Captain James Tiberius Kirk

Today I had a go at the second in The Corbomite Manouver collection.  Today it's Captain Kirk, painted using the Shire supergranulators, befitting his yellow/green shirt.  As will become the norm, the Shire supergranulators were supplemented with forest green and green apatite genuine for darker greens and burnt sienna for that little bit of warmth.

You know how I do these by now.  Grid, pencil outline, mask some highlights and spatter some masked stars, add the colour and fiddle around trying to find a likeness until I feel that it's impossible to do anything more.  And that's what I did today.

And this one is an even bigger flop than Scotty.  There's no likeness in the nose or mouth and, while the eyes might be OK of everything else was good, they're unable to rescue this one.  The spacey background is good as usual and I'm wondering now whether I should be using the supergranulators to do some night time landscapes to take advantage of their abilities.  And the other things I like about this one are the shirt creases and the tilt of the head – there's something about Kirk in there.

But, no, this one's not going up for sale.  In fact, after two bad portraiture experiences with the supergranulators, I'm probably going to give up on the Corbomite Manouver collection.  Maybe I'll put Scotty up for sale as an individual painting, though, as he's started to grow on me.  Watercolour portraits, though, are turning out not be as easy as I thought.  I need to go back to the style I used for John Lydon and look for subjects that might benefit from a similar approach.

<Edit: after painting Spock,  I decided the collection looks better than the sum of its parts and the three painting collection is now up for sale.>

The Sandstone Kagoule

I really shouldn’t be painting on Mondays.  Monday is housework day and after I've had breakfast, done the housework, finished my daily four mile walk, had lunch, done about an hour of German lessons and set the alarm so I can be in front of the telly for Only Connect, there's not much time left in the day and not much of that will be in the hours of daylight.

But today I was a man on a mission.  I saw a Facebook post by Fiona Matheson the other day with a video of some miserable weather, presumably up Inverness way.  Anyway, the picture to click on to see the video looked interesting.  If I screw up my eyes, the woman in the kagoule (is it Fiona?  Not sure) looks like a couple of sandstone rocks stacked up.  Along with the weather and the grim state of the sky and sea, this was just screaming to be painted:

It was an es decision to paint this in the key of green warm.  I wanted a cool blue and warm red so that they would mix to a neutral colour without the slightest hint of violet and needed a cool yellow so that I didn't get garish oranges when mixing reds with yellows.  For the blue I ides Mayan blue genuine for its bitty granulation.  For yellows I used both raw sienna and transparent yellow.  For reds I used Winsor red, rose dore and burnt umber.  Cadmium red, sepia, titanium white and white gouache all made appearances too.

The sky is mainly Mayan blue and Winsor red with a bit of raw sienna added later.  I started with a wash of the blue and red, turned the painting upside down and sprayed water on it to get it running (a Nita Engle idea).  I tipped it around a bit and dabbed it with kitchen paper to avoid puddles.  As it was drying I added in clouds with the blue, both reds and a little raw sienna.  Everything granulated really well.

For the sea, I stared off with a walk of the blue with a little burnt umber.  Following another Nita Engle idea, I squirted some water upwards near the bottom of the painting to create the cresting wave.  Underneath/ the wave I added some of the blue with burnt umber for ricks and was amazed to see them coming out greenish.  I continued to tinker with the sea, adding more layers of blue at the top, more blue and burnt umber on the rocks and some white gouache to get a bit more solidity to the foam on the wave.

And then there were the rocks.  I really should have experimented with colours on a separate piece of paper to find something that worked, but instead just kept adding layer after layer and dabbing paint off, searching for the right colours.  I used the blue, both yellows, both reds and the burnt umber.  At times I put in little spots of sepia or cadmium red and I tried to give the rocks some texture using the titanium white trick.  Eventually, though, I had to give up because the paper was feeling too saturated and reluctant to dry.  I’m starting to wonder whether my paper is a bit wet before I've even started painting and might explore different storage possibilities.  Anyway, that was me done.

Anyway, I think this one's good enough to go in the shop window.  The sky and the sea both portray the weather accurately and I think I've just about succeeded in leaving it unclear about whether that's Someone on a kagoule or a pile of rocks.

Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott

Sometimes great ideas come into my head on my daily walks.  Today was one of those days.  Earlier this year I put together The Good The Bad and the Ugly Collection.  There were three paintings in the collection, painted using the Shire, desert and tundra supergranulators.  I enjoyed putting that set together and have been trying to think for a while about how I could repeat exercise with a different collection.  Which would mean I needed three subjects with some sort of green/blue/red distinction between them.  Maybe they could be portraits too, as I'm enjoying watercolour portraiture so much.  And I'm also enjoying using the supergranulators to create starry backgrounds in those planet paintings.  So where can I find good facial shots of people that I can categorise as green, blue and red and that might look good with starry backgrounds.  I don't know why it took me so long to come up with this but the Starship Enterprise crew wear greens blue and red shirts and travel among the stars.  And only two nights ago I watched The Corbomite Manouver, a brilliant episode that had loads of interesting facial shots showing off highlights and facial planes.  So I'm putting together a collection of paintings based on three facial shots from The Corbomite Manouver.

I couldn't wait to get started and kicked off today with Scotty.  He wants a red shirt, so was painted using desert colours.  I supplemented these with cadmium red to help suggest the colour of his shirt.  Cadmium red is one of the components in desert green, so seemed an appropriate addition to the team.

I started by putting down a pencil outline using a grid.  Maybe I was in too much of a hurry but the likeness wasn't perfect today.  I should probably have spent longer on the pencil drawing, using a ruler to accurately pinpoint where within particular squares particular reference points were.  In particular there's too wide a gap between the left extreme of Scotty's left eye and his ear - maybe I drew the eye too small.

Before putting any paint on, I spattered masking fluid everywhere and tried to remove it from everywhere apart from the hair, the background and the black shirt collar.  Not very successfully as I can see there are a few stars showing out on his shirt.  I also added a few white highlights, most importantly on the irises in the eyes.

