Derwent Art Prize 2024

I've no idea how things will turn out but I've entered these two bad boys for the Derwent Art Prize 2024.  Entries have to be in pencil but that includes not just coloured pencil but also inktense and watercolour pencils.  I won't find out until January how I've got on.  Eighty of about three thousand entries will end up on display at the OXO Tower in London.  Making it there would be amazing.

<Edit, 31 January, both rejected.  David Suchet is back in the shop window>

Drawing From Photos, Patrick J. Jones - Book Review

Work still continues on the patio outside and it's possible that I might not be able to access the studio again until it's all over but I did manage to sneak in and fetch the last of my birthday books to read, make notes on and review.  This is Drawing From Photos by Partick J. Jones, a 160-page paperback with those folded over covers that mean that the corners will never get dog eared.

It's a book on figure drawing using charcoal (but with ideas applicable to other media), mainly made up of detailed demonstrations.  I'd seen a copy in a shop and liked how the demonstrations explained why Patrick did what he did everywhere: they're the sort of demonstrations that I can learn from.  But that's not really telling the whole story.  This isn't a beginners' book.  It assumes you already know how to draw, how to use charcoal, how to draw figures and how light and shadows work.  It's not even what I'd call a second order book that builds on the basic knowledge and turns you into a better artist.  It's a third order book that assumes you're already a really good artist and tries to turn you into an excellent one.  Looking through some of my other figure drawing books, I think Huston and Legaspi are first order books and that Reid and maybe Buchman are second order, even if Buchman's more about pushing towards abstraction than about improving your figure paintings.  Patrick's written a couple of other books, both of which sound like they might be quite anatomy focused - these sound to me like second order books and I'll be watching out for them on Amazon.

There's no big, fluffy introduction or discussion of materials here.  The book's just divided into eight workshops.  The first seven of these are demonstrations and the last one more of an educational piece that should arguably have come at the front rather than the back.  The seven demos start off with an objective in mind like learning about light or movement or whatever but there's a lot more to learn from them than what's needed to meet the objective, so I won’t list the objectives here.  But I will mention the big underlying theme of the demos because it's the whole point of the book and something that should determine whether you want to but the book.  And it's this.  Photos are just an inspiration and not something to be rigorously copied.  This comes through in two important submessages.  One is that the camera can distort shapes and that you might need to resize some of the body parts around the edges of the photo.  The other is that the poses can be suboptimal: sometimes you can make the painting more interesting by (for example) moving a hand or changing the angle of the shoulders.  There were other non-compliance ideas in there about swooshy backgrounds and adding bodily adornments but those first two submessages were absolutely key.  If you want to see examples of someone doing this, then this could be the book for you.  If you're looking to learn how to exactly replicate photos, them move along please.

There was also a secondary theme coming through about gesture and how blocking in the initial drawing should be based both on structure (so distances, angles etc) and gesture (imaginary swooshing lines connecting everything together).  But how it's important to get the right balance between the two.  With my use of grids, I'm guilty of putting far too much weight on structure and not enough on gesture.  Or, to put it another way, being too deferential to the source photo.  A big learning point for me.  There's a Daniella Brambilla book on figure drawing that is highly focused on gesture that has just shot up to the top of my Amazon wishlist.

It's also worth mentioning that I found all the references to the use of charcoal to be quite handy too, making this an interesting follow up to the Kate Boucher book.  So another book shooting up my Amazon wishlist is an old one on charcoal figure drawing by Douglas Graves.  I'm hoping that might leave me better placed to pick up on some of the third order tips in this book.

Anyway, those were the first seven workshops.  The book concludes with an eight workshop that I'd call a lesson rather than a workshop.  It's called "learning to see" and is mainly made up of photos of models with lines drawn on them.  They're the sort of lines that Patrick looks for when studying a pose photo and planning a painting, so they include things like:

- an outline around the figure to help plan where to place it on the paper

- gestural lines

- what would have been vertical lines down the body

- contour lines going around the outside of all the cylinders that the body is (to first order) made up of

- second order contour lines around all the lumps and muscles

This list doesn't do Patrick justice - you really need to see the annotated photos.

So it's an interesting book.  Definitely not a galactico though.  The question is whether to give it three or four stars.  I was thinking three stars after I read it but after looking at the volume of notes I took, I think there's more to learn from this book than I was giving Partick credit for.  And I'll be coming back to this book after reading second order figure drawing books on gesture and anatomy and expecting to find that there's lots of third order lessons that I missed first time round because this book was too advanced for me.  So I'm going to give this one four palettes but with a big warning that you need to already be a really strong figure artist to get the best out of this one.  It's no accident that this book has sent me off looking for what are slightly less advanced books.

