2023: Year Of The Portrait

So that was 2023.  I think I can safely say 2023 was the year of the portrait.

After reading the Bill Maughan book in March, something clicked big time for me with portraits.  I seem to be churning out more portraits than landscapes now: my whole outlook's changed.  I'm even feeling confident about watercolour portraits now!

I've no idea what to expect in 2024.  Everything's so unpredictable.

Happy new year everybody.

Japanese Style Watercolor Portraits, Hiroko Shibasaki – Book Review

I wasn't expecting to be doing a book review today.  The only job I had on my list was to update my swatch reference sketchbook with notes on my newly discovered favourite triple glaze combinations.  And, while waiting for the first layers of colour to dry, I picked up this book and started reading.  And I just kept on reading, just having to interrupt myself every now and then to swatch more paint.  So, now that I've finished it and made some notes, here's my review.

This is a 112 page hardback, quite a hefty feeling book for the price.  The portraits are all of Japanese women or, in some places, kids and the artist is Japanese but otherwise I don't know what constitutes a "Japanese style" portrait.  So not the most helpful name ever for a book but let's move on.  This is really just a book on watercolour portraits, quite realistically coloured watercolour portraits in particular.  I'm new enough to be able to imagine looking at this book as a complete beginner, as well as through more experienced eyes, and I'll try to reflect this in my comments.

We have about 20 pages of introduction, 20 pages on sketching, 30 pages on painting the face and hair, 20 pages on clothing and backgrounds and 20 pages of summing up.  The contents page, as well as dividing the book into five chapters, subdivides it into 48 "lessons", which gives this book the feel of a How And Why Wonder Book (remember them?) and is a good way to ensure that the author always has something to say.

Let's go through chapter by chapter.  We have the usual stuff on gear and some thoughts on what direction to paint the subject from.  Hiroko recommends we use transparent paints, which I support big time, but then she specifically recommends cadmium red and cadmium yellow, which are both opaque and both of which she uses extensively.  That's a weird start.  You always need to have your brain engaged when reading books and be ready to challenge the author in your head.  Having said that, I've seen those two cadmiums recommended elsewhere for flesh tones (by Charles Reid).

Then we move on to the initial sketch.  I found it quite refreshing that the author's emphasis here was on measuring distances and angles and on thinking about all the underlying 3D shapes.  In particular I like how Hiroko didn't give us a big long boring list of rules of thumb about sizes and positions of features of the face.  Just two or three rules and that was all: after that it's down to observation.  It's more "make sure you put the ears in the right place" than "this is where the ears go".  Most of this chapter follows a single demonstration.

In the third chapter, the demonstration continues but now we're painting.  Most of this chapter is a continuation of the demonstration in the previous chapter with the odd interesting tip thrown in.  The demonstration is generally quite prescriptive but there's the odd place wherever author says she only did something because of the way her own painting was developing, so it's not a demonstration to follow blindly.  And, actually, with things like eyes being really complicated, I found it useful to follow a demonstration that chopped the work up into lots of tiny tasks – it made things much easier to follow.  But the highlight of the chapter is page 48.  This page alone justifies the price of the whole book, so we're already looking at at least three palettes.  Spoilers!  Anyway, page 48 has a drawing of a head with four sets of colour coded areas: (i) lit up planes to highlight, (ii) shadowed planes angled away from the light, (iii) shadowed planes that pick up a bit of reflected light, (iv) deep shadows on areas blocked from the light.  Like I say, an amazing page.

Then we have the chapter on clothing and backgrounds.  The clothing bit is really about painting patterned clothing rather than a detailed analysis of drapery and folds but there's an example of a white lacy top with flesh tones showing through from underneath that's jaw dropping.  The stuff on backgrounds is interesting too.  Should they be detailed or empty?  Light or dark?  The answers are all here.

And finally we have the closing pages.  A little bit of advice on painting kids and two more demonstrations with far fewer steps than the one from earlier in the book and, to be honest, without many new lessons for us.