And then I put in the colours.  I started with the darks: desert grey and desert green.  I tried to make the background behind and above Scotty dark and to not distinguish it from his hair.  But I also added the mouth line, nostrils, irises, eyebrows, top edges of eyes and a lot of shadow on the right (our right) of his face.  After watering the paint down a bit, I added a few midtones, looking to bring out the eye sockets, some  facial creases and some shadows.  After the darks were down, I moved on to the mid tones, using the desert brown, desert orange and desert yellow.  This was also probably the point at which I added some cadmium red to the shirt.  Not enough to make it red red but enough to get it to fit with the rest of the colours while suggesting a shirt that was locally red.

Then I tinkered for a while, trying to tease out a likeness.  And, once again, I didn't manage to do that.  Maybe watercolour portraiture isn't so easy after all and John Lydon was just beginners' luck.  And, just like the other day with Uranus, the paper started feeling too wet and full of water.  Maybe the colder weather is just making paint take longer to dry.  I need to add a hairdryer to my Christmas list.  Maybe a rechargeable one that I can take out in the field.

Anyway, after deciding that I wasn't getting any closer to a likeness, I let the painting dry and rubbed off the masking fluid.  And that was me done.

Scotty is part of The Corbomite Manouver Collection, up for sale as a set of three paintings.

Uranus

After a bit of a break, I'm back on the planets again.  Today it's Uranus.  All eight planets revolve around the sun in roughly the same plane and seven of the eight rotate about an axis that, while not 100% perpendicular to that plane, definitely sticks out of it, making the planets spin around as they make their way around the sun.  Uranus is the odd one out, also rotating but about an axis that's much closer to the orbital plane and that points vaguely towards the sun.  It means that Uranus rolls along its orbit and that's where the twist in this painting comes from.

With Uranus being really cold and having a lot of green/blue methane in its atmosphere, I went for the tundra supergranulators again.  I've already used these for Neptune but, because this set of planet paintings is a series and not a collection (a subtle difference) I've no problems allowing two of them to have so much in common.  And I used some titanium white and white gouache too.

Once the pencil outline was down, I put on some masking fluid.  Some around the edges of the rails and some around the edges of Uranus and the two carefully placed (compositionally balancing) moons plus a starry spatter all over the sky.  It was only after I'd done this that I decided to add some thin white lines supporting the rails.  I put these on using a mapping pen, masking fluid and a ruler.  If there were any gaps (and unfortunately it looks as if there weren't), that wouldn’t have been a problem - it would have made them look more realistic.  Of course it was messy laying a ruler down on top of wet masking fluid to do this - it would have made much more sense to add the straight lines before all the other masking marks.

The first paint to go down was the sky: I used the tundra purple, pink, blue and orange, just putting them down wherever I fancied.  I sprinkled on a minimal amount of salt in a diagonal from bottom right to top left.  It didn't show up in the final painting.  And, rather than masking out some hard edged rings like I did for Neptune and Jupiter, I created the rings by lifting off paint with kitchen paper.

Before painting the moons and planet, I removed all the masking fluid and then masked that part of the nearer rail in front of the planet.  Then I added the colours.  I started with the top moon in tundra green and blue and the bottom one in tundra green and pink but ended up using all five colours in both.  I got to something I was happy with pretty quickly for the moons, but not for the planet.  I wanted cloudy bands that would reinforce the message that Uranus was on its side and rolling but was never entirely happy and kept dabbing paint off and adding a new layer.  I even found  myself lightening the pole and the left side of the planer with titanium white at one point.  Eventually, though, the paper started to feel as if it had taken too much punishment so I had to stop.

Next it was on to the rails.  After removing the rest of the masking  fluid, I painted the "top" of the rails in white gouache and the side facing us in a greenish mixture of colours.  I even remembered to lift paint off the tail in a couple of places where the ring was in front of it.  As a finishing touch, I added white highlights to the top left of the planet and moons and Tundra violet shadows. To the rails and supports in places.  And that was me done.

I think this turned out well.  The sky is off the charts as usual and the rails and supports make this one interesting.  Uranus itself, though, might be a little overworked.  Not sure.  Still, a worthy addition to the series.  This one's up for sale.

Three planets still to go and I think I know where I'm going with them…

Thea 5

Today's been quite a short day but, with England playing cricket tomorrow, I didn't want to take what would be two days off, so I went for a quick painting today.  In fact, this painting took less time to complete than it took for me to listen to Molly Hatchet's Greatest Hits on CD.  This is a painting using the Artgraf blocks and the model is Thea, making her fifth appearance.

I put down two outlines using a grid: one was of the body and the other the outline of the darkest shadows.  It might be interesting at some point for me to try painting the shadows using the Artgraf like watercolour pans, but I find it more fun to draw the paint on using the Artgrafs like chalks and to wet the paint afterwards.  So I drew over all the dark areas with the brown Artgraf (a colour that looks to me more like sepia).   I tried to be careful and to apply the colour as lightly as possible.  And then I added some colour by putting in the blue, both yellows and both reds wherever I could see those colours and at one point I think I found myself jamming along to Molly Hatchet and adding colours wherever I felt like it.

Once I was happy with the pigment on the paper, I added water.  As is normal for me with these Artsgrafs, I would stab in a little bit of water with a tiny brush, then rinse and clean the brush before going on to to another spot on the painting to wet.  This method seemed to work out today, maybe because my wetting was quite watery, not leaving hard edges, so not turning the body into loads of rectangles joined together.

For finishing touches, I added what I thought were some missing colours: some blue between the butt cheeks and some red and yellow on Thea's right hand.  For both of these I used the Artgraf like watercolour pans.  Finally I added some water to all the white shapes on the body and tried to coax in watery versions of the adjacent colours.  It worked in places.

And that was me done.  This feels to me like a big success, with so many colours and brush marks bringing it to life.  Thea's up for sale.

Oh, and the surprise element in these Artfgraf paintings even surpasses that for inktense pencil paintings.  I had absolutely no idea what colours I was going to see here, whereas with inktense pencils I at least have a vague idea.

Upchurch Art Exhibition 2023

This year's Upchurch art exhibition takes place at St Mary's Church between Friday 17th and Sunday 19th November (11am to 4pm, 10 to 4, 10 to 1) and I've booked myself a stand.  It's an exhibition rather than a craft fair, so I won't be there for the whole three days but will nip in a couple of times a day for a coffee and a mingle.

