contaminating these portraits.

I do like this one.  It's not going up for sale just yet, instead being added to the Bond villain collection that I'm building up.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld

These marker portraits always come in pairs, so here's another Bond villain - Donald Pleasence as Blofeld in You Only Live Twice.  Except that my source photo has the vertical wound down the right side of his face missing, so I guess this isn’t from the film.  I had to go for this shot though, just because of the gaze, a gaze that I wanted to replicate.

There are some impressionistic colours in there among the flesh tones and neutrals again: this time red and blue.

While there's an interesting look in the eye, it looks unfinished.  But after examining the source photo in detail for ages, I couldn't identify any extra marks that I could make to improve it.  And the rest of the head is just wrong.  It's too chubby and there's no likeness.  Have I turned it into a self portrait?

This is another that's not going up for sale but that might end up in a Bond villain collection.  Goldfinger has a bigger chance of making the final squad than Blofeld though.

<Renamed from Donald Pleasence to Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Makes sense given the lack of likeness.>

And now I've just discovered that the source photo was a mirror image.  It doesn't make sense to add the scar to the near eye as it's so wide open.  I had a go at adding it to the far eye but it's so obviously a mirror image.  I think I need to just redo Blofeld from scratch.