Roy Wood

With one page left in my rough watercolourpaper block and that page starting to come away at the edges, I wanted to do another watercolour today just to get to a good place.

With December starting tomorrow, I went for a Chriatmassy personality in Roy Wood, founder member of Wizzard.  Because I was using paper with a rough surface, I picked out granulating colours in the form of French ultramarine, raw sienna, viridian and cadmium red.  If I can count the viridian as a second cool yellow, I can claim this to be in the key of triadic right.  But what will be most shocking for regular readers of this blog is the starring role played by cadmium red.  This red is an opaque colour, so I only normally use it for garnishing.  It's been years since I used this colour in a starring role.  So how did it get on?

I'm sure everyone can guess that I started with a pencil outline using a grid.  With Roy wearing glasses, I was careful to measure out important turning points within the squares: glasses can be unforgiving if just drawn freehand within a square.  And I spattered masking fluid overall the dark areas, looking to create a little magic.  I didn't use much masking fluid to cover the light areas but did put down some highlights and a few lines down where I wanted sharp edges between dark and light areas.  These edges don't look any sharper than non–masked areas, so I don't why I bothered really.

The first colour to go down was in the dark shapes.  I put down a layer of the blue, red and green, allowing them to mix a little bit on the paper to create some interesting darks.  One thing I probably got wrong was separating the hair into a dark shape closer to the head and a lighter shade further out.  After I added mid–tones, I could see that the contour dividing the two hair tones was much too sharp.  I corrected this by mixing the green and red into a dark neutral colour and putting this all over all the dark areas and the outside of the hair in a unifying wash.  I quite like how this turned out: Roy's looking better in black with hints of blue, green and red than he did in blue, green and red.

My original plan had been to add some mid-tones to the flesh using a mix of raw sienna and cadmium red but Roy was looking so good that I instead mixed a watery colour from the blue, green and red and used this to add a few shadows and improve the likeness.

With the most important stuff complete, I stopped to think about what sort of background I could add.  I didn't want to leave it white and wanted some bright colours to offset Roy's darks, so just used watery washes of the red at the top and raw sienna at the bottom and encouraged them to mix into a graduated orange background.  I sprinkled on a tiny bit of salt in an attempt to suggest snow and to create a second hint of magic (along with the masking fluid spatters).

And after leaving the painting to dry and removing any remaining masking fluid, that was me done.

And I rate this one a success.  There's a likeness, some attitude in the pose, the magic in the salt and the masking fluid, the simplicity of the composition, the contrast between subject and background and some amazing colours and granulation in Roy's silhouette.  This was a good day at the office.  Roy's up for sale.

Suzie's Spot

I've done another painting of Queendown Warren today.  This isa bench that I walk past pretty well every day.  If it's been raining a lot, I go for a different walk instead, sticking to the roads rather than tramping overnight grass, which means a trip to the local farmshop in Stockbury.  Quite often, maybe a couple of times a week, I'll bump into a local guy in his eighties Sittingbourne this bench.  I don't know his name but I do know the name of his dog.  It's Suzie.  She's deaf and almost blind and barks at everybody except me, who she's all over instead.

I saw this as a chance to have another go with the Shire supergranulators.  They're interesting colours but they're so needy!  They need a blue for the sky, so I used cerulean blue.  The greens are quite light and great for rolling hills but hopeless for trees, so I need some darker greens: I used green apatite genuine and forest brown.  They need some red or brown for warmth: I used burnt sienna.  And they need some opaque colours to bring the foreground closer: I used cadmium yellow, cadmium red and sepia.  There were also appearances for tundra orange, titanium white and white gouache.  That makes fifteen colours in all!  It's a lot but every colour was chosen for a reason and it wasn't just to match the colours that I could see (which is a sure fire way to ruin a painting in my opinion).

The first colour down was the sky.  There’s cerulean blue, Shire grey and burnt sienna in there, with some interesting granulation going on.

Next I went for the light hillsides, using Shire blues Shire green, Shire olive and Shire yellow.  I also included burnt sienna to calm the greens down a bit.  I used more of the brown closer to the front and more of the blue towards the back.

After the hillsides came the tree lines.  I used green apetite genuine and forest brown with a bit of burnt sienna and dropped in a little of the other Shire colours.

Then it was the bench and sign,  I found that Shire grey, Shire blue and burnt sienna made for an interesting neutral colour.

After that came the foreground where I started with several layers of stabby, leaf-like shapes in all sorts of colours.

Finally I added the tree behind the sign and the overhead branches, again using all sorts of colours.