I've decided to make things more interesting this time around by going for some of my more creative works rather than just picking out my best paintings.  There will be plenty of artists there showing off landscapes and I want to be different.  The one whose art generates conversations.

Until the exhibition is over, none of this artwork is up for sale here.  Ten of the works are up for sale at the exhibition, the exception being It's A Jungle Out There (bottom right) which I'm keeping.

Sir Bobby Charlton

Sorry everybody.  I screwed up today.  Rather than doing a fourth portrait in a row I should have switched back to painting planets.  I need to keep constantly changing to keep fresh.  Doing a second Liz Chaderton style rainbow portrait so soon after John Lydon was just asking for trouble.

I tried to change things, I really did.  Starting with the colours.  I went for Winsor blue green shade, Winsor red and Indian yellow as my three main colours (so this is in the key of orange cool), attracted by the neutral colour that the red and blue mixed to (both of them being well away from purple, heading towards orange and green respectively).  I also included burnt sienna to add a bit of warmth and some white gouache at the end for hair and highlights.

This one generally followed the process for John Lydon.  Pencil outline using a grid, then an underpainting in the dark and mid toned areas with my primaries and a little bit of burnt sienna.  And then a dark colour in the dark areas: today that dark was mixed from my blue and red.

Where this one differed to yesterday's was in the amount of fiddling.  Sometimes you just can't find a likeness however much you tinker.  And when so much of the tinkering is with the dark colour, you feel compelled to go back over all the rest of the darks with the dark mix again.  So Sir Bobby's jacket and the area behind his head is now very dark.  On the other hand I like the area to the right if his he’d where I tried to phase out the blue/red mix every time I added a new layer.  At one point I started adding more midtones, using a green mix in some places and warmer, fleshy colours in others.

After I finally decided I was going  to give up, I added white hair and highlights in gouache and tried to use gouache to lighten the flesh surrounding Sir Bobby's left nostril, which was too dark.  And that was me done.

And this was a disaster.  It looks more like Putin than Sir Bobby.  I've not even managed to catch his personality.  This one won't be going in the shop window.  I feel guilty about not being able to give this legend the send off he deserved.  RIP Sir Bobby.

<Edit: others have suggested a likeness of Gorbachev or King Charles!>

John Lydon

I wasn’t planning on doing a watercolour today but I found a photo of John Lydon that was just begging to be painted in Liz Chaderton style.  In fact the source photo is so good that I may come back to it again at some point to try out with other media.  John Lydon may end up alongside Big Sam Allardyce and me as a triumvirate of favourite portrait subjects.

People might think it's weird that I'm painting John after looking through other musical artists I've painted and wonder whether he fits with my tastes in music.  Well, let me tell you.  I got the the one proper Sex Pistols studio album (Never Mind…) for my birthday and it's honestly amazing.  Time's a great healer and this music that would have been quite shocking back in 1977 sounds fresh as homemade bread today.

Anyway, first step in this one was to put down an outline using a grid, and then to put on a bit of masking fluid.  Today I only masked out the highlight on the ear, the earring a couple of highlights in the pupils and a highlight on some sort of pimple under John's right eye.  I didn't do any spattering today as I feel as if I've been using too much masking fluid lately.

Than the painting.  It was a two step process but with a little bit of extra fiddling after each step.  The first step was to paint in all the dark and mid tones with random colours.  I used viridian, burnt sienna, Indian yellow, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.  With five well spaced colours featuring heavily, this painting can't be classified under a colour key.  After the colours were down, I did do some fiddling, adding a second layer in places where I wanted to distinguish between dark to mid and light to mid tones.  And in some places I could see medium tones that I'd missed and added these in.

Then the second stage was to layer over the darks.  I put aside the yellows red and green and just mixed the French ultramarine and burnt sienna into "that grey", veering slightly towards blue to keep it cool.  And I put this all over the darkest areas.

And then I fiddled a bit, colouring in the shirt to help it stand out, putting in some darker hair shapes and adding the odd dark here and there in the face as I "looked for a likeness".  The whole looking for a likeness thing is making more sense to me with every portrait.  And, after removing masking fluid and deciding that the white shapes in the ear and earring were fine, that was me done.

And this, my friends, is a second successive amazing painting.  Likeness tick.  Attitude tick.  Colours tick.   The colours in the darks on the side of John’s head, on his neck and on his shirt are just so interesting; even without the multicoloured background the colours in the dates would make this one much more interesting than a painting with monotone darks.  Suffice to say, this one's going up for sale.

B. B. King

Today's not a day for watercolours.  I tend to do watercolours in bursts of 2-4 successive days and with yesterday being a charcoal day and tomorrow an England cricket sofa day, today wasn't going to work, was it? So I went for the oil pastels.  It's cold enough now for the pastels to be useable and not buttery.  It's also not that cold today that I need the heating on outside, so no chance of that melting the pastels either.

Today's portrait is another guitarist, the late B. B. King.  I did get to see B. B. in concert a few years ago at the Albert Hall.  From memory I think he was just a few months short of his 86th birthday!  Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi joined him for the middle third of the concert and stayed around for the final third when they were also joined by Ronnie Wood, Slash and Mick Hucknall!  That was some evening.  The concert was recorded and I have it on CD and DVD.

As usual, I started by putting down outlines using a grid.  I'd been looking at the source photo yesterday evening and deciding there were lots of greens in there, so I started by putting in the darkest shapes with sap green, and then I just let the pastels do their thing.  I introduced more greens, plus some reds, blues, yellows and some colours that were more fleshy. Oh, and some whites for highlights. I kept going with these colours for a while, refining the likeness  but being aware that at some point it would no longer be possible to add more colour to the paper.  At one point I had something that looked great but with lots of red in the forehead and green in the cheeks when theory suggested they should be the other way round, so I corrected this.  Eventually I decided that it was too risky to continue working on the face and hands, so stopped.

After the face and hands were done , I worked on the guitar, the shirt and the background.  The background started by being shaded in with the side of a black pastel.  It wasn't quite dark enough but instead of adding more black, I dotted in blues, reds, greens and maybe some dark browns and smoothed them all together with a finger.  It looks good now.  I didn’t really have a plan for the shirt and decided on the spur of the moment to have a go at something patterned similarly to the actual shirt rather than taking the easy option and going for a plain shirt.  And that worked too.  I just had to be careful when pushing the colour into the paper with my fingers not to ruin everything by spreading the blue and yellow together.