So there we are.  Even though my own portraits are far more adventurously coloured than those in here, there were still lessons in there for me, which was good.  But I also need to view this through beginners' eyes, and I have to say this would make a great introduction to (realistically coloured) watercolour portraits: it smacks David Thomas out of the park.  I personally still prefer the Maughan/Chaderton combination but that may be more down to my colourful style.  Even though I learned something from this book, I felt as if it was aimed at beginners (beginners at portraits anyway, not necessarily complete watercolour beginners) because it didn't ever seem to take that extra step into advanced techniques.  That's why this book doesn't get five palettes but it's still getting the four.  It's an excellent book and a long overdue addition to the bookshop shelves.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Oh, and while I remember, I started thinking about what might be a good book to supplement this one or to just read a few months later.  And you know what?  I'd go for a Charles Reid book.  Either this one or, better still, this one.  Both would take the reader's artwork a step forward from "Japanese style" by introducing them to contour drawing, the idea of including a blue within flesh tone mixes and some ideas for loosening up brushstrokes around facial features.  Or is that me pushing too far?  Caveat emptor.

Glazed Balls

My year end painting hiatus is still on but swatching doesn't count as painting in my book and there's an experiment that I've been meaning to try out for a few days.

Since discovering the Artist Assist App and using it successfully, I've been meaning to give it more action.  But rather than using the same three colours every time, I want to give other colours a go.  It might be interesting to do two or three portraits of the same subject (maybe all from the same source photo, so with the same underlying value plans) using different colour schemes.  If I can manage to do three portraits in parallel and finish in under four hours, this might even be worth trying if I make it onto Portrait Artist Of The Year.

But to be able to do this, I need to have a portfolio of triads ready to use in triple glazed portraits.  And that's where today's experiment comes in.  I identified fifteen candidate triads after restricting my colours to transparent or semi transparent (even in the first layer) and restricting my first and second and layer colours to strainers so that they wouldn't be disturbed by later layers.  For source material I picked a photo of a ball on a table that the app reduced to really simple value shapes.  And then I painted the ball using each of my fifteen candidate sets.  Here's how I got on.

In the first row, I tried transparent yellow as my first layer, followed by Winsor red.  Then for the final layer I tried, from left to right, viridian, Winsor blue (green shade) and French ultramarine.  I already know that the French ultramarine works from the Tracey portrait and it looks OK here.  As an alternative blue, the Winsor looks OK and shows up some interesting green/orange complementary clashes as an alternative to the darkest areas coming out quite neutral looking with the French ultramarine.  The viridian gave me praoblems and looks ugly here after I got the initial consistency wrong and had to lift some paint out and start again.  I think I'll pass on the viridian but the other two look OK, both very summery.

Then we have a cool looking combination of cerulean blue, then French ultramarine, then quinacridone magenta to give purple shadows.  The purple stands out a bit against the blue; maybe this would look better were the darker values more scattered over the painting.

Then we have two warm combinations, starting with rose dore and then Winsor red.  For the final layer I tried viridian and French ultramarine.  The French ultramarine combination looks OK but I had problems with viridian again.  But, putting aside the problems I caused myself by lifting out paint, it seems that viridian results in too muddy a colour over those two reds, so it's getting rejected.

The last two from my main palette of colours are green looking combinations, made up of transparent yellow, then very lean blue, then a darker blue, French ultramarine or Winsor blue green shade.  Both look good, and cerulean on top of transparent yellow is amazing, but I slightly prefer the French ultramarine with its reddish hints resulting in a more neutral looking shadow colour.  Both are fine though.

After that we're onto supergranulators, starting with the tundras.  I didn't fancy using tundra orange or tundra green, so that left just tundra pink followed by tundra blue followed by tundra violet.  And it's a great combination.  The granulation effects are even coming through on what's hot pressed paper - a smooth surface that I picked out today so that I could write on it with fineliners.