⚠️ Warning!      🎨🎨🎨🎨      Danger! ⚠️

Craighouse, Jura

Spin The Wheel!  Last night I relaxed in my recliner chair in front of the telly (but reading a book) with a Jura mal5 that had been stored in old pale ale barrels and, towards the end, diluted with saliva, reminded me of the frothy bit at the bottom of a beer.  Better than it sounds actually.  My choice of tipple was based on me wanting to paint the Jura distillery today.  Rather than just painting the distillery, though, I think I've painted the whole of the villa of Craighouse, including the Jura Hotel and loads of residential properties as well as the distillery.  I had to do this really, just to bet the hills and the water in.  I couldn't swear to it but I'm guessing those three hills at the back are The Paps Of Jura.

I went back from supergranulators to my main palette today as it would be too easy to keep using supergranulators and to never develop as an artist.  For my red and yellow, I picked rose dore and raw sienna respectively, perfect colours for the reds in those hills.  I picked Mayan blue genuine as my blue only after looking through swatches of the triads of all four of my regular blues with the red and yellow I'd chosen.  I introduced transparent yellow later as a fourth primary.  Being another cool yellow like raw sienna, I was still in the key of green warm.  As well as these four, I was using burnt umber and green apatite genuine as key colours, the brown for earthiness and the green for trees.  And I used some cadmium yellow and titanium white for some garnishing and tidying up at the end.

The starting drawing was all by hand today, without using a grid.  It wasn’t perfect but it was good enough and felt better.  I masked out the edges of the white shapes, not to preserve highlights but to keep my darker colours from intruding into the white shapes.  I masked out a few ripples in the water and applied some wax resist (with a candle) mainly to the water but also to the hills, creating a bit of texture.

The first shape to be filled in was the sky.  I used Mayan blue, burnt umber and rose dore, working wet I to wet.  I must have applied three different layers, never really being happy with the result.  In the end I dropped in some water to create cauliflowers, then dabbed off a lot of the colour to lighten things up.

Next I moved onto the everything else except the buildings.  For the land shapes, I started with a layer of raw sienna, then dropped in the green, blue, brown and red wherever I could vaguely see those colours in my source photo.  And then I painted in the water, using similar colours to the sky.  I wanted to get the water in early while I could still remember how I did the sky.

Then I went back to the land, adding two or three more layers of colour and making the shapes more accurate as I went on.  I worked hard to sculpt the hills, letting my brush slide down the hillsides.  For the trees I used the blue, the brown and the green wherever I could see them in the source photo.  I introduced the transparent yellow.  Even then, things weren't right, so I added some grass with a Terry Harrison brush and some cadmium yellow for its opacity.  With the cadmium yellow on the page, it was easy to add more grassy strokes with the blue, the brown and the green.  I also tinkered around with the edge of the water, adding some quite thick brown to the banks.

The three houses on the hillside were looking like they were floating in space for a long time, even after I created hillsides for them using transparent yellow.  Eventually, though, I messed around and found an accidental solution, putting in some transparent yellow based colours for t( hillside, then wiping down the side of the hill with kitchen paper to sculpt the shapes of the hills.  An interesting technique that I need to remember.

And then, after removing the masking fluid, I was onto the buildings.  I wanted to keep things simple today by just painting in rooves and some very rough doors, windows and drainpipes.  The idea was to use one colour for the dark shapes and three colours for rooves.  I mixed up roof colou4 as close as possible t9 what I could see, painted these on and added the doors and windows.

And then I stepped back, spitted some problems and corrected them.  I seem to be doing this a lot lately and it's a good sign.  The first thing I noticed was that my roof colours weren’t working.  In particular the big orange rooves at the back were blending too much into the background and not looking part of the village.  It doesn't look it, but I neutralised those oranges a lot by layering over blue and green.  At least they look like part of the village now.

My second problem was that the buildings were looking too white.  I didn't need to think much about how to correct this.  I added watery transparent yellow on all the forward facing walls, then dabbed it off.  Then I did the same with rose dore.  And then I did the same with the Mayan blue but only on the shadowy walls that weren't facing forwards.  The result is very subtle but does solve the problem.  Somehow white walls with a little bit of red and yellow dropped in look sunnier than plain white walls.