And then there came a lot of tinkering including:

- using the titanium white trick on the set of the bench to lighten it and add a bit of texture

- adding the fence, first in white gouache, then darkening the shadow sides

- adding a bit of colour to the overhead leaves with stabby, leafy marks in cadmium yellow and cadmium red and dabbing paint off quickly with kitchen paper so that the opaque colours didn’t overpower everything

- adding more layers of stabby leaf shoes over the foreground, including cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia this time, again dabbing with a kitchen towel to prevent the opaques from taking over

- adding grasses and little hillocks in the foreground using whichever dark colours felt right

- spattering cadmium yellow, cadmium red, sepia and white gouache over the foreground while covering up the rest of the painting

And that was me pretty well done.

I think this painting was a success.  With a little help from their friends I got the Shire supergranulators to work.  My main two niggles are the green shape behind the fence, which I could have done without, and the mess in the top right where overhead branches are indistinguishable from the tree behind the sign.  The green and orange colours work well together as complements.  I'm not a great fan of these green/orange paintings but that's my personal taste and not me doing myself down.  Because I know there are people out there who will love these autumnal colours and the way they complement each other.  What with this also being a local painting, I wouldn't be surprised if it sold quickly but we'll see.

And, what do you know, this one sold within a couple of hours to another actuary.

What Happens In Manchester Stays In Manchester

Yesterday was a day for oil pastels, so I took a look through the box of CDs that I currently have out in the studio, seeking potential portrait subjects.  And I came up with Sir Tom Jones.  As well as being a musical and alpha male legend, he's been the subject of the final commission on Landscape Artist Of The Year.  He was just begging to be painted.  Not being in the mood for beards, I picked out a photo of a young Tom.  I cropped down the photo to a size that would also include his hand on the microphone – the judges on LAOTY have a thing about hands, so I really should include them more often.

I put down a pencil outline using a grid and then added the colour, starting from the darkest shapes in the face, then working outwards.  After trying various colours colours in his hair, I decided that black would work best there, so went over it all in black.  I also made the jacket a boring black with no impressionistic tints, deciding that having both the jacket and hair shapes in black would make for an interesting composition.  Later on, though, I made the hair a bit more interesting by scraping off bits of black to expose the colours underneath.

I had big problems with the likeness on this one.  I eventually gave up on it last night and came back to it for about an hour today to keep searching.  I moved the nose and mouth up and down the face several times, kept widening the mouth whenever it shrunk and added a bit more bulk to the chin.  I kept finding that the hair was too big and had to shrink it back two or three times.  I also tinkered with the eyes but they never really changed.  And eventually I saw that I wasn't making any progress, so stopped knowing that this was the best I'd be able to do.  And that was me done.

And, no, it's not a great likeness.  I can see bits of Sir Tom there but I can also see Engelbert and Elvis.  So I'm not going to name it after Sir Tom but just give it a name that makes it sound like I've painted a random washed out nobody with dyed hair performing at the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club.  It's my attempt to protect my self worth.  Still, there's some good stuff there.  The shirt, hand and microphone are all good and the inventive naming has created a story.  Maybe I'll put this one up for sale.

Looking forward, though, I think my oil pastel paintings need to be closer views if the head (so with no hands).  So many of my problems in this one stemmed from the frustration of not being able to add accurate details in the eyes and mouth because the pastels were too big and clumsy.  But we'll see.  Maybe I can look for poses with hands covering part of the face?

DanM

Since reading the Douglas Graves book, I've been intending to try out some figure drawing with the charcoal. I got around to it today with interesting results.  Today's model is DanM, making his debut on this blog.

Let's address the elephant in the room first.  The pose.  I can see what it looks like now and, looking back at the source photo, yeah, it looks bad there too.  I've no idea how I didn't notice.

Anyway, back to the artwork.  I followed Douglas' methodology, first not using a grid for the initial drawing and second drawing shapes rather than outlines.  Without a grid and outlines, I struggled to get the proportions right.  I think I need to continue using a grid and to just put down light outlines to use as a guide and then fill out the shapes.

I used both the huge charcoal bricks and the charcoal pencils for this one, starting with the huge blocks, trying to map out the biggest shapes, including highlights and shadows.  And I tried to add details with the pencils.  I added a lot of layers of colour, continually correcting both shapes and values.  I did struggled with the pencils.  While I got some facial features out early (albeit not with a likeness) I had problems adding the details.  The pencils (the white one in particular) didn't seem to make marks on top of the charcoal that was already on the paper.  Maybe charcoal pencils work best on their own.  And maybe I need to supplement my gear with vine charcoal.

So, yeah, I struggled with this one today.  Compared to figure drawings in other media, this is pretty poor.  There's nothing exciting or impressionistic about it: all I'm managing to do is suggest cylinders with my marks.  A frustrating afternoon all round really, what with all the dusty names that charcoal creates.  It's early days but I'm not warming to charcoal.  Let's see how it goes.