Next up are the Shire supergranulators.  With Shire blue being opaque and Shire olive and Shire green being quite similar, I went for Shire yellow and Shire green as the first two layers, then tried out Forest brown and green apatite genuine as third colours.  I guess I could have tried out Shire grey as third colour, but these two dark greens seemed to form a more natural sequence with the first two layers.  The two trios are similar looking and both acceptable.  I might vaguely prefer the set with forest brown as the bittiness of the green apatite genuine seems a bit out of place.

And finally it's the desert supergranulators.  With desert orange and desert yellow both being worthy starting colours, desert grey and desert green worthy darks and desert brown the only mid-value candidate, I had four candidate combinations to try.  Looking at the results, I prefer the grey to the green as the shadow colour as it works better as the third in a sequence - the greens and reds in the forest brown look a little out of place.  For the first colour, though, I'm on the fence.  Desert yellow looks good for a subject in the sun, desert orange looks good for one in the shade on a sunny day.

So I think I'll be keeping a list of these ten for when it comes to some Andy Warhol portrait action:

How To Draw Portraits In Charcoal, Nathan Fowkes – Book Review

It's only the 28th of December and I've finished another of my new art books.  I need to slow down and read a novel or two on the kindle before reading another art book.

Today's review is of How To Draw Portraits In Charcoal by Nathan Fowkes.  It's a 180 page paperback with shiny pages.  Structure–wise, we're looking at about 35 pages of introduction and generalities, 65 pages of specifics and a 90 page gallery showing off Nathan's work.  Let's talk about those three chunks.

So, yes, we have about 35 pages at the front on general stuff.  There's plenty in there about equipment.  I don't mind this as there aren't that many books around in charcoal: it's when every new book about watercolour keeps going over the same old ground that I get grouchy.  There are four "challenges" presented to the reader as a sort of trailer for the rest of the book.  We all need to practice a lot, work within strict time limits, use a limited range of values and train our eyes to look for and see what we need to be able tundras a portrait.  But the most interesting bit to me in these opening pages was a set of five short demonstrations showing us how Nathan works.  An outline in orange coloured pencil, then down with the darkest shadows, then blend those shadows over into the mid tone and even light areas using whatever's handy.  That's useful to know.  Without reading this I might gone over the mid tone areas with more charcoal, albeit with gentler strokes.  There's a small red light flashing at this stage though.  By setting out his demos without outlining his process first, it already feels as if Nathan's not wanting to bother with all the less important stuff.  Why tell us the process when we can watch what he does five times?

We then get to the 65 pages of meat, with chapters on structure, simplicity, values, edges, composition and common mistakes.  I'm again getting that red light about Nathan being a lazy teacher: in the chapter on structure he talks about the Reilly method for drawing the face but doesn't tell us how that method works.  I'm having to add another book to my wishlist to explore further.  Or maybe Nathan's just aiming this at highly experienced artists who know most of this stuff already.  The rest of these 65 pages are better and there are definitely some lessons there.  The places where I learned the most were where Nathan compared his drawings either to source photos or to students' attempts at the same drawings.  Some of the points he makes are so subtle that I'd never have understood them without seeing these examples.  And I'm feeling even more now that this is a book aimed at experienced artists – these are tips on how to turn very good portraits into great ones, not acceptable ones into good ones.

And a quick word here for the biggest lesson I got from the book.  It's one that's easier to understand  if you're a mathematical physicist.  We're shown examples of portraits by students who have followed Betty Edwards and drawn what they see rather than what they thought they should have seen.  They ended up emphasising the difference between light and dark areas within shadows or within the light side of the face.  Instead, the lesson seems to be that we should start by drawing what we think we should see.  Start by drawing the head like an egg and shading it like an egg.  And only after that, bring in the next level of accuracy by making some bits of the light or dark sides slightly lighter or darker than others, but with these value differences not as big as the value differences in our original egg shading.  And then after that, add some tiny details with a pencil.  Like I say, it helps to be a mathematical physicist to understand this.  I've come up with approximate "first order" solutions to equations that get most of the job done, then calculated "second order corrections" that get us closer, and even third order corrections after that.  Not brilliantly explained, I admit.  Nathan doesn't explain it brilliantly in words either, but the examples he shows us get the idea over better than words ever will.

