Watercolour Nature Unleashed, Jane Betteridge - Book Review

This book keeps popping up on my Amazon recommendations.  When I took a look inside, I immediately recognised it as a repackaged version of Jane's earlier book Dynamic Watercolours.  Why do authors and publishers pull tricks like this?  A poor show.  Hang your head in shame Jane.

On a separate subject, it's been a while since my last piece of work.  Blame the World Cup.  I will be back in action soon.

Nasser Hussain

More cricket portraiture with  the markers today.  I'm going to continue with cricket portraits until I have a complete balanced team together, or maybe even a squad of 12, giving me a choice of whether to go in with four seamers or pick a second spinner.  My team needs a captain and I still need a couple of middle order batsmen, so it's Nasser Hussain's turn in the seat today.

Today's portrait was almost entirely done upside down.  The initial pencil drawing was done upside down using a grid.  I turned the picture the right way up briefly to check I'd got a likeness, then put it back upside down and started in the markers.

As is my wont, I started with some greys on the darker areas, just to get down some values and some structure.  I then went on to the fun stage where I added more interesting colours and, at the same time, darkened all the greys from my initial values plan.

I think with the greys I should have stopped at my second darkest today rather than going all the way to black - Nasser looks like he's been a bit heavy with the Just For Men.  For the interesting colours, today's flesh tones were made up of the greys, the flesh coloured markers and a bit of blue pearl.  Maybe I've been watching too many Liron Yankonsky videos on YouTube but a lot of today's colours were motivated more my temperature than by colours I could see in the source photo.  So where, for example I could see greens in the source photo, rather than going for greens in the flesh tones, I'd translate the colour to "cool" and put on blue pearl.  It's interesting to compare these colours to those I used for Adil Rashid.  I th8s the Rashid colours are more interesting.  They're also much more risky to use, though, as they're highly saturated and can easily ruin a painting if not used carefully.

I think I've ended up with a reasonable likeness today.  The distinctive mouth and head shape are spot on.  The hair is too dark, though, and the nearer eye isn't quite right.  But Nasser's going up for sale.

Adil Rashid

My third successive cricket portrait and they've all been in different media.  Today it's the first outing for markers since last winter.  I picked out a photo of Adil Rashid to work from.  He's a member if England's World Champion T20 cricket team and his economical bowling in both the semi and the final were indicative of a player who steps up for the big occasion.  It's his beard that made me reach for the markers: to paint a beard like that in any other of my media would require a lot of texturing skills which I don't really have, so they were a no brainier.

To get my initial drawing down, I again used a grid and drew upside down.  I'm going to keep doing this.  I know I said at one point that I'd be abandoning the grid.  I'm going to backtrack on that though.  Now my ambition is to complete a whole painting (not just the initial drawing) upside down.  I've seen Liz Chaderton do this on YouTube and the result looked amazing.

Anyway, back to today.  After putting down the pencil drawing, I put Adil the right way up for adding colour.  I started, as I always do, with quite a dark grey in the darkest areas, then lighter greys in slightly less dark areas.  Next I add colour in the clothes.  Then there are two things that happen in parallel in the third stage: I add impressionistic colours to the face and start to add darker colours and even blacks to those dark areas that I've already started on.  Finally, I add a background and (at least today) some outlines.

The best thing about this work is the look in the eyes.  The Jos Buttler painting showed fear in the eyes but this one shows a focus and determination.  The likeness is also better in this painting than I managed to squeeze out of Jos or Beefy.  The colours in the flesh are interesting to say the least.  I could have stopped earlier with only six shades of grey in the face but couldn't resist the temptation to teach for the pinks and the orange that I could see in the source photo.  At one point I thought the impressionistic colour might ruin the painting but in the end they made it stronger.  This seems like much more adventurous use of colour in flesh tones than I've ever put down before with markers.  Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, the worst thing about this one is the black outlines that I've added - I could have done without them.

Overall, I think this one's pretty good.  Adil's up for sale.