.  

Finally I tinkered around, being careful to think about whether I was improving the painting before actually doing anything.  I added the big coniferous tree on the left, some empty deciduous trees behind the buildings on the right and some foam in the water.  And I did the correction to hillsides, buildings and distant trees.  And that was me done.

The verdict on this one?  Similar to the last one.  Background hills and foreground grass brilliant, water pretty good, sky acceptable but the buildings are again the weak point.  Then again, is the message from this painting that the real beauty of this location is in the natural surroundings and not in the buildings?  I'm putting this one up for sale now but it's a candidate for culling the next time I prune down the window display.

Dalwhinnie Distillery

It's the weekend and the builders are off for the weekend so I'm back in the studio for a couple of days.  What to paint though?  Well, I can't believe I didn't think of this before.  I was enjoying a malt last night and found myself googling the distillery to find out where exactly in Scotland it was from.  Well, it turns out that the Dalwhiinie distillery is slap bang in the middle of the Grampians with a huge mountain towering over it from behind.  I found a snowy photo that looked ideal for the tundra supergranulators and that was my Saturday sorted.  This won't be the last distillery I paint.  There are so many distilleries in Scotland that I'll never be short of ideas, in particular for ideas about how to use the tundra or even the Shire supergranulators.  There's going to be one rule though.  I can only paint a distillery if I was drinking its whisky the night before.  That already rules out painting distilleries on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays or Fridays.  With four more malts in the cupboard (besides the Dalwinnie Winter's Gold), I have four distilleries to choose between for tomorrow.

Anyway, today's painting uses mainly the five tundra colours, along with titanium white and a little bit of transparent yellow.  There's too little red in there for me to be able to designate a colour key to this one.  With a load of coniferous trees in two big bands in the background it was tempting to introduce forest brown and green apatite genuine but, no, I wanted to just go with the tundra colours

Being a bit out of practice, I used a grid to do the drawing and had to resort to measuring distances with a ruler but I got there in the end.  I reserved a few highlights with masking fluid and then I was ready to go.

Unsurprisingly I worked from top to bottom.  The sky was looking a bit too dark so I blotted off a lot of the paint with kitchen roll and was happy with the result.  The hills were what I'd been most looking forward to, as I'd seen how David Bellamy can include oranges and greens in his snow colours and still leave things looking cold.  The hills worked out well.

Then there were the two bands of trees.  These were where I had the most fun.  In the source photo, I could see an orange band through the middle with greens just above and below it and with blues and dark colours below it.  So I wet the whole band and stabbed in little bits of all the Tundra colours to diffuse wet to wet and to create the bands.  When the started to dry, I tried dropping in tree shapes: blue and purple at the top and bottom and green and brown in the middle.  I think it worked.  The lower band of tres was much greener in the source photo but I still made sure to include loads of blues and browns.

Then I came to the buildings.  At first I tried replicating all the colours in the source photo and seemed to do OK.  All the windows and darkest shadows were in tundra violet.  I added a tiny bit of transparent yellow to the most sunlit walls to try to create a tiny bit of warmth.  Most of it I blotted off but there's still enough there to brighten things up.   Once the buildings were done, I coloured in all the snow in the foreground, having loads of fun dropping in weird colours.

And then I took a step back.  There were some compositional problems with the painting but these were easy to rectify by diverting from the source photo.  The building on the left has plain white walls and a white roof in reality but these stood outvote much against the rest of the painting, so I darkened the roof and added some squiggly vertical lines to the wall.  There was also a blue balance problem, with lots of blue in the sky, the hill and the trees but not much in the buildings, so I unified all the rooves with a thin blue glaze, then went over the walls of all the buildings except the leftmost and rightmost with a thin glaze mixed from a number of colours but with enough blue to balance the top and bottom of the painting.

Finally, after removing the masking fluid, I added some snow tongue rooves in titanium white (always part of the plan) and went around tidying edges and shadows.  And that was me done.

And the result?  Mixed.  The supergranulators absolutely did their job and the sky, hills and trees are nigh on perfect, at least by my standards.  The buildings bring things down a bit though.  The white snowy edges along the left sides of the two towers are just too crude with their fixed widths.  And the buildings themselves, just like those in many of my paintings, look a bit too tentative and shaky, with my draftmanship skills letting me down again.  Still, this is good enough to go in the shop window and might attract some interest.