And then the book peters out into a 90 page gallery.  I guess that after reading the rest of the book I can look through these and see examples of Nathan's ideas in practice but that's because I've got a few years' experience under my belt.  But I don't think beginners would get anything from this gallery.  And, to be honest, just a few words under each drawing bringing our attention to some particular feature would have been of value to all levels of artist.

So it's an interesting book.  It's not a great introduction to charcoal portraits.  I'd recommend that artists instead head for the Bill Maughan book on portraits and the Kate Boucher book on charcoal.  Together, those two books would give a solid grounding to someone planning on exploring charcoal portraiture.  The book does have useful stuff in it, though, for more experienced artists and I applaud this.  At some point there will be nothing left for me to learn unless people like Nathan Fowkes and Patrick Jones keep writing books that assume we're not stupid, that we know almost everything already and are only interested in turning very good works into great ones.  So I am glad to have this book on my shelf.  It's definitely worth the money.  Having said that, though, I didn't feel there was enough content in there for me to be able to describe it as a "really good book" (and the extended gallery section doesn’t help in that respect) so it doesn't get that hard–to–earn fourth palette.   It gets a highly creditable three, though, along with a warning that this one is only for experienced artists.

⚠️ Warning!     🎨🎨🎨       ⚠️ Danger!

The Easy Guide To Painting Skies In Watercolour, Stephen Coates – Book Review

There seem to be quite a few books around on watercolour skies at the moment, all of them looking like they might include some interesting ideas.  The problem is that so many of them are aimed at female artists.  I'm thinking in particular of books by Rachael Mae Moyles and Zaeena Nabeel.  Look them upon Amazon and tell me whether a male artist wouldn't feel a tiny bit weird being seen with one of those books.  Look further down the page at recommendations of similar books and you'll see that there are loads of books like this: it's not just skies.  All seems very strange to me.  Oh well.  Their loss.

Anyway, somewhere in there I found this book by Stephen Coates.  It's a 112 page paperback devoted to painting skies.  While I wondered whether it might be aimed at more inexperienced artists than me, I was still tempted, suspecting that this book might still have things to teach me.  It's not as if my skies are perfect.  So I added it to my wishlist and it arrived in Christmas morning.

We have about 30 pages of generalities, 65 pages of specifics (including demonstrations) and 20 pages of closing generalities.  A decent sounding structure to start with.

Let's start with those first 30 pages.  Often I'm bored by these pages, rolling my eyes at the vague musings and all the padding about equipment, but I found this book to be pretty well focussed.  The bits about equipment are mercifully brief.  Stephen recommends using expensive paper and cheap paints.  He gives good reasons for why to use expensive paper for the skies in this book, so rather than saying that I'd go the other way and recommend cheap paper and expensive paints, I think I'll recommend expensive paper and expensive paints.  But there's also lots of other useful stuff in there about how to hold a brush and how with watercolour skies you need to get the paint down quickly, back off while it does its thing, and be prepared for potential fails.

I do like Stephen's choice of colours in this book too.  Cerulean blue, French ultramarine, light red, burnt umber, burnt sienna, raw sienna, lemon yellow and Payne's grey.  Light red is mainly used to create a plum coloured mix with the French ultramarine and I reckon I could do this with rise dore instead.  And I could substitute transparent yellow for the lemon yellow, but otherwise these are all colours that I'm very happy to use.  I'm finding myself wanting to give the burnt sienna and burnt umber some action in January.  It was a pleasant surprise not to see cadmium red and cadmium yellow all over the place in the sunsets.

Talking of sunsets, we then get on to the meat of the book with the six types of sky.  These are:

– plain simple top to bottom graduations

– white clouds

– sunsets

– sunbursts

– stormy skies

– low clouds and mist

I think this is a pretty comprehensive list of skies.  For some of these skies, Stephen describes lots of different techniques but also gives advice on the pros and cons of different techniques: he doesn't hold anything back.  I learned plenty in this part of the book and was especially excited by the choice of colours in places and am looking forward to giving some of these ideas a go.