Jos Buttler

Look, I'm still in the mood for cricket portraits and with England due to play Pakistan in the World T20 Final on Sunday morning, I thought I'd have a go at drawing our captain, Jos Buttler, arguably the greatest limited overs cricketer of all time.  I went for oil pastels as my medium as I quite enjoyed sculpting Ian Botham's face while wetting the inktense pencils the other day and oil pastels are the other medium that I can sculpt.

It took me a while but I finally found a photo of Jos where he wasn't grinning his head off.  The other thing I liked about my source photo was how his chin stick out defiantly as a result of the camera being quite low down.  If this were in a comic, the angle of this one would definitely remind me of Gil Kane's artwork.

Anyway, the pencil drawing went down first, again drawn upside down using a grid.  This method gets me as close to a likeness as I'm ever going to get.

To fill it all in, I start with the eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils.  These are the most important areas, so I take my time over them and even add careful lines using the edges of the pastels.  If you can get the gaze, that's 95% of the important stuff done.

After that, the rest is coloured in much more loosely, with lots of dots from stabbing the paper repeatedly with the pastels.  I put in all the impressionistic colours I can see in the source photo, and whites in the well lit areas, then follow the rules by dotting in goldish yellow in the forehead, red in the cheeks and blues and greens in the lower face.  Finally, I look at the mess I'm left with and add in more conventional fleshy colours like white, pinks and earthy colours.  At this stage, every point on the face should have at least three colours on or very close to it.  And then I have fun sculpting the face with my index finger, mixing the colours as I do so.  Once the face is done, there's always some further work to be done on it. Either correcting some shapes or correcting some colours - just like with inktense pencils I'm never sure how the colours will turn out.

The hair, clothes and background all work similarly but are even looser with a lot less thought put into them.

And the final result?  I don't think I've got a perfect likeness, but this one's still going up for sale.  It's an interesting painting and not just because of the crazy flesh tones.  I could claim to have seen a little bit of fear in Jos's eyes that I've put into the painting.  In fact I will make that claim.  It's definitely a painting that tells a story.  It was very tempting to call this one England Expects.  Jos is up for sale.

Sir Ian Botham

I've been watching more Liz Chaderton videos on YouTube. She's been busy with portraits throughout November and there was one yesterday where she did her initial drawing upside down.  This is something I've tried as an exercise while reading the Betty Edwards book but not something I've ever tried for a proper painting, so I thought I'd give it a go today.

I picked out Beefy as a subject as I do enjoy painting cricketers and for the medium I went for inktense pencils because I was in a loose mood.

For the initial drawing, I worked upside down but still used a grid of squares.  I think I got a decent likeness in my initial drawing that I'd never have managed working the right way up.  On the other hand, I do need to try out upside down painting without the grid at some point.

For the colour, I used sun yellow, tangerine, poppy red, chilli red, fuchsia, shiraz, violet, deep indigo, iris blue, teal green, leaf green, baked earth, willow and bark.  That's a lot of colours but that's the kind of mood I was in today.  I worked with the paper the right way up during this stage.  After reading up on coloured pencil and adopting a layering technique, I found myself doing something similar with the inktense pencils.  The suit jacket and the cheeks, in particular have multiple layers.  For the darker areas, I found myself layering up blue and red before switching to indigo, bark and purple later.

I did the wetting in stages.  I started in areas where I needed the most detail, so that was the eyes and mouth, followed by the ear and tie.  I found myself moving next onto the hair and wrinkles.  For the wrinkles at the top of the cheek, I was careful to follow the lines I'd put down that bent to mark the top of the cheek bones - something I might not have noticed had I drawn this one the right way up   After this, I moved on to the rest of the face and the jacket and shirt, one big shape at a time and allowing the inks to mix on the paper.

There's lots to like about how this one ended up.  The ear, the shirt, the colours in the jacket, all the different colours in the face.  On the other hand, I've lost the likeness at some point.  The bottom half of the face is great but the eyes look like they belong to Bradley Walsh.  The shape of the forehead may have something to do with this, as may the colour of the hair which is too dark.

The loss of the likeness means this one won't be going in the shop window but there's a lot here to be happy about.