Finally, I added more colour to B.B.'s hair and scratched out some facial hair with a scalpel.  And that was me done.

And I'm so happy with this one.  It's unmistakably B.B. in my eyes, although some might claim to see a bit of Nelson Mandela, Don Warrington or Peter Reid in there.  I think it was the 'tache at the end that finally won it for B.B.  but it's not just about the likeness.  I find this painting is generating an emotional response within me.  The closed eyes somehow make me feel the note that he's squeezing out of the guitar and the hair and 'tache show off his old age and remind me of how recently we lost a legend.  This one's a huge success in my opinion and is up for sale.

Donald Trump

I took a break from the planets today.  A charcoal painting is long overdue and I thought I'd have a go at a charcoal portrait for the first time.  I picked the famous Donald Trump scowl as my source photo, a face that's just screaming to be painted.

And there really is very little to say about how I put this one together.  I picked out some orange paper, just put as anybody else would.  Then I put down a grid and pencil outlines.  I did this using an orange charcoal pencil so that I didn't need to worry about erasing all the lines later.  In fact I found that I could just wipe the lines off with a chamois.

Then I died all the charcoal.  I started with the eyes and then moved on to the darks that designed the contours of the face.  The great thing about charcoal is that I can keep tinkering with it without worrying about muddying paint or filling the tooth of the paper - if there's too much charcoal on the paper I can just remove it.  So I tinkered with this one for ages, never being really happy acting so many times with a new set of darks and facial creases.  The eyes weren't positioned correctly at one point but I managed to move them to somewhere where they look like they belong.  The hair is where I had the most problems.  I struggled to get variegated colours with light highlights and dark bits - it all ended up a bit too uniform.

Anyway, I eventually got to something I was happy to stick with.  Strangely, while I've not quite got the eyes, the mouth or the facial expression right, I think I've managed to capture the personality and the foreboding sense of menace in the scowl.  And this one does look good when you catch it out of the corner of your eye.  So I'm happy with today effort - remember this is my first ever charcoal portrait.

This one isn't up for sale at the moment - I want to master the use of fixative in charcoal before I start selling paintings like this.

Mercury

Today's planet is Mercury, sharing its name with the messenger of the Roman gods and therefore deserving of a pair or wings.  For the three colours today, I put aside the cheat code supergranulators and picked Winsor red, Winsor blue green shade and Indian yellow as my three colours as they could give me a decent planet and some interesting dark colours for the background sky.  So this is in the key of orange cool.  Titanium white and white gouache made late appearances (a common theme for this planet based series of paintings) but no other colours were harmed in the production of this painting.

So after putting down an initial drawing and starry spatter (and not managing to remove all the spattering from inside the planet shape) I painted in the sky.  I deliberately made the sky bluer ahead of the planet and yellower behind with a bit of red here and there.  As well as helping suggest movement, this helped contrast the planet against the background later on, with a sunny side against the blue sky and a dark side against the yellow.  I added loads of salt behind the planet and a tiny sprinkling everywhere else.

Then it was on to the planet.  This was pretty straightforward, although I did put in three layers of primary colours.  The left side was mainly yellow, with some red introduced further to the right and some blue in the right and underneath, and the three mixed to a near black on the shadow side of the planet.  I stabbed in lots of spots because Mercury is pock marked with loads of meteor holes.

For the wings, I started with a watery neutral mix of the three primaries with individual primaries charged in.  It took me a while (and maybe three layers) to get this right.  I thought too much white paper was showing, so went over everything again with a neutral colour and charged in more primaries.  At one point I added some shadowy detail marks in a blackish mix of primaries.  I made the near wing more detailed by having one mark per feather, at least for the middle and most extreme bits of the wing; for the further wing I included less detail.

As a finishing touch, I lightened the leading edges with the titanium white trick, putting on watery paint and dabbing it off with kitchen paper.  And I added some white highlights to some of the feathers in gouache.  And that was me done.

And that all resulted in a decent painting.  Just as with all these planets so far, the two big stars are the sky background and (at least in my opinion) the creativity and imagination.  The salt does a great job in this one of suggesting movement and I also like the colours in the near wing.  I just worry a little bit about whether the colours in that near wing fit in with the rest of the painting.  They're the same colours as everywhere else but a bit brighter and less saturated than the muddy colours everywhere else.  But that's just me being picky.  This is good enough to go in the shop window.

The Face Of Mars

Another day, another planet.  My latest idea for planet paintings (to go with the ideas of random surrealness and Roman gods) is to think about features and properties of individual planets and how to turn these into creative ideas.  Today's planet is Mars and I'd been thinking about the famous face on the Martian landscape that's been photographed a few times by passing Terran satellites and looks like an alien construction but is really nothing special.  I've blown up the face to a huge size, so huge that it might have looked silly on a spherical planet, so I've turned Mars and its two moons into cubes.

I stared by drawing in all three bodies in two point perspective.  I didn't want everything to look neat and tidy, so I put the nearest edges of the moons at non vertical angles.  I'm not sure what I was supposed to do with the vanishing points of the moons but in both cases I moved one up and one down, keeping then directly above and below Mars' vanishing points while in all three cases keeping the line between the vanishing points perpendicular to the nearest edge.  I'll have to check online what I was supposed to do at some point as I don't have any books on perspective.

I went for the desert supergranulators today because of Mars' red colour and supplemented them only with titanium white and white gouache at the end.

After getting a bit frustrated last week with how difficult it was to remove masking fluid from my current bottle, I decided to only spatter it over the paper for stars and to not bother protecting the three body shapes.  Being quite well behaved, convex shapes, it shouldn't be too difficult to paint around them anyway.

As usual the sky background went down first.  I started with desert green and grey, the two dark colours in the set, but then also dropped in some of the yellow, orange and brown.  The green and grey that I mixed were quite watery and came out quite lightly valued.  The planets came out darker valued than the sky but, to be honest, I had no value plan in mind today and if the sky had come out darker I'd have made the planets lighter.