And then we get to the closing generalities.  First there's some stuff about using clouds to point to focal points and to imply depth. In the contents page of the book, this bit is presented to us as a seventh type of sky, but I see it as a closing generality.  The rest of the closing section talks about artists developing a repertoire of sliders and not being afraid to use the same sky in multiple paintings, which makes sense.  And then we're at the end of the book.  So what did I think of it?

First of all, I see the book's very existence as a positive.  The world needs a book on watercolour skies that doesn't look like it's aimed at Disney princesses.  As for the content, yeah, it's pretty good.  It covers lots of different skies and includes lots of ideas.  Some of those ideas aren’t restricted to skies, as the demonstrations include foregrounds and birds, and there's stuff to learn there too.  I think the biggest takeaway from this book for me personally, though, was a new appreciation of skies.  I've not thought about skies for ages but am now thinking about them as an integral part of the while painting and something to be planned carefully.  And I think I'll be more patient in future, allowing skies to just do their thing as they dry and to not interfere – an approach that I used tongues when I first started but have drifted away from.  So that's a big lesson for me.  And the other big plus, as I said before, was Stephen's use of colours.

Could anything have been done better?  Well, 112 pages is a bit short and I'm wondering whether this book could have been extended to 128 or 144 pages with some stuff about names of types of cloud, or whatever, but that's being pretty pedantic.  And the other thing is that this book felt a little simplistic.  I felt a little guilty reading something that a complete beginner might also find to be of value.  This feels like an unfair criticism, though, as I'm usually a big advocate for keeping things simple so that anyone can understand what's being described.

Anyway, my mind's made up.  This book included enough ideas to definitely worth the money, but not enough ideas for me to be able to call it a "really good book".  So it gets three palettes which, I must remind you all, is a good score.  I think this is one of the stronger three palette books and it may well be possible that I might have given it four palettes had it been around much earlier in my watercolour journey.

🎨🎨🎨

New Books

Happy Christmas everybody.

Unwrapping is over.  I'm now making my way through my job list:

- squash up all the wrapping paper and put it in the bin

- put everything new away.  Beer in fridge, clothes in wardrobe, etc

- send out thank yous

- shower, daily walk and German lesson on Duolingo, although I might skip the German today to be honest

- remove all new books and CDs from Amazon and CamelCamelCamel and add them to my collections in Goodreads and Allmusic

- put up a Facebook post showing off my new CDs

- put up a blog post with any new art books and/or gear

- rip new CDs onto the iPod

Anyway, no new art gear but here are my new art books.  Seven of them, all of them with new tricks for me to learn.  It might take a couple of months but I'll be reviewing all of them here.

Portrait Artist Of The Year 2024 Entry

I've entered for Portrait Artist Of The Year again but this year I'm going for it as a watercolourist.

I've included these three paintings in my entry.  There's a thin line between consistency and variety and I think these three walk that line perfectly:

– the consistency is in how my focus is on getting the values right rather than the colours.  If the values are right then the likeness is there, so why not just have fun with the colours?

– the variety is there in the colours: a set of supergranulators, a simple yellow/red/blue three layer scheme and something more multicoloured but also with some colours that border on looking fleshy.

Now let's just wait and see.

The 2023 Artistic Actuary Video

The 2023 Artistic Actuary video is now ready.  It's too big to load up onto this website but you can see it at https://youtu.be/96MxHz6CDJo

Almost everything from this year is in there.  I've left out less than ten works, so there will still be the odd clunker in there.

The Shard

It feels as if the big year end winddown has started.  This will be my final painting of the year but probably not my final post.  It's based on a photo that a guy called Chris Bristol put up on Facebook of a view of the Shard from his train window.  I was drawn to the photo by all the similar looking acute angles on view.  In my version I've applied some artistic license by using a protractor and making as many of those a does s possible thirty degree angles.  This does mean that the Shard is looking fatter than it is in real life but I'm fine with that.