Roughtor, Dartmoor

Tempting though it is to keep painting portraits and figures, I do need to keep up the landscapes, ready for LAOTY of I make into a pod or the wildcards.  I thought I'd get back into the swing of things with a pile of rocks on Bodmin Moor.  I liked the look of the two hills in the left, so went for a huge sky so that I could fit them in.

With such a huge sky to fill, my mind went straight to sunsets, so I picked Winsor red as my red.  For the yellow I picked raw sienna as I wanted some earthiness in the rocks.  The blue was a close call,  I went for French ultramarine, wanting some granulation but not being in the mood for the grittiness or Mayan blue genuine and wanting better greens than those that cerulean blue tends to give.  Before getting started I checked out my swatch book and tried out the three colours on scrap paper to check that they could give me the colours I was looking for.  White gouache was also used near the end. 

The sky was the obvious place to start.  After doing some tests on scrap paper, I decided that my sky would work in bands from top to bottom of blue, violet, red, orange and yellow.  I thought that yellow in the lower sky behind the rocks would enable them to stand out.  So I started by putting down that basic banded sky.  It worked but looked a bit boring.  So I mixed a neutral colour and used it to add some wet into wet clouds.  The clouds didn't look good, so I variegated them by dropping in blue and red hints.  But that made things worse than ever, so I quickly sprayed on some water, tilted the paper around and dabbed out the puddles with kitchen paper.  I threw on some salt in an attempt to create some magic in the sky rather than to create textures.  And that's how I ended up with what you see here.

My plan at this point is normally to work from back to front but I've developed a new habit while portrait painting, which is to start with the darkest shapes so that I have something there for everything else to hang off.  So my next step was to paint in the shadows between the rocks.  When I was left with just the sky, those shadows and the pencil lines, things were looking really good and I thought long and hard about whether to make this one a snow painting.  In the end, I decided not to and moved onwards.

After that I just worked from front to back as usual.  One think I didn't do today was to replace my water or wash out my palette when they got dirty.  Instead I went into Liron Yankowsky and worked like a pig in shit, managing to come up with some interesting unsaturated colours.  Everything still looks colourful but not as colourful as usual.

I've not much to say about the first layers of paint: the tinkering is more worthy of discussion today.  The hills on the left needed to stand out gibst what was behind them and the ricks and foreground needed to come forward even more than that.  Mist of my tinkering was in the form of extra layers of paint to bring those shapes forward.  Sometimes, when only a slight adjustment was needed, I'd glaze over a really thin watery layer of paint.  I dabbed out some paint with kitchen paper on the right between the hills and t( foreground to create a cool mist and push the hills back a bit.  To farken the foreground, I painted over mist of it by flicking in grasses with the Merlin brush, using all three of my primaries.  At one point I tried adding stones in white gouache but this didn't really work, so I added white grassy flicks with the Merlin and spattered over some magical white spots while keeping the rest of the painting covered.  And I added the odd white spot to the rocks.

Finally I added some birds to create some interest in the sky.  Maybe I should have added them on the left to balance the rocks but that idea felt a bit too diagonalised to me.  Instead, putting them on the right emphasises the hills on the left more and maybe even the light patch in the top left of the sky.  Anyway, that was me done.

And, yes, I'm happy with this one.  The hills, the rocks and the foreground are all distinct from each other and from the background and all three are interesting in their own way.  It't the sky that's the star though.  There are some gorgeous purple tones in there and the yellow at the bottom complements the purple while pushing forward the hills and stones in front of it.  The salt marks in the sky add something too but I don't know whether it's something positive, let alone whether it's adding magic or a chill.  This started off as a painting of a real place from a source photo but the more time went on, the more I painted stuff from my imagination.  Surely that's got to be a good thing?  This one's up for sale.

Joe Strummer

I'm back from the Upchurch art exhibition now and my studio's all back to normal.  I only sold the one painting, The Happiest Days Of Our Lives but, you know, this is a hobby, not a business.   My work attracted lots of interest, and that's the main thing.

One guy liked my John Lydon portrait and we got chatting.  He told me that if I ever painted a portrait of Joe Strummer from The Clash he might be interested in buying it.  I said, without committing, that I might give him a go and he took away a business card with my email address and website on it.  I had no idea what Joe looked like, what with me being a blues and Southern rock man rather than one of those punk rockers but after looking around the internet, it became clear to me that Joe would make a great portrait subject.

I picked out a source photo that was monotone and almost chiaroscuro in that it was all dark and light tones, with just a few mid tones in the shirt.  I decided that I'd do most of this one in a dark neutral colour rather than going for a rainbow portrait, so I picked out Winsor blue (green shade), Winsor red, Indian yellow and burnt sienna, the same colours as I'd used for Bobby Charlton about a month ago.  So this is in the key of orange cool.