Interruptions

No painting going on at the moment as there's a new patio going down.  I could get access to the studio if I wanted to but don't fancy painting in there while there's all sorts of stuff happening on the other side of the window.  Maybe if they have Sundays off I might do but we'll see.  Otherwise it will be October before I'm back in action.

David Bellamy's Arctic Light – Book Review

Here's another book review, as promised.  David Bellamy's Arctic Light is a reassuringly robust feeling 176–page hardback.

And, for the first time in ages, I'm looking at a book that was exactly what I thought it would be.  About 160 pages of it is an artistic Arctic travelogue, the remainder being some tips on what I'd call extreme plein air watercolour painting.

So, first up, the travelogue.  This part of the book is divided up into six chapters, each based around one or two Arctic expeditions.  Most of these expeditions are in Greenland but there's also a trip to Iceland and a trip to the Svalbard Islands, East of Greenland and North of Norway.  All the expeditions are described in lots of detail, all mishaps and problems included.  And the scenery is well described and illustrated by some fantastic paintings.  David's poetic language brings the landscape to life, makes me want to visit it (well, maybe Iceland as I'm a bit put off by the polar bears otherwise) and, more importantly, makes me want to paint.  Just like with any book like this you find yourself going backwards and forwards between the main body of text, the text attached to the paintings and the paintings themselves.

The chapter on extreme plein air painting didn't teach me anything useful, to be honest as that's not my sort of thing.  But it still worked for me as an extension of the rest of the book, adding more details to David's journey and the problems he faces just painting.

The benefit to my painting from this book just comes from inspiration.  There's the inspiration to paint that comes through in the poetic language but there's also a lot to learn from just looking at David's paintings.  Just looking at how much granulation he has in his skies, the colours  he puts in the ice, the colours he puts into non–icy bits that work well against the icy colours behind them.  Some of these paintings have colours and effects that remind me a lot of tundra supergranulators and give me ideas about how better to use them.  Whenever I revisit this book, it's probably going to be to look at the pictures and to learn from them.  The book on learning from Turner's paintings might even prove useful to be in studying and learning from David's work.

Before we get to the scores on the doors, a random thought.  I was reading a review of a book somewhere that described a book as the sort of book that an artist would never buy but that people buy artists as gifts.  It was referring generally to books of the "Encyclopaedia of Techniques with Medium X" type, with lots of two page spreads giving shallow coverage of individual techniques that are either already common knowledge of that really need to be discussed at greater length.  They tend to get marketed as the only book about medium X that you'll ever need.  I must admit I've been sucked in by one of these books.  But my point is this.  If you're looking to buy a book for a watercolour artist and don't know what they want, you can't go wrong with a book like this one.  David also has a book on Arabian Light that's on my wishlist and there's the Hazel Soan book on Africa, but David's, with their solid hardback feel, kind of work better as gifts.

The final score?  Well, this was a pleasure to read and will be a source of inspiration for years but I'm limiting scores for books that are all inspiration and no learnings to three palettes.  This feels unfair on a book that I've nothing negative to say about but that's how my ratings work.  As a gift or as one more book in the collection of someone who thinks he has everything, this works well.  I really hope people read the words in my reviews and don't just look at the ratings.  I've lots of positive things to say about three and even two palette rated books.

🎨🎨🎨

An FIA No More

Some news that I should probably put up here so that people don't get the wrong idea.  I've just resigned my membership of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries so am no longer able to call myself a Chartered Actuary or to have the letters FIA after my name.  I just didn't see any benefits to remaining as a member during my retirement.  I'll still be calling myself The Artistic Actuary, though, as actuary isn't a protected term.

I'm having to take a break from the artworks for a few days as we're having a patio built and I don't have access to my studio.  I did bring one of my birthday books in with me, though, so there will be another book review at some point.

Free Horse Manure

I took my phone out with me today on my daily four mile walk through Queendown Warren, hoping to find some good subject matter after feeling a jot short of ideas yesterday.  A lot of rain came down during the walk but I was quite happily waterproofed.  This the view on the walk that begged most to be painted.  There are lots of views that would be amazing outside my window but which make for pretty boring paintings.  This is a boring view that makes for an interesting painting.  There's the path into the painting, the reflections on the road, the drips of water on the chain between the posts and the contrast of the white sign against the dark trees behind it.  The sign says Free Horse Manure, hence the title of the painting.