And then it was onto the planets.  I think all nine faces showing had at least three layers of paint on them.  I imagined light coming from the top left (as this matched the light source for the face photo I was using) so I tried to put four of the faces in shadow.  At some point I realised that the weird orientations of the bodies made them look like tumbling dice, so I encouraged this a little by dabbing in some crater marks to look like spots.

I had the most trouble with Mars itself.  Not the face (that worked our well) but with the dark side, where I tried to paint in shadowy shapes to suggest a crater that was in the same source photo as the face.  But somehow, while the shadows on the face worked perfectly, those on the shadowy side never succeeded in defining the crater.  So I removed most of the paint from that side and just made it shadowy.

I finished off with some titanium white and then white gouache to add some highlights on the top edges and on the face, and that was me done.

This one works for me and is up for sale.  The background sky is amazing – once again it's the people at Schmincke who mix these paints that have to take credit for that.  The face works too, being right on that border of ambiguity between a face and some random shadows that look like a face.  Just as it should be.  If there's anything wrong with this. It's that there's so much empty space, but that what it's like out there.  I could claim to have captured the emptiness of space in this one.

Oh, and someone pointed out in Facebook that the sky background looks like the surface of Mars.  Which makes things even better.  This one can be interpreted in two ways: either as three celestial bodies in space or three dice on the surface of the planet.

Susan

Monday's housework day and BBC2 quiz night so tends not to be a proper painting day.  But after a couple of days off I thought I'd better have a go at something, so did some figure drawing with the inktense pencils.  Today's model is Susan, making her debut.

After putting down an initial drawing with the aid of a grid, I added some colour with the pencils.  I started with just bark and left green and made a special effort today to be quite light with the pencils, looking to get something classy and understated.  It's a thin line, though, between classy and understated and washed out like the England ODI team and, after wearing the pencil marks, it was pretty clear to me that this one handed ended up on the wrong side.

So I put on another layer of colour.  I tried to darken the darkest bits with charcoal grey and then added iris blue, poppy red and Shiraz wherever I thought the painting needed some livening up.  And then I wet the pencil marks, and that was me done.

As always, an interesting little exercise.  The right shoulder and right thigh don’t look quite right but the colours are interesting.  So are the marks.  This looks like watercolour so people will look at those marks wondering how much of their character is down to my control and how much is down to me getting lucky when the paint just did its thing.  But these are inktense pencils and I really have much more control over the marks than you might think.  They're a bit of a cheat code.  Anyway, this is interesting enough to go in the shop window.

Neptune

This is the second in my series of paintings of the planets and today it's Neptune.  There was a question on University Challenge the other week about symbols associated with planets.  One of the symbols was the head of a trident and I immediately called it out as Neptune.  Stands to reason – Neptune was the Roman god of the sea.  Well, that question stuck with me and I decided to do a painting of Neptune from one of its moons with a rocky formation that looked like a trident.  I also decided to challenge myself by trying to suggest a face on Neptune, helped out by some hills in the foreground that looked like a beard and a ring viewed from underneath that might suggest the downward facing surface below the brow.

Colour–wise, it was a no brainier to go for the tundra supergranulators because the methane in Neptune's atmosphere gives it blue and green colours and because it's cold there.  I also used titanium white and white gouache.

There's not much to say about the the technique.  I masked out the edges of the rings, the moons and the planets and spattered on some stars.  I painted the background first and sprinkled out some salt and dabbed  kitchen paper in places.  Then I painted in Neptune and the background moon, then the foreground.  I used all five colours everywhere except for in the sky where I stick to the purple, pink and blue.  The more interesting stuff is all the tinkering that I did afterwards.

The sky didn't need any tinkering and the background moon just needed some white down the left (first titanium, then gouache) to help it show up against the background.

Neptune ended up taking a lot of layers and has ended up darker than I was hoping for as a result.  My problem was that the hidden face just wasn't emerging.  I have up at the point you see here, with a couple of dark blue spots for eyes, two latitudinal blue bands that are slightly darker where the top lip and shadow under the bottom lip would be and a wide latitudinal band that switches between green and pink in an attempt to suggest a nose.  I considered putting a tree on the top of the hill and using it to suggest a nose but decided not to introduce any life to the moon.

The foreground also gave me problems, the biggest of which was that it was too similar a value to Neptune and that there was no suggestion of a beard.  I took a break for a walk in the middle of the painting and got back having decided that the addition of snow to the top of the hills might act as a mitigant, even if there probably isn't any water on Neptune's moons.  So I added snow in white gouache, a much easier job than doing the same thing with titanium white watercolour.  I got a bit carried away with the snow but did notice that it gave the impression of waves in the sea, which could only be a good thing, so tried encourage this.

Finally, I went over the ring with white gouache, giving the near side a pinkish tint and the far side a blueish one.  And that was me done.

I don't mind this one and it's going up for sale.  The sky, including the distant moon, is off the charts.  And the suggestions of the trident, the sea and the face make things interesting, even if the face is too subtle.  Or is it not subtle enough?  I can't tell.

One lesson from this one, though, is that the best hidden faces are accidental ones.  Check out Horsehead Quarry, The Hidden Gorilla and The Magic Purple Tree Only Appears At Sunset.

The Wishlist

No time to do any painting today but with an empty thirty minutes window going begging, I thought I'd create this post.

These are the 24 art books that are currently sitting on my wishlist.  Portraits, figures, landscapes, general drawing, abstracts/creativity.  It's all there.  Consider this a sneak preview of the books that I'm expecting to read and review over the next few years.

Given my preferred media and subject matter and current skill levels, I’d there anything that people think

– is missing from the list that I would find useful?

– is on the list that I wouldn't find useful?

– is already on the list and that I should make a top priority?

Jupiter And Io

Seventeen days since my last watercolour and I'm finally back.  The idea for this one popped into my head while out on my walk yesterday.  I've no idea why I was thinking about painting planets at the same time as I was thinking about the five platonic polyhedra but I was and somehow I ended up mashing the two together.  This will end up as the first in a series of planet paintings but I'm not sure yet whether it will be five planets shaped like the platonic polyhedra or paintings of all eight planets but with various different creative twists.