I put down a pencil outline first, using a grid as usual.  Then I masked out some highlights on the face, hair, shirt and microphone, including an important white shape on Joe's right eye, and spattered on some stars in the background.  Then it was on to the fun part.

I mixed up my three primaries into a very dark neutral colour and painted over all the darkest areas.  I started with the eyes, nose, ears and mouth to give me something to hang everything else on, then moved on to the background, including hair, neck and the bottom of the arm.  While painting in this huge background shape, I tried to variegate the colour, making it look bluer, redder or even greener in places.  I found myself going over with a second layer to darken things before the first had even dried.  I also added extra layers to the facial features but only after allowing them to dry.  After putting down the background, I put in all the darkest bits on Joe's shirt and between his fingers, a much more relaxing step as the darks were smaller shapes.

Then I moved on to mid tones.  I started with a fleshy looking mix of raw sienna, Winsor red and Indian yellow.  I put this in various places in the face, hand and arm.  I added some water to my mix and added this in places where I wanted a light to mid tone.

Next it was the shirt.  I've not done many watercolour portraits so far but I know the shirt can make or break things.  With a green looking background and some orange looking mid tones, I could have gone for an orange or a green shirt.  It would harmonise with one of those two colours and complement the other.  I thought I'd try something orangey, the idea being that the orange in the shirt would show up as reflected orange light in the skin.  But, no, orange didn't work.  So I mixed up a really thin watery puddle of Winsor blue and glazed this over the top.  It got me to this amazing green colour that harmonised with the sky and complemented the orange on the skin but I could see that the orange in the skin was included somewhere in that green on the shirt.  The limited palette was working the way that limited palettes should.

For a final bit of tinkering, I mixed a greeny neutral colour and used this to cool down some of the warm orangey midtones in places.  At the same time, I made the arm more pronounced by putting another dark layer over its underside but with a very blue bias to it.  I think that without this blue, the oranges and greens in the painting might be a bit boring.

And, after leaving things to dry, removing masking fluid and adding a little colour to some of the white shapes revealed, that was me done.

I'm no Clash fan so can't really tell whether this captures Joe and his likeness but I do know that I captured the person that I saw in the photo.  The best thing about this one is Joe's right eye.  That triangle of white in there is ambiguous.  Is it to the left of the iris or to the right?  When I look at this one from a distance Joe's looking ahead, over the microphone to our right; when I look at it close up, he's looking to his right, straight at me.  It's a happy accident but it's also genius.  And someone on LinkedIn just commented that it looks as if there is loads of sweat flying around, which adds to the energy.  I'll take that thanks.  If there's one thing about this one that I'd change, though, it's that I'd soften some of the edges on the dark and mid-toned shapes.  Too late to do anything about that now as the red and blue that I used were both stainers.

So Joe's definitely good enough to go up for sale.  What I'm going to do, though, is give the guy at the exhibition until Sunday 3rd December to get in contact.  Until then, Joe's reserved but after that all bets are off!

Life Drawing In Charcoal, Douglas R. Graves - Book Review

Time for another book review.  I've been holding back from figure drawing in charcoal be a use I wanted to read this book first.  Well, I don't have an excuse any more because I've bought the book, red it and made notes.  Now it's time for me to share my thoughts.

This is a 176 page paperback issued by Dover.  Dover books always seem quite cheap and I might be being a bit unfair here but there's a bit of me that always expects them to feel cheap.  The sort of books that pages start falling out of after a while.  Well, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that there's no sign that pages are falling out of this one or that they ever will.  It's perfectly acceptably constructed.  On the other hand there is one thing that bugs me.  It’s not that everything is in black and white (which is only to be expected given the subject matter) or that the pages are thin (they're not top top quality but are acceptable and definitely not newspaper thickness).  It's that the pages are a bit yellowy.  It's as if this book wasn't printed off from a word processor type document but that an older version of it was photographed, converted to pdf and then printed off.  Still, this isn't a showstopper - just a minor eye roller.

Contents–wise, the book is divided into a whopping 27 chapters, described as "projects".  A couple of these projects are exercises for the reader, both of them around getting used to using charcoal.  The rest of them seem more like exercises for the writer (i.e. demonstrations).  There's nothing in the book presenting a challenge to the writer let alone to the reader, so they're definitely demos.

Having 27 chapters and needing to include new tips in each of them does mean that this book isn't short of ideas - there's plenty in here.  It all starts off at beginner level with stuff about equipment, mark making and value control, although it doesn't go into anything like the detail that Kate Boucher does in her book.  I won’t list out all the 27 chapters here but pretty well everything is covered.  As well as tips on life drawing in charcoal there are tips on life drawing without charcoal, charcoal drawing generally, portrait drawing with charcoal and portrait drawing without charcoal.  There are ideas here that I'll be incorporating into my Artgraf, watercolour and inktense figure paintings.  There's also an overarching idea throughout the book, which is that figure drawing in charcoal is about putting down big value masses and refining them and not about putting down contour outlines and filling them in with values.  This feels like something that would only work with charcoal as it's a medium that can be rubbed out and pushed around.  It's a medium for tinkerers.