I'd already decided to do a painting using the Shire supergranulators.  I supplemented these, as is my now normal custom, with two more greens: forest brown and green apatite genuine.  To keep the greens well out of Haribo territory, I mixed all of them with burnt umber.  Later on I used rose dore to add some reddish tones and cadmium red, cadmium yellow and titanium white as garnishes.  So that's a whopping eleven colours in all but this still feels like a limited palette collection.

I didn't use a grid for my drawing today, although I did check the positioning of a few points using a ruler.  I masked out the sign, a couple of posts and some bags of (presumably) horse manure, spattered on some masking fluid where I thought I could use some white spots and rubbed a candle over the road and foreground for texture.

My underpainting was better today.  I started with Shire grey, Shire blue and burnt umber in the sky them moved on to various greys and greens elsewhere without worrying about the edges between shapes.  I dropped in drips of water and charged in bits of paint in an attempt to draw out textures.

And then I worked from front to back.  The furthest trees, which don't exist in reality, had emerged in the underpainting and I left them as they were.  For the next closest trees (the furthest in reality) I used Shire blue, the coolest of the greens, along with a bit of forest brown for variety.  For the next closest I used green apatite genuine.  After that the plan was to use warmer greens: Shire olive, Shire green and Shire yellow but this was where I started to run into trouble.  Because these greens are a bit too pale and weak to be able to compete against the green apatite genuine behind them.

To get around the problem, I lifted out as much of the middle distance green apatite genuine as I could, leaving it quite pale so that I could use a stronger green apatite genuine for the closer trees.  So those closer tees are from green apatite genuine stabbed in with the Merlin brush.  Even after making the middle distance trees paler, I found I needed to stab a little bit of cadmium yellow into those closer trees to help them stand out.

For the road, verges, sign and posts I just painted in whichever colours I could see in the source photo.  As I said earlier, I brought in rose dore to get some red tones, mainly in the concrete in the bottom right.

For finishing touches I stabbed a little bit of white into some trees, added some white highlights, spattered on cadmium red and cadmium yellow and then used burnt umber, titanium white and my two cadmiums to paint in lots of brambly branch lines in the tree on the right, that hadn't been looking great.  And that was me done.

Before I get to the scores on the doors, I think it's worth me recording here the biggest lesson of the day, and it's this.  My Shire supergranulating palette, including its two guest greens can be divided into two sets of greens.  Forest green, green apatite genuine and Shire blue are all greens that work best in trees.  Shire green, Shire olive and Shire yellow, the greens that I was finding too weak and watery for trees, work best in grassy meadows.  I think I already knew this but it really hit home today.  It's something I won't forget next time.

From a distance this one's quite evocative of the view and of the feeling on the day.  I also like the rose dore and how it contrasts against the complementary greens.  It's not my favourite painting ever, probably because I prefer more saturated colours, but it sold really quickly to a certain local stable owner and horse manure entrepreneur.

The Mukurob In Green Warm

After a huge gap of twenty seven days, I was back on the watercolours today.  I was feeling a bit bereft of inspiration, so went for The Mukurob again, albeit from a different angle to last time, with one side all in shadow.  But rather than just going through the options using the desert supergranulators again, I challenged myself by using my regular watercolour palette.

I'd already decided to use hematite violet in this one to get some nuttiness and granulation but I still needed to choose my red, blue and yellow.  Rose dore was an easy choice as my red but, looking through my swatch book, I was torn between Winsor blue GS and French ultramarine and between Indian yellow and raw sienna.  After trying out some swatches on the back of an old rejected painting with all the colours, I opted for raw sienna and Winsor blue GS, so this is in the key of green warm, the same key as my previous Mukurob effort that was painted using the desert supergranulators.  Oh, I used a bit of titanium white towards the end, not that it shows that much.

I kicked off with a rough pencil drawing.  I used a grid to do this but only as a very rough guide: there was nowhere near as much draftsmanship put into this one as there is in my portraits.  After that, I reserved some whites with a candle.  I drew on some marks but also rubbed the candle on its side over the paper to add some texture.  The texture marks worked out really well and I need to try this again in future, remembering that I used rough paper today and that the results might be different on cold press paper.

So onto the colours.  For the sky I used mainly Winsor blue GS with a bit of raw sienna at the bottom.  Like a fool I screwed up and let the blue bleed into the yellow, giving some green in the sky at the bottom.  I also messed up by laying in the blue a bit too thickly but managed to rescue things with water and kitchen paper, even ending up with a two tone blue sky that suggests a tiny bit of cloud: not enough cloud to create any white shapes.