I uses charcoal today, almost all of it the chunky Derwent charcoal blocks rather than the pencils.  I just became comfortable at some point that the chunkies were able to give me as much fine detail as I needed, which was very little.  Down the right of the page I think that must be the darkest black I've achieved so far.  This was done using Kate Boucher's "shoe polish technique" with a chamois.  And you can probably tell that I used paper masks to get all those straight edges with the charcoal colours.  I was planning on using paper masks to help me erase out some lights in the building for windows but the marks I made with the white charcoal looked good enough to me.  I also varied from the photo in two more paces, making the platform more blurry and adding a cloud across the building.

I'm happy with how this one turned out.  The thirty degree angles definitely tease the eye but it's the moodiness of this one that gets me.  It's perfect for the slow Christmas wind down.  It feels cold outside the train and I can feel myself wanting to get home in the warm.  There are people on the platform but they're all blurry, as befits their status as less important than just getting home.

As I keep saying, my charcoals paintings aren't up for sale yet: I'm waiting to see how I get on with applying fixative to them first.

Tracey

This is Tracey, a friend of the family.  She dabbles in painting herself and gave us. Painting of our dog Ruby last Christmas and it's been at the back of my mind all year that I really should do a painting for her this year.  The problem was that I couldn't find a photo of her, her dogs or her family anywhere so had nothing to go on.  Then yesterday, I found a photo of Tracey, the wife and a couple of others taken in some hospitality room just before a concert at the O2.  So I took a sneaky photo of the photo on the iPad.

I wanted to paint this one in three layered glazes using the Artist Assist App but it took me a while to get things working.  There wasn't enough variation in the photo between different values, so I converted invite black and white and increased the contrast to the maximum.  But there was too much dark tone in there, so I brightened it.  But then there was too much light tone, so I darkened it a bit.  By using a binary chip method I eventually got to a photo that would come out the other end of the app with proportions of different values that I was happy with.

I'd already decided to use yellow as the light glaze, red as the middle glaze and blue as the darkest glaze.  I picked transparent yellow as it was a staining colour, so great for glazing over.  Then it was Winsor red, another stainer.  The blue on top didn't need to be staining and nothing was going to be painted over it, and I picked French ultramarine as it looked better in my swatches than Winsor blue green shade, which was the other blue that I considered.  No other colours were used today and this is in the key of triadic right.

Methodology–wise, it was case of keeping faith with the process, so I:

- put down pencil outlines using a grid, as usual

- masked the areas that the app was telling me to leave white

- painted yellow over all the ares that the app recommended, not questioning anything, even when things felt a bit weird in places

- printed red all over the recommended mid–tone areas

- rubbed off the masking fluid

- painted blue over the recommended shadow areas

And at the end of this I somehow ended up with lot good portrait.  I did do a tiny bit if tinkering at the end though:

- I had to add a bit of red over the left side if Tracey's neck as I'd made it a bit too wide

- I added some very dilute red to bring out the eyebrows and the side of the nose

- I added some more shadows on Tracey's right side, trying to make them look more like strands of hair

And that was me done.

This came out really well and felt really easy.  It looks strange close up but from a distance, it's definitely Tracey, in personality as well as likeness.  I like the Santa hat too, and how the bottom right of the painting looks like flames.  Tracey will be getting this for Christmas.

Artist Assist App

I discovered something new today, thanks to Liron Yankonsky's YouTube channel.  It's the Artist Assist App.  It seems to be a website at the moment rather than an app but the big news is that it's free!  The best way to find out what it does is to go in and explore it, but I'm going to highlight two things here.

First, it can come up with the closest possible colour mixes to what you see in photographs.  I loaded up this photo of John Lydon and all the colours in my main palette, then clicked in the middle of one of his cheeks, to be told that I could match that colour really closely with Winsor red, viridian and cadmium yellow in 4:3:2 proportions.  I can even change the size of the area under consideration if I don't want to analyse individual pixels.