I started with French ultramarine, transparent yellow and Winsor red as my three primaries, liking the different mixtures of these I could see in my swatches and thinking that they looked right for Jupiter and its moons.  But cadmium yellow was introduced later, so with both a cool and a warm yellow playing important roles, this isn't in any particular key.  Titanium white was also used later along, along with, for the first time, white gouache.  Titanium white still has an important to play in the "titanium white trick" that adds texture on top of artificial looking washes.  But gouache is more opaque, so will give better spatters and highlights that might only need one layer of colour.

To kick off, I put down pencil outlines and them masked out the rings.  We all know Jupiter has rings, don't we?  It’s not just Saturn.  Where have you been for the last fifty years?  Anyway, yeah, I used a ruler to put down all those starting shapes.  I was especially careful measuring out the two biggest octahedra, basing these on a couple of photos I found on the internet.  When I got to the rings, though, I got lazy and just guessed where to put them.  Any draftsman will tell you that the corners of those square rings need to lie on imaginary lines that pass through through two of Jupiter's vertices, which they don't.  My lazy approach has left me with rings that are slightly out of kilter everywhere.  Once the outlines were down, I masked out the rings, added spatters all over and removed any that landed on the planet or any of its moons.  To keep things interesting, I made the outermost ring more patchy than the two more solid looking inner rings.

Oh, while I remember, the size, positioning and orientation of the three moons in the painting were all carefully chosen using compositional considerations.  I just wanted something that looked balanced.  The nearer moon, though, is Io, which has interesting colours.  I'm not going to name the other two.

I started by painting in the starry background.  I mixed all three starting primaries into a neutral colour and put this down while varying the mix everywhere.  I was especially careful to make the background bluer around Jupiter to complement the oranges there.  I might have even put on the odd bit of neat red, blue or yellow in places to increase the degree of variegation.  I dabbed out a little bit of paint in places with kitchen paper to create some cloudy atmospherics.  And then I threw on some salt to see what would happen.  And for once I timed the salt perfectly, too perfectly in fact.  Every grain I threw on must have spirited wings – I May have ended up with more salt texture there than was really needed.

Once the background was down I moved onto the planet and moons.  My plan was to have light coming from the top left, so that the top left triangle in each octahedron was lightest and the bottom right triangle darkest.  I remembered that, next to a sharp edge with light on the other side, the darkest bit of a shadowy face is the bit closest to that edge.  I didn't have too much trouble with the moons, with two or three layers and the titanium white trick being enough to create some interesting objects.  Jupiter, though, gave me some problems.

I wanted Jupiter to be instantly recognisable with its stripes and with the red spot in the bottom right face while also trying to make it look three dimensional.  I tinkered for ages with layers of locally coloured stripes and layers of neutral colours in varying values to create the 3D effect but just wasn't happy.  The longer I went on, the less the yellows that I added looked yellow.  I've had this trouble with transparent yellow before.  It can be a bit wimpy when laid on top of other colours, being seemingly more interested in letting the colours underneath through than in standing up for itself and screaming yellow.  So I pressed the nuclear button (not for the first time) and brought in cadmium yellow for its opacity.  I also used a little bit of titanium white in places to create some lighter blooms.  I eventually got something I was happy with, even if I've ended up with something that's more orangey than the yellow I was after.

Then I removed the masking fluid.  I made a bit of a hash of things, ending up with lots of smudges all over those lovely white rings.  So this was a great excuse to try out the white gouache.  I went over all the rings with gouache, using a paper mask to get the edges straight.  The second ring picked up a pinkish tone from me not cleaning my brush properly.  I quite liked this so made the inner ring blueish.

To finish, I added a white highlight alongside top left edge of each of the octahedra and then, to make the rings more solid, added a grey line along all their bottom edges.  It gave them then a bit of thickness and they looked better for it.  And that was me done.

And this is really not too bad at all.  I went into this without a value plan but it looks as if I did have a plan.  Jupiter and Io are, if anything darker than the background which is weird but it absolutely works.  There are lots of places where dark edges are close to white areas too.  The background colours are also great and, even after adding too much salt, the salty texture also works.  Even those rings that are slightly out of kilter work: their workings is just jarring enough to impart a bit of energy and interest.

This one keeps growing on me the more I look at it.  It's up for sale.

Eric Clapton, 1970

I've had loads of chores to do Sunday and Monday, leaving only a couple sessions available for painting.  So I went for a coloured pencil portrait as I don't feel rushed doing these and am happy to leave paintings half finished overnight.  With my fondness for drawing guitarists, it was only a matter of time before Mr Clapton moved into my sights.  This is based on his pose on the cover of his eponymously titled debut album.  I'm including the year in the name of this painting as I can see myself coming back to Eric again at some point.

I followed my usual methodology for this one, putting down a pencil outline using a grid, marking guitar strings and the odd stray hair with a pointy stick and then applying colour but switching between shapes whenever I needed a change.  I tried to keep the layers of colour as light as possible but may have presses to hard in places at times.  Anyway, let's talk through the six major components.

For the black shirt, I reached for my four colour black combination, applying delft blue, then dark pthalo green, dark red and helio blue reddish in that order.  Then I repeated those four layers, then repeated them again, so there are twelve layers of colour in that shirt.

For the hair and beard I used the same four colours in the same order but with fewer layers.  The darker areas have two layers of each colour; the lighter areas only one.  Both of the sets of layers in the beard and the first layer in the dark hair on the head were applied in small circles but in the subsequent layers on the head I tried to follow the direction of the hair with my pencil strokes.  In those later layers, I also tried to let the individual colours show through more.

There's not much to say about the guitar colours: I just applied unimaginative local colours.

For the jacket, I started with a layer of cadmium orange as this is the complement of the blue that I wanted to end up with eventually.  I added a layer of cold grey II and several layers of different blues.  I incorporated other colours in the most shadowy places and over creases.  The jacket ended up a lot darker than the light blue jacket on the album cover and I tried to lighten it by burnishing over it in white but this has made a coloured pencil jacket look like something drawn in crayon.

The two elements I had most fun with were the flesh and the background.  For the face and hands, I started with yellow across the forehead, red on the cheeks and the end of the nose and green and blue in the lower part of the face.  Then I added whatever impressionist colours I could see in the photo and some dark colours in the darkest areas.