For the first layer of colour over the rocks, I should have just done one wash over everything, largely ignoring shadows and definitely treating all the hills as one big shape.  Instead, maybe lacking a bit of confidence in my ability to be able to separate shapes in later washes, I painted shadows and separate hills as separate shapes.

I knew that was a mistake straight away, so for my second layer, I put a wash over all the rocks, treating them as one big shape but putting a bit of variation in there with more red, yellow or hematite violet in different places.

And then for the third coat, I went over all the shadows properly with a neutral colour mixed from all four of my main colours.  It was all looking a bit flat, so I dropped in more red, blue or yellow into places where I could see these colours in the shadows on my source photo.

And the final stage was tinkering.  My biggest problem at this stage was the light shape down the edge of the shoulder.  I tried using all sorts of colours here, eventually resorting to lightening it up with titanium white and adding some blue to the yellow and red that were already there.  It's not perfect but it's the best I'm going to manage.  I also added the odd crack in the ricks and drybrushed some colour across foreground for texture.  And that was me done.

I admit this isn't my greatest painting.  The right shoulder still doesn't satisfy me and the mounded shape of the foreground hill is a bit too round.  But there are big ticks for the colours in the shadows and the foreground, for the texture effect from the candle and for the path into the painting, gradually curving around to the right.  A path that was just a lucky accident.  All in all, good enough to go in the shop window.

Derek Trucks

I've painted a lot of guitarists over years in various different media but until now I've not gotten around to my favourite.  My favourite living guitarist anyway.  Most of you out there won't have heard of him but this is Derek Trucks.  He played guitar in the Allman Brothers Band for about twenty years.  Now, though, he plays guitar in the Tedeschi Trucks band.  I've seen them in convert four times and was at the BB King concert a few years ago when Derek popped up as a guest along with his wife Susan Tedeschi.  Oh, and Ronnie Wood, Slash and Mick Hucknall came on to join the party on the stage later.  It was quite the night.

Anyway, on to the painting.  I picked out this pose because when Derek goes off on one he closes his eyes and hunches over.  I've no doubt that the photographer caught him here at the high point of the concert.  I'm also a bit of a sucker for black backgrounds when. It comes to coloured pencil pirtraits.

Preparation first.  I put down a pencil drawing using a grid, as per usual.  And, before reaching for the pencils, I scraped in some lines with the pointy tool: some random hairs on the head and in the beard and some guitar strings using a ruler.  Then I was ready to start.

Unlike with watercolour paintings, I don't just work from the background forwards with coloured pencils.  I decided today to pick out the black background, the main body of the guitar and the wooden panel as the three shapes that I'd work on first.  Each of these shapes has loads of different colours in it, far to many for me to remember.  And rather than do each shape one at a time. I’d do one or two layers in one shape before moving in to another, so they were built up in parallel.  Now, here's the interesting bit.  Every time I used a colour I'd also incorporate it into Derek's hair, face, leather shirt or hands or into the guy out on the right.  Background guy didn't come out brilliantly but Derek and his jacket just emerged gradually.  By the rime I was happy with my three starting shapes I has a brilliant likeness of Derek and an interesting multicoloured shirt.

The shirt was maybe slightly too multicoloured so I went over it with thin layers of red, blue and green to turn it black.  And I used sepia and indigo to go over some of the shadowy shapes and make stretches were still there.

And then we were onto finishing touches.  There were background shapes and little bits on the guitar to add some colour to.  These were pretty straightforward.  Then I tinkered a little with Derek's face, hair and hands.  And then it was all about smoothing and blending.  I used a paper stump for Derek's face and shirt and for the background but otherwise burnished everything in white.  And that was me done.

I'm happy with this.  The face with its likeness and with all those colours in the hairdos off the charts.  The left hand I guess could be better and I could have left out background guy and the wooden panel but, you know, this is a portrait.  That face makes this a big success.  Derek's up for sale.

Adhira In Greens And Reds

I made a late start today and decided to go for the inktense pencils as I can choose a model pose pretty quickly and hit the ground running.  Today I picked a pose by Adhira; this is her second appearance and her first with inktense pencils.