How about the demos though?  Well, the first few felt like they’d been specially chosen to hammer home the lessons in the corresponding chapter.  But the further I got through the book, the more they seemed like a set of demos that was disconnected from the rest of the book.  So many things were happening in each of the demos that the little steps that matched the chapter were lost in the crowd.  That doesn't mean I didn't like them though.  It just meant I felt as if I was switching backwards and forwards between two books: one of tips and one of demos.  The demos themselves were actually really good.  They're worded as demos for a start and not as instructional knitting patterns.  And all of them include loads of corrective steps where the author tells us what he wasn’t happy with and how he changed things.  If there's one thing I like to read about in a demo, that's it!  And all of the demos, while reinforcing the messages about (i) drawing tonal areas rather than lines, (ii) starting at a high level and gradually refining the drawing all over and (iii) correcting earlier errors, were all different, with slight changes to style every time.

So all sounding pretty good.  I find myself wanting to give this one three palettes for two reasons.  One of those is the yellow paper.  The other is that the author's passion doesn't come through.  I know how he wants us to draw but I can't hear his voice coming through and you'll know if you've read a few of these reviews that I do like to feel some sort of connection with the author.    But these feel like quite petty complaints.  I'm going to have to go with four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

InnaBG

I'm back on the Artrafs today, aware of my promise from last time to hold back on the blue and not make the darks too dark. So here goes.  It's a debut today for InnaBG as model.

After putting down the pencil outlines I drew on the colour the blocks.  I wanted to make sanguine and ochre the main two colours, so started with sanguine in all the midtone areas and the few dark areas.  I then added ochre on top of the sanguine, overflowing the sanguine into the white shapes in places to get a 3D effect.  So on the edges of Inna's upper arm, there's both sanguine and ochre but move towards the centre line of the arm and there are areas of just ochre.  After these two colours, I added sepia in all the darkest places and some blue in the very darkest places.  Then I added some magenta in the reddest of red places and a little bit of yellow in the sunniest spots.  And I stopped there, being careful to leave a lot of lost edges down Inna's right arm and leg.

After that I added the water, hopping around and keeping the brush clean.  I recorded this stage on video and it can be seen on YouTube here.  And after rubbing out what pencil marks I could still see, that was me done.

These paintings are getting better.  Cutting back on the blue and choosing a source photo without too many darks definitely helped.  The lost edges work well and re something I need to persist with.  On the other hand, there's a who shape down Inna's back just to the left of her backbone that I'm not keen on.  I would put on more pigment but second layers of Artgraf haven't really worked for me so far, so I'm sticking here.  Inna's good enough to go in the shop window.  Progress has been made today.

Ameeka

Back on the Artgrafs today, and I'm painting Ameeka for the first time.

I thought I’d try replicating the success of Thea 5 by using the exact same colours again.  So I started with brown in the darkest places, then added sanguine, magenta, yellow, ochre and blue wherever I fancied.  In the case of blue, that meant all the shadowy areas.  I decided later on to draw in some outlines and to add some colour to the background.  I started with a yellow background on the left and black on the right to try to contrast against the body but ended up throwing some other colours too.

To wet the colours, I did my usual thing and dotted all over the place rather than brushing over areas, which does exactly the opposite of mixing colours.  And there was a big surprise as usual, with the colours looking nothing like they did in Thea 5.  Maybe I just didn't include enough of the red or the sanguine.

And there's something else there that I'n not overly fond of either: the choppiness of the brush marks.  The marks on the body are entirely down to me - I must have been drawing with the corners of the blocks (as opposed to the edges) too much.  In the background, though, I had a problem with the black block.  It must have has some sort of tiny pimples nearby corners because I couldn't draw with the edges without creating the sort of lines I get when drawing with corners.  And I was just too lazy to smooth down the blocks to correct this.

While this isn't my best Artgraf painting I still think it's good enough to go in the shop window, so there.

For my next Artgraf figure, though, I'll be changing my strategy when it comes to choosing a subject.  Rather than looking for photos with the biggest differences between shadowy teas and highlights (which normally make for great paintings) I'll be looking for more mid–toned photos.  That way maybe I'll not feel the need to include so much blue in the shadows.  And, whisper it, maybe even leave empty white areas on the body like I do with inktense pencil figures.

H2 Artistic Actuary Poll

It's time for my next art poll.  After eliminating a load of clunkers from my last six months of output I'm left with 51 works, which is about the right sort of number to include in one of these surveys.  If you have, what, three minutes to spare to vote at some point, it would be great to hear your views.