For the background, rather than going with the grey/white from the album cover, I decided to go for something orangey to complement the blues in the jacket.  From some earlier swatches, I identified the most interesting oranges as combinations of either cadmium yellow or dark Naples ochre with either pale geranium lake or rose carmine.  And with some interesting Tedeschi Trucks music in the background, the time felt right for jamming.  So I took one of the yellows in each hand and jammed all over the background in both big loops and little circles.  Then to avoid left/right bias I swapped hands and applied another layer.  This was great fun.  I was feeling like Curtis Holder.  I added two layers of two handed reds the same way.  Then I repeated the yellows and repeated the reds.  Then, just to tone things down a little, I jammed over the whole background with a blue (one handed now) – I can't remember whether it was ultramarine of light ultramarine but it worked.  And finally, to give some earthiness and tu unify the random swirls, I added a layer of burnt ochre in small scribbly circles.

To finish off, I smoothed over everything (except the already burnished jacket) with a paper stump, trying to keep soft edges and take advantage of this paper's ability to make coloured pencil paintings look like old, out of focus photos.  And that was me done.

What I've ended up with isn't my best but I think it's good enough to go in the shop window.  The jacket is the biggest letdown, although the likeness isn't perfect either.  But I really like the colours in the background, the hair and the flesh.  And my paintings are all about the colours.  Oh, and I've captured some of Eric's essence.  I don't know whether he was stoned or just tired when his photo was taken but whatever it was I think I managed to catch it.  I do like it when my paintings tell stories and this one does.

Lumen F In Artgraf

The day's not over and I have gone for one more painting!  While my mind was still in the zone I thought I'd do that second Artgraf painting, this time stopping at the step where I wish I'd stopped before.  The model this time is Lumen F and this is her second appearance on this blog.

So, I started by sketching out an outline using a grid.  Then I covered the page very lightly with yellow, blue and magenta pigment, trying to replicate the gestural sweeps in the pose while also trying to get magenta and blue in the darker areas and yellow in the highlights.  At this point took a photo to show just how little this layer of pigment replicated the pose:

Then I got to the interesting bit.  I applied water to all the darkest areas.  When applying water to an Artgraf work like this, I can't do big strokes because they would just spread the first colour I picked up everywhere.  Instead, I stab in little bits of water and encourage them to mix together.

My plan was to stop about here but I couldn't resist a couple of bits of tinkering.  First I wet some of the mid tone areas wherever thought this would benefit the painting by bringing out the model more.  I was careful to only wet mid tone areas where the pigment already on the page wasn't too dark.  Second, I wasn't happy with the background.  I had some shadows on the floor but nothing else.  It was tempting to wet some of the background, maybe to even negatively paint Lumen's face, but this felt too risky.  Instead I went for wetting in a horizon line.  But I screwed up, putting the horizon lower then the top of the shadow that I'd already put in.  So my horizon instead became the gap between a couple of floorboards and was joined by a number of other gaps, going up to a horizon that was above the top of the shadow.  And that was me done.

What I've ended up with isn't perfect but is good enough to go up for sale.  From a pure figure painting point of view, the best thing about this one is the dynamism.  Lumen is somehow unbalanced and the right arm looks as if it's been quickly thrust out there to stop her falling over.  This imparts movement and energy.  More important to me, though, are the colours and how unpredictable they were.  Not just in the figure either: look at those floorboards!  I had so much fun watching myself wet this painting, never knowing which colours would emerge.  And the undiluted pigments everywhere definitely look better than the background that was wet with kitchen paper in the last painting.  I've discovered another way of using the Artgraf blocks.  It's been a good day.

Luana

The builders have finished work today and I have access to the studio again.  After a break of a couple of weeks, I was expecting my first couple of paintings to be writeoffs, so there's no excuse for not kicking off with an experiment.  And with the last two pages in my cold pressed watercolour block pulling away from the board behind them, the Artgraf blocks are calling.  If I used watercolour on these two loose sheets they'd buckle all over the place.

After reading the Patrick Jones book on figure drawing, I wanted to try out some gestural figure drawing, so I chose a pose by Luana in which I could see tomorrow three big swooping gestures.  And then what I did today was:

– get down a pencil outline using the grid method

– add some yellow, blue and reds with big swooshing gestures, following gestures in the figure but ignoring outlines and swooshing through the background as well as the figure

– wet the marks carefully with a brush in selected places.  I did this in all the darkest places and got something looking pretty good.  I really should have stopped here but instead I carried on.

– wet the marks indiscriminately with a wet kitchen towel, following big swooshing gesture lines in the background and over the figure.

– wet any dry bits left in the figure to give it more presence

– went over again with the kitchen paper making gestural swooshes

– fiddled a little in places, wetting the brush, picking up pigment from the blue and yellow chunks and strengthening bits of the figure

And that was me done.

The thing about experiments is that they never fail and you always learn something.  Today I learnt that only wetting the odd bit of the body might make an interesting painting.  I learned that swooshing with wet kitchen paper doesn't produce good looking marks.  And I was reminded that I really need to apply minimal pigment to the paper with these Artgraf blocks.  As a painting, though, a clear failure.

Drawing Drapery From Head To Toe, Cliff Young – Book Review

And here's the other book I bought this week.  It was while looking around Amazon that iced that I'd never read a book on drawing clothes.  All the folds in clothes in my portraits to date have been based on observation and not on the rules of physics.  So I found myself looking at books on "drapery" and, after looking at reviews of a number of different ones, went for this one by Cliff Young, first published in 1947.  it's a 48–page paperback but drapery feels like the sort of subject that doesn't need a huge volume devoted to it.

There's no real written text to the book: just commentary against all the drawings and photos within it.  And that commentary appears to have been written in hand, albeit in block capitals and easy to read.  When the text is in bite sized commentary chunks, though, the loses something.  Without having the luft available to him to write big volumes of text, the author doesn't  chance to elucidate ideas clearly and unambiguously.  He can just fire out an idea once and if we don't understand it we're stuffed.  And I was.

I also don't like the drawings or photos in the book.  The photos are often figure drawings in red pencil with clothes drawn over the top in black pencil, maybe with arrows pointing to various paces saying pull or crush.  It's all a bit too busy and unclear.  And the photos don't work: there's too little contrast between dark and light for creases to show up.  I'd rather have been presented with better contrasted photos with overlays pointing out creases and pull and crush points.