I'm not one for using loads of colours and trying to perfectly replicate what I see, so I'll never be a slave to this feature.  I might, though, find myself skating around a new source photo looking at what colours it recommends in various places and use this to select my three primaries and maybe even the odd extra colour.

And second is the feature that is most intriguing me.  The app can take a photo and create a three glaze painting plan like this:

The first photo shows the first glaze with all the light but not white areas.  Then the second has a mid value glaze added overate top and the last one has darkest values added on top of that.  Somehow seeing all this in computer generated photos makes multiple glazes easier to implement.  It takes away the stress and worry that by the time two glazes have gone down you've forgotten what you were going to do with the third.  This tool makes it ridiculously easy to follow some of the ideas in the Liz Chaderton book on portraiture.

This app definitely looks interesting, even if it's giving off big cheat code vibes.

I've already had a go using the glazing plan – the result is in my next post.

Annual Self Portrait 2024

So at last I've finally done a self portrait in watercolour.  I was in the mood for supergranulators today and picked out the tundra set.

I started with a pencil outline, using a grid as usual.  I dragged a candle gently over bits of my face to create a bit of texture.  I reserved some white highlights on the pupils/irises and in the tear ducts (this really does make a difference).  I also reserved a few white hairs in the eyebrows and spattered some stars over the background.  After the masking fluid had dried and before starting to paint, I rubbed off any masking fluid spatters on my face and torso.  Then I was all set to go.

I started with the darkest colours, in both the big torso and background shapes and in the darkest bits of the face.  This was mainly tundra violet but I dropped all the other colours into the background and mixed some sort of brown for the irises.  I then watered down my (contaminated) puddle of tundra violet to a lighter shade that I used to painting the clearest middle values, giving me the skeleton of a painting to play with.

So after that I just kept adding more colours to the face, wherever I felt they were needed.  I was working from a black and white photo, so was trying to replicate values and not looking for colours.  I did, though, add a layer of green and brown strokes in the forehead, pink in the cheeks and green and blue in the lower face, following James Gurney's advice on facial colour bands.  I added loads of layers.  Watercolour is weird.  Landscapes are easy to overwork by adding too many layers but portraits keep improving for much longer when adding more layers.  I have no idea why.  Anyway, I kept going until I was happy with the diversity of blues, browns, greens and pinks in the face and with the range of values.

After standing back, I decided that the shape of the face wasn't quite right as a result of me not painting up to some very faint pencil edges.  This was easy to rectify by putting on two more dark layers over the torso, each of then stealing a bit of territory that had been part of the face.  And that was me done.

I think this is OK, although maybe a slight step down from last year's self portrait.  It's definitely me in the painting but I have a vague feeling that the eyes are slightly too small.  Otherwise it's OK though and this will replace last year's selfie as my social media avatar in January.

Which still leaves the big question.  Will I be submitting watercolours or markers to Portrait Artist Of The Year?  It's a tough decision.  I think the watercolour is the better painting but the markers might have more chance of being selected for the program.  I still have a month to think it over. 

The Under The Desk Collection

Well, I can tell you that I will definitely be entering for Portrait Artist Of The Year again this time around.  Because, even if I don't have any luck painting a watercolour self portrait, I have this marker portrait collection in reserve.  If I do end up submitting this one, I'll be putting forward the Dads Army Collection as my second piece.

I've arranged the four portraits into a letter X with two of them upside down, just to be different.  I could have created an X with all four the right way up but that felt a bit tame.  And with the green painting looking better than the blue and the red better than the grey, I chose to have the green and red the right way up.

And that's pretty well all I have to say today.  My mind's already racing ahead towards tomorrow's watercolour portrait.

Under The Desk IV

And that's the Under The Desk collection completed.  For the colour scheme I chose the grey markers, putting down some vague value shapes and then adding some loose random flesh colour marks over the top.  I started with the darkest grey in the darkest areas but later replaced this with black and darkened all the values.  I put some yellow in the background just to keep things interesting, making sure this portrait had something that the others didn't.