You'll see 51 works and all you need to do is highlight the ones you like (as many or as few as you want) and click on the submit button.  The 51 will come in two batches: 41 landscapes and portraits in the first batch and 10 naked figures in the second.  After responding to the first batch you'll be given the opportunity to skip the second if that doesn't butter your parsnips.

The poll is at https://poll.app.do/h2-2023-artistic-acruary-poll but please don't don't click on the button to start the survey unless you're ready to vote. If you look at the question but don't vote, it still costs me one of the votes that I'm allowed to see for free.  Cheers.

The Corbomite Manouver Collection

And here they are, all together.  Spock, Kirk and Scotty.  None of them brilliant individual paintings but as a set of three I think they look great together.  They're up for sale but only as a setback three.

These three painting collections with my three supergranulation sets and subjects that have clear links to the three colour schemes (whether that's through climate, shirt colour, personality or whatever) need to become a semiregular thing.

First Officer Spock

I know I said I might not end up completing the Corbomite Manouver Collection but after putting Kirk and Scotty alongside each other I could see how they complemented each other and how the combination was stronger than the sum of its parts.  So I cracked on today with the third and final painting in the collection.  Because this painting was to be created using the tundra supergranulators, I wanted to paint somebody in a blue shirt and picked Spock.  I thought he'd be easier to paint than the wrinkly Doctor McCoy and I had a great source photo of Spock with dark facial planes and bright highlights.

So I started with a pencil outline, using a grid.  I found that I didn't need to do as much measuring of positions of landmark points within squares as I usually do: many of the features seemed to lie on the edges lf squares or slap bang in the middle.  I spattered on some masking fluid stars, reserved some directional highlights in the hair and some seriously big highlights on the face and ear.  One thing I forgot to do today, though, was to remove any spatters from the face and shirt before starting to paint after the masking fluid had dried, so there's the odd rogue star in there.

I started painting with all the detailed darks to give me something off which to hang everything else.  So that's the line between the lips, the nostril, the irises, shadows along the top of the eyes, eyebrows and shadowy bits in the ears.  All of these were painted in with tundra violet, the darkest colour in the set.  I didn't paint the sky, hair or collar at this stage, despite the plan being for these to also be dark.

Next I moved on to the face and added in all the mid tones with Tundra pink, green and orange, variegating between colours while trying to keep the cheeks pink and to include impressionistic greens, pinks and oranges wherever I could see them in the source photo.  Once these were down, I added in some tundra blue to create mid to dark tones wherever they were needed.

This shirt is mainly tundra blue with creases added in the green and violet in places.  I ended up adding this layer twice.

And then there's the sky, the hair and the black collar.  Most of this is tundra violet but there's the odd bit of pink, blue, green or orange that's been dropped in.  I found the violet wasn't as dark as I was hoping for so I went over everything with a second layer of the same colours but with the violet very dry, almost direct from the tube.  I'd normally not separate the hair from the sky here, as both are dark, but today I thought I'd make the hair just that tiny bit darker to make it stand out and to distinguish Spock from Scotty.  And, as you can see, I added some salt to the sky.

As usual, I kept coming back to the face, tinkering around looking for a likeness.  I don't think that tinkering with watercolour portraits is as bad as tinkering with watercolour landscapes.  In fact it's almost essential.  And after letting it all dry, removing the masking fluid and hoovering up all the crumbs, that was me done.

I guess this one's not too bad.  Just like with the other two in the collection, the likeness isn't quite there but it's clear who it is and there's some personality coming through.  The supergranulators are creating some great effects on Spock's cheek, chin and neck – probably the best supergranulation effects in this collection.

So let's see what the collection looks like all together…

Venus And The Petrova Line

I'm back on the planets again and today it's Venus.  It took me a long time to come up with an idea about how to make a painting of Venus a bit offbeat.  But I was reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (the guy who wrote The Martian) and Venus came into the plot at some point when scientists spotted the "Petrova line" of fast moving radioactive particles connecting the sun to Venus.  If you want to know more, you'll have to read the book.  If you enjoyed The Martian, you'll probably enjoy this one too.they both have that Apollo 13 vibe of having problems to solve miles away from Earth with access to limited tools and materials.

For colours I chose Indian yellow and Winsor red for their fieriness and French ultramarine because I didn't trust the Winsor blue green shade to not dominate.  I also used hematite violet genuine to add some bittiness.  If I classify this as a warm red, I can claim this painting to be in the key of orange warm: warm versions of all three primaries.  Titanium white and white gouache made cameo appearances towards the end.

Today I masked out the edges of the Petrova line itself and the big drip shapes near where it touches Venus.  I didn't mask the edge of Venus as I trusted myself to paint the starry background around it.  And I spattered stars over the background: lots more stars than usual.