And I just wasn't in the tight frame of mind today.  I started with the pad upside down, drawing an outline on the back of a previous painting and wondering why all the paper underneath was cockled.  Eventually I realised my error and started all over again.  But I was in too much of a hurry, resulting in an ugly hand, and too heavy with the pencil, so you can still see the remnants of some of my gridlines.

So it was pretty clear pretty early that this was going to be a writeoff.  So I thought I'd experiment with colour.  I decided to just use three reds and three green.  I started with the greens, field green in the darkest places, then leaf green, then apple green.  I roughly added poppy red to the field greens, fuchsia to the apple greens and Shiraz to the leaf greens, not worrying too much about whether I got it right every time and allowing colours to mix in places.  I finished by stroking in  some random red and green marks here and there.  And then I wetted all the pencil marks and that was me done.

Obviously this is a writeoff and won't be going in the shop window but how was the colour experiment?  Inconclusive, that's what I'd say.  I've not managed to get any dark, neutral colours but this is all down to me wanting to get this completed and to pour out a Friday night beer.  If I'd taken my time, the colours might have worked better.  Even then, though, there's something a bit boring about these two colours when you see them separately.  I think my inktense figures need some blue, purple or even brown in there to get the pulse racing.

Bad day today.  I need to get up earlier tomorrow and get out either the watercolours or the coloured pencils.

The Dads Army Collection

And here it is completed: The Dads Army Collection.

From left to right, top to bottom:

– Captain Mainwaring

– Wilson

– Jonesy

– Godfrey and Pike

– The verger and vicar

– Frazer

– Hodges

– Walker

Normally I'd say that the portraits weren't that special but that they work well together as a collection but some of these individual masterpieces are off the charts in terms of likeness.  And with them all having a bit of character to them and with the guest colours adding a little bit of, well, colour to what are otherwise painted only in greys and flesh tones, this is far and away my best collection of marker portraits so far.

In fact, if you showed me these portraits a couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have believed that they were mine.  My marker portraits have taken a huge step forward in the last week or so, just after the first attempts at Wilson and Walker.  I'm now wondering what my next portrait in coloured pencil, oil pastel or even watercolour will look like.

Honestly, I'm still shocked at what I've managed to create here.

Captain George Mainwaring

And finally here's the last portrait in the collection, Captain George Mainwaring, played by Arthur Lowe.  Along with Walker, one of my two favourite characters in the shows largely for the bravery he shows in the climax to the feature length Dads Army film that starred the original actors.  It's well worth a watch.

I followed the usual process.  Grid, pencil outlines, dark greys and black, light greys, flesh tones, bit of guest colour, rubbing pencil lines out only when I needed to.

One thing I did slightly differently today was to mark in the irises, nostrils and mouth line in dark grey after accurately plotting their positions in the grid.  I'd been having some likeness problems and at least  this pegged down some unerasable reference points that would hold firm while I kept attempting to draw all the other features.  In fact one of the things I've discovered while doing these portraits is the process of "finding the likeness".  It's something they walkways talk about on PAOTY but that has been alien to me for a long time.  If you've not got the likeness in the original drawing, how are you supposed to move towards it later on?  But that's what I've been doing in these portraits.  I've started with some barely acceptable pencil portrait outlines and kept adding colour marks until I can see the likeness and then slammed on the brakes and put the markers down.  It's something I've not experienced before.

So how is George?  Oh he works.  The likeness is there and there's a look of disgust in the face that tells a story, even if that's down to Arthur and not to me.  And the character in the portrait marches the character in the TV program, which I'd normally be delighted by but after some of the other work I've done recently, I'm a tiny bit disappointed that I didn't manage to add any new aspects to George's character.  And some of the grey shadows on the face (like along the bottom of the chin) are maybe a bit too hard edged and crude,  The better I get at this, the bigger a critic I become.

But, still, a good day's work there.

Sergeant Arthur Wilson II

I've had a second go at Wilson today.  After painting Wilson and Walker the first time around I think my portraitist skills (or was it just my style?) went through a step change.  Whatever it was, those two portraits just didn't gel with the rest of the collection and they've now both been replaced.

Just like everyone else in the collection, Wilson started with a pencil outline, using a grid, before being brought to life with dark greys, then lighter greys, then flesh tones.  I has some trouble eking a likeness out of this one, so added quite a few layers and used the blending pen much more than usual.  I added the blue background to balance against Godfrey and Pike when the collection is all put together.