The portrait is an interesting one, viewed from a higher angle than the others and having a foreshortened face.  It's a decent likeness I guess, but there's something about it that reminds me of Sinead O'Connor.

Under The Desk III

Here's the third in the under the desk collection.  Today The main two colours were my light and dark green.  Just as with the previous two portraits, I threw in some greys and flesh tones.  The greys and flesh tones definitely add something extra to these otherwise monochrome-ish paintings.

My face looks a bit thinner in this one compared to the previous two but I have no idea which is more accurate.

Anyway, one more to come later today after lunch and my daily walk.  I'll be thinking during the walk about what colour scheme to use for the final punting.  All grey, all flesh tone, grey & flesh and brown & flesh are the four favourites.

Under The Desk II

Look, I'm allowed to change my mind, OK?  Yesterday's portrait grew on me and Monday tends to be a short day, so I thought I'd continue with the markers for now and finish the collection before doing a watercolour portrait.  It helped that I got a comment on LinkedIn saying that it was recognisably me but a little scary.  Likeness and a story?  That makes yesterday's portrait a success.

So I continued on today.  This time it's a red theme, with the three main colours being red, orange and pink.  I went for red today in the dark areas rather than black and it looks as if that's worked.  As well as my main three colours, I used the odd grey and flesh colour later, just to bring things back down a bit.

Not much more to say today really.  I'm looking forward to finishing the collection and seeing what they look like together.  I'm planning on doing bit/ the remaining market portraits tomorrow but we'll see.

Under The Desk I

Applications for Portrait Artist Of The Year need to be in by the end of January, so I thought I'd better make a start on the 2024 self portrait now rather than sleepwalking into panic mode nearer the time.  I was in two minds about what medium to use this time round.

Should I use markers?  These might go down well with judges who line to see different media.  Marker drawings are quite quick, so if I was on the telly with these I'd probably come up with a setback three portraits from the front, left and right.  For my submission, I’d anticipate this by submitting a collection rather than a single piece.  To supplement this I'd include the Dads Army collection down as my second submission and I'd not yet decided what to outbid as a third.

The alternative would be to go for a watercolour painting.  If I can come up with a good watercolour self portrait. I’d include John Lydon and Roy Wood with my entry.  But what to go for?

The first thing to do was to take some photos as source material.  To get some dark shadows I had to crawl under my desk to get photos.  I managed to get four decent shots and converted these to black and white and pushed the contrast to the extreme to turn them into decent sources - I need to see a range of values and don't really care about colours.  I noticed that two photos had my head tilting to the left and two had it tilting to the right.  This have me the idea of doing four portraits and arranging them in a 2*2 grid with the lower two upside down and with the four heads forming a letter X.  That would make an interesting work for the judges to look at at the start of the program.

So here's the plan.  I do the four portraits with markers, with different colour schemes.  Four out of blue/black, green, red/pink, grey/black and brown/flesh.  If they look any good, I'll have a go at a watercolour anyway, knowing that I have a marker-based safety net.  If they go badly, then at least I'll have gotten in some practice at replicating what's a much thinner face the it used to be.  Sounds like a plan.

I decided to start with a blue and black painting, using the black marker and the three blues in my collection.  I put down a pencil outline using a grid, rubbed out all the grid lines and then put in the background and the darkest bits of the eyes, nose and mouth using the black marker giving myself something to hang everything else off of, as I always say.

Next I added blues, starting with the darkest one in the darkest remaining shoes, then the medium blue and finally the light blue.  Because values can be darkened but not lightened, I erred in the side of making shapes lighter rather than darker.  That was the end of the first step.

The next step is to add more colour, darkening blues where necessary, in an attempt to draw out a likeness.  So some of the dark blue areas ended up black, some of the middle blue areas dark, some of the light blue areas middle and some of the empty white areas light blue.  At times the portrait was looking too blue, so I used some