I don't want to devote any more time to this review.  This book might have been a classic of its time but it's really poor compared to today's books.  I'm wondering whether the Morpho book in drapery might be a better option and have added it to my wishlist.  I 100% regret buying this one.  And that means it scores one palette.

🎨

Painting Portraits In Watercolour, Liz Chaderton – Book Review

With the art studio out of bounds while building work is going on, there's not been much painting action going on lately so I thought I'd use the time to buy and read a couple of art books.  I've just finished this one.  It's a 112 page paperback, smaller than 7x10 inches.  Before you say anything, I have to point out that this is a Liz Chaderton book, so tips are tightly packed in here and it feels more like a 200 page monster.  I bought this book as I do want to start painting watercolour portraits at some point and am looking for the right book to get me there.  I wasn't impressed with David Thomas' book, which I'd heard was the best out there.  Liz's book looked interesting in the flickthrough that she posted on YouTube, so I thought I'd give this one a go.

The book has eight similarly sized chapters.  First up is a chapter in transferring the image to paper.  As well as the grid method, there's talk about tracing paper, carbon paper, an alternative gridding method and light boxes, along with what must be every possible tip on using all those techniques.  Nothing really new to me but I'm already impressed with how Liz can give as many tips in one paragraph as other authors do in five pages.  And, most importantly the message is coming through to me that using a grid isn't cheating.  For portraits anyway.

Then we have three chapters on painting portraits in watercolour.  There's a chapter on monotone, value driven portraits.  Then one that's value driven but with colour, very abstract and allowing the colours to mix on the paper.  And then a chapter on painting in multiple monochrome layers.  The real point is that value is much more important than colour.  When colours are introduced, it's first in an abstract way as a mood setter and only later as a tool to approximate actual colours.  Very clever.  There are seven demonstrations in these three chapters.  Unlike demos in other books, they're described in the main body of the text and illustrated by scattered photos, rather than described in text underneath a load of regularly organised photos.  I honestly haven't decided which I prefer.  These three chapters also include a scattering of the sort of introductory tips that might appear in an opening chapter in other books.  Stuff like equipment, colour theory, brushstrokes.  Somehow scattering them among densely tipped chapters makes them feel like less of a space waster than they would have done if all gathered together into one chapter.

Then we get a couple of chapters on pushing it further.  First there's a chapter on line and wash portraits.  And you know what?  I don't mind this.  I actually welcome it and think it was a smart idea to include it.  It works for landscapes and presumably for figures so why shouldn't it work for portraits?  And then we get a chapter on mixed media.  Slightly less interesting to me but not a killer.  There's some stuff on using pastel pencils on a watercolour portrait that would probably work with coloured pencils or charcoal pencils.  Then some stuff on collages, with a lot of ideas, that could apply to any watercolour painting.  Then a weird idea with ink and gouache but no watercolour – Liz's first misstep so we'll forgive her.  There are five demos in these two chapters which, apart from the one with ink and gouache are 90% about reinforcing earlier lessons and only 10% on stretching further.  So even if I wasn't interested in mixed media or line and wash, these chapters would still add value.

And then we get to the two most tip–packed chapters that I've ever read.  They're as packed as the compact notes that I make on these books after I read them.  First up is a chapter on "special challenges".  It's one huge brain dump of tips on how to paint old people, kids, beards, hair, eyes, eye brows, ears, wrinkles, noses, mouths, hands and teeth.  There's also something about the three bands of colour across the face that I first read about in Colour And Light by James Gurney.

And then we get a chapter on "achieving a likeness".  Actually it turns out the the first chapter on transferring images was all about getting a likeness.  This chapter is about drawing freehand if you don't like the ideas in that first chapter (or if you think they all amount to cheating).  So here we have all the usual rules about how the features on the face relate to each other.  The face being five eyes wide, that sort of thing.  There's also a reminder about perspective and how things move around and resize when the head is moved.  And a demonstration of painting from an upside down photo, a great idea, albeit one that Liz admits we'd have all seen before.

And to finish the book there are a couple of pages of interesting online resources for source photos, artists to check out, etc.

Having read the book, made notes and written up this review I'm feeling knackered.  I can't believe this book is only 112 pages long.  Liz isn't one to waste a word on fluff – she just bangs the ideas out like a machine gun.  It's something worth being aware of.  This isn't one of those books you can skip through, knowing that you'll be able to focus in on the big ideas when they come: there's just a constant stream and you have to be switched on when reading this one.  I tip the chapeau to the author.

Is it the answer to all my prayers though?  Yes and no.  I don't think this is the perfect standalone book on watercolour portraits.  For me, it jumps too quickly into the monotone paintings without making sure that the reader can look at his source and identify the value pattern that he needs to be painting.  I think there are also some important value–based tips later in the book that the reader could do with knowing before starting on the monochrome paintings.  Like how the bottom lip tends to be highlighted and defined only by the shadow underneath.  So, no, not the perfect standalone book I was hoping to find.

On the other hand, this is a brilliant tetris book.  A tetris book is one that fits perfectly with another book to create something truly monstrous.  Remember that Bill Maugham book that I raved about?  If you want to paint watercolour portraits, that's the place to start.  There's no mention there of watercolours from what I remember but there's everything about value patterns and how they appear on the face.  After reading that book, Liz's book is perfect for filling in the holes and extending all those lessons to painting in watercolour.  Obviously better if you already know how to use watercolours and how to draw, but otherwise Bill is the perfect prerequisite to Liz.  Having read Bill's book, though, Liz has left me eager to get started on watercolour portraits: I can't wait to get started.

Because Liz's book struggles to stand alone, I couldn't give it five palettes at first but in the couple of months since reading this book, I'm finding that it's made. Huge difference to my watercolour portraits.  I therefore take great pleasure in bumping it up to five palettes.  Great pleasure because Liz runs a free YouTube channel as well as painting and writing books and I can tell from her videos that she's a genuinely nice person who deserves every success and I still feel guilty about my review of her previous book.  Just make sure you also check out Bill Maugham's book.

🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨

<Edit: if you prefer to paint portraits in realistic colours, rather than impressionistically, I've since discovered a book by Hiroko Shibasaki that would be great for a new watercolour portrait artist.  For someone like me, though, it's Liz and Bill all day long.>