One new thing I started doing with this painting was being a bit more careful about rubbing out gridlines and outlines.  Rather than rubbing out the gridlines once the outlines were down, then putting back any outlines I'd missed, then rolling the putty eraser on the paper to make the outlines faint, I didn't rub anything out until I needed to.  So, for example, just before added the first dark grey shapes I rubbed out any gridlines that went through these shapes.  And once those shapes were down, I rubbed out their outlines.  This way, I could see the complete portrait clearly throughout the process.

What I ended up with wasn't a perfect likeness.  In fact I can see almost as much of Robert Bathurst coming through as I can of John Le Mesurier. But as this is a portrait of the character and notion the actor playing him, that's a plus isn't it?  I'm not sure whether there's any character coming through from this one though.  If there's any indecisiveness there, it can be put down to the pose and not to me.  But this does look like a real human being and not just a character from a sitcom.  I think this one is good enough to include in the collection, even if it's looking like the weakest so far.

One more to go and it's the other one of my favourite two characters.

Private James Frazer

Today's addition to the set is Frazer, played by John Laurie, another actor born in the 19th century.

After I found a picture of hin in his undertaker gear, there was never any question of Frazer being given any guest colours, so he's only here in black, greys and a couple of flesh tones.  This is my second attempt – I abandoned the first after screwing up and putting black over part of his left ear.

I've got some personality coming through in this one.  Not as much of the defeatist, doomed, attitude but the funereal gear and the pale flesh tones give this one a ghostly, Addams Family style look.  With all that story coming through, I'm happy that the likeness is close enough for this zone to be worth a place in the collection.  Without any of that fluffy stuff, I'd be less happy with the likeness.

Just two to go now, although I need some new pens to be delivered before I can start properly.

Private Joe Walker II

For my second portrait today I had another go at Joe Walker.  This actually my third attempt.  I tried using the same source photo as first time round but was struggling to get any sort of likeness, so have up and picked out another pose.  This alternative pose also had a lot more tie on display, allowing me to include more extra colour in an attempt to balance all that extra colour behind Godfrey and Pike.

Obviously, apart from the ring and tie, this is all in black and various greys.  There are quite a few layers in this one.  The darkest shadows started as a dark grey but were eventually turned to black.  And I was never really happy with Walker's whistle.  It started off in light grey with medium grey creases but ended up as a very dark grey with black creases.  I also put on a flesh colour towards  the end to supplement the light greys in the face and to bring in a bit of life.

I think Walker might be the character in the collection who it's most difficult to capture a likeness of.  But eventually, after going over the dark greys with more dark greys and then black, I got something close.  It felt to me as if I was never going to get closer than this, so I stopped there.

I thought about adding a coloured background but, nah, there's enough colour in the tie.

What I've ended up with is something with a good enough likeness and enough guest colour ti be able to replace the original Joe Walker in the collection.   The jacket and the hand aren't perfect but the eyes are drawn to the face.  Story–wise, Joe's not as shifty looking as he was the first time around but there's something else to him, a bit of Wild West hussler that adds that little bit extra.  I'm happy with this.  Two more to go, plus Wilson probably needing to be replaced.

ARP Warden William Hodges

Up nice and early today and, with the chess not needing too much work today, I think I have time for two portraits.  First up is Hodges, played by Bill Pertwee.

I found a great black and white photo, so this was always going to be mainly in blacks and greys.  I could have made the background all black but instead blended it into some lighter greys behind Bill's shoulders.

For the guest colour, one possibility would have been to give Bill brown eyes but there's already enough brown in this collection.  So I went for yellow.  My original idea was to light up Bill's face with yellow light from exploding bombs but his face was looking so good that I didn't want to disturb anything.  So instead I put some yellow over the top of those background greys to look like fires in the background.

And that was me done.

Just like Jonesy, this one brings out an emotional response.  Hodges is a man with a job to do and I didn't like how he was always portrayed as the enemy.  I've worked in an office.  Some days you're the Mainwaring and sometimes you're the Hodges.  But in this painting there's no doubt about who's side Hodges is on.  There's anger and defiance in those eyes as he stands amidst the carnage of a German air raid.  This one has story and personality there.  I'm amazed at what a few simple strokes with a marker pen can do.  And most of this is down to that Bill Maughan book.

So, just two more portraits to go now.  Or is it?  The last four have come out so well that Wilson and Walker are starting to look pretty bad.  I may need to have a second go at both of them.  Wilson is looking like the best candidate at this stage to be given a coloured background to balance the one behind Godfrey and Pike.