For the starry background, I started with a variegated but neutral mix of all three primaries with bits of individual primaries dropped in in places.  I went over everything in the same style as it was drying, so there are actually a couple of layers there.  I sprinkled on what I thought was a tiny bit of salt at the end, mainly around Venus and the Petrova line but was clearly more heavy handed than I thought.

Then it was on to the planet, where I used all three primaries, along with the hematite violet whose bittiness is intended to portray whatever constitutes the mattering the Petrova line.  It took three or four layers of paint and some dabbing with kitchen paper to get right but I eventually got to something looking spherical with clouds along longitudinal lines.  Titanium white was used here at some point to lighten the left side of the planet to help it stand out against the sky – just the usual titanium white trick of painting over a watery wash and dabbing it off with kitchen paper.

Finally, it was on to the Petrova line and the drops after removing loads of masking fluid.  I started with a mix of Indian yellow and hematite violet along the middle of the line and generally everywhere away from the edges.  This colour had to be carefully mixed to allow both the fieriness of the yellow and the bittiness of the violet to show through.  Once this was down, I filled out the up facing edges with pure Indian yellow and the down facing edges with an orange that was heavy on the Winsor red.  In a few places that felt like they should be more shady, I used the blue instead.  And after rubbing off all the masking fluid spatters from the sky, that was me done.

And, while what I've ended up with isn't a masterpiece, it's interesting enough to earn its place in the series and to be put in the shop window.  I like how it's unclear whether the Petrova line is a stream of matter or an arm with a hand on the end.  If you want to know what it is, read the book.  I also like how the salt and some spillages of planet paintings space have created some sort of cloud around the planet, adding more mystery.  And that's about all I have to say really.  Two more planets to go now: Earth and Saturn.

Mick Fleetwood

You know what?  I did end up finding a photo of Mick Fleetwood that would make a great portrait.  It was a pretty monochrome photo and was close to being a chiaroscuro photo, with just white and a dark colour everywhere.  Add in the expression on his face and it was just asking to be painted in watercolours with all the focus on the values and the colours just allowed to do their thing.

For colours I picked French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta straight away.  They're not just my favourite single pigment colours, they also mix to a great purple.  The yellow was a close call between transparent and Indian yellows.  I went for transparent after looking at the greens and oranges that the yellows could coax out of my blue and red respectively.  I also thought I'd give the viridian a workout.  If I call the viridian a second cool yellow (pushing it, I know), I can claim this was painted in the key of purple cool.

As usual I started with a pencil outline, using a grid as a guide.  5x7 square grids work for me in all my media.  Once the outlines were down and the grid lines erased, I masked out a few white areas that were small or important enough that I couldn't risk trusting myself to leave white when painting over the wash of colour.  This most notably included the whites of the eyes, highlights on the pupils and the pattern on the scarf, although I also reserved the odd highlight.

I wanted this to be mainly in white and a dark value but I wanted more middling values on the top left cymbal, on the scarf and in a few other places.  I guess I could, and probably should, have put a light wash over all the middle and dark values and then come back afterwards to darken the dark areas.  But I didn't want to use too many layers in the dark areas (but read on) and was worried about whether I'd be able to remember whether boundaries were between middle and dark values if I just painted over them.  So instead I started by putting a layer of yellow over the middle values so that I would always be aware of where they were.  I added some other colour wet into wet  into the cymbal to give it some life.

For the dark areas I just painted on whichever of my four colours felt right at the time, although I restricted my use of yellow to orange and green mixes with my other colours.  That's one huge dark area to paint and I found at times that I was leaving hard edges to my painted areas before reaching the boundaries of the shape.  Whenever this happened I found myself trying to rescue things with water or more paint.  The end result was that I did end up with more layers of paint on the dark areas than I'd originally planned.  It meant that the dark areas were less saturated than expected, so more neutral rather than rainbowy.  Was that a good thing or a bad thing?  I'm not sure.  Liz Chaderton would probably say bad and Liron Yankonsky good!

I was determined to keep Mick's scarf in middle values, so painted over the yellow with a mix of thin blue and red glazes, allowing the yellow to shine through.  And there was a bit too much white on Mick's sleeves so I drybrushed in a neutral mix of colours to break them up.  I sprinkled on a little bit of salt in places, not expecting much action.  And, after letting it all dry and rubbing off all the masking fluid, that was me done.

And what I've ended up with isn't too bad.  While the likeness isn't perfect, it's unmistakeably Mick.  I expected the eye to be drawn towards Mick's eyes but instead I find my attention getting dragged back to the scarf every time.  Which is a good thing because the scarf is the best thing about this painting for me.  And somehow that scarf screams Mick Fleetwood and increases the likeness.  The dark values didn't end up as colourful as I'd intended but I do like how it's come out and there's some interesting granulation in there and a few cauliflowers.  Mick's going in the shop window.

Krys

Still not feeling the watercolours so today's an Artgraf day.  It's also a day of experimentation because I've bought a hot pressed watercolour block to use with the Artgrafs.  I've found that on cold pressed paper the Artgrafs granulate too much for my liking, leaving things looking quite spotty.  So I thought I'd try them out in the smoothest watercolour paper there is.  I've used hot pressed paper before, for dash & splash paintings but the 100% cotton Arches Aquarelle paper feels like a huge step up in quality compared to the paper I was using for those.

Today's model is Krys, making her debut on this blog.

I used a block to put down a pencil outline to get me started.  Then I put down loads of colour.  Yeah, this paper was feeling really good.  This is what the painting looked like before adding water:

And you can see that I'd already screwed up at this stage.  I was just jamming away, gering I to the music and enjoying myself without noticing that the photo I was working from was a different one to the one that I'd used for the pencil outline.  I mean, just look at that blue line that's presumably a backbone.

So, this obviously isn’t going to end up as a painting good enough to go in the shop window but let's carry on.  I added the water next, dotting in little bits of water and washing my brush between each dot.  Once again, the paper felt great, being smooth enough to let the blobs run together.   I even ended up with cauliflowers in places, which is nothing short of amazing for what's actually (I believe) a graphite-based medium.  Here's what I ended up with:

Yeah, that backbone is ugly but this was a day for experimentation and I've discovered that this paper was made for the Artfrafs.  Everything just works.  I usually cause myself problems by putting on too much colour and thought I'd done that today but this paper even manages to solve that problem, even allowing the excessive colours to shine.

After letting the painting dry, I tried drawing in more colour to move the backbone, plus a bit more colour in places (in particular what I thought was a tiny hint of blue on the left).  The final version is at the top of this post.  The backbone still looks wrong and I was overzealous with the blues so this isn't going in the shop window.  But the experiment was a success and, going forward, the Artgrafs will be much easier to use.

Fame

I was feeling watercoloured out today and in the mood for a different medium, so went for the oil pastels.  I wanted to draw a portrait and was short of ideas so looked through the box of CDs under my desk for inspiration and came up with the idea of painting Mick Fleetwood.  I found a photo of Mick that would make a great watercolour subject and out that to one side for another day but no photos that were screaming to be painted in oil pastels.  Except that I saw a photo of Mick with Stevie Nicks with a big headline talking about how Mick had more problems with cocaine than Stevie did.  Anyway, Stevie in the photo had dark circles where her eyes should have been, making her look like a panda.  It was those panda eyes and the opportunity to use sgraffito on the hair that made me choose Stevie as subject.

As usual, the pencil outline went down first, using a grid.  One good thing about using oil pastels is that I don't need to rub out any pencil lines - they just get buried underneath all the colour.

For the hair, I started by drawing in loads of impressionistic colours, using most of the colours available to me.  I rubbed them all in with a finger and then felt the time was right to head out for my daily walk.  When I got back, I put more colour over the top, following the hair contours, most of it white but also some yellows and maybe raw sienna.  I smoothed out this second layer of colour a little bit, then scraped out lots of hair shapes with a scalpel, revealing the colours underneath - this is the technique of sgraffito.  Later I went over the hair with more lines and added some rogue white hairs.  If any hairs looked too sharp, I smoothed them out a little with a finger.

For the face, I followed my usual methodology of trying to mix at least three colours together everywhere.  So I filled in areas with dabbed spots of colour (at least three colours everywhere)  and then smoothed /mixed them with my fingers, trying to shape the face at the same time.  I added several layers of colours this way, generally alternating between crazy impressionistic colours and local colours like white and the pinkish English red.  I guess the lips were an exception - there are only reds, browns and white there.  Rather than leave the eyes as black holes, I added the barest hint of irises somewhere in the darkest areas.

I've not much to say an out the remaining three shapes.  They've all ended up quite muddy, which is a shame but not a disaster.  The thing worth mentioning here is that when I first decided to stop painting, the two areas at the top were quite saturated colours, mainly delft blue.  They just didn't look right and distracted from the rest of the painting, so I muddied them up in an attempt to match the dark shape at the bottom and things looked better after that.

I've finished up with an interesting painting. It doesn't look much like Stevie.  If anything, I can see more of Christine McVie in there, and maybe some Brian Connolly.  But what I've ended up with is a big contrast between the brightly coloured hair and the tiredness in the face behind it.  I'm going to call this one Fame because that's what it's about.  But is it saying that fame is all about putting on a facade that is totally separate to the person behind it, or is it talking about the price of fame?  Well, that's up to the viewer to decide.  Sometimes picking the name of a painting can turn it from a failed portrait into a deeply moving comment on 21st century society.  Now that I've chosen the name, I'm very happy with this one.  It's up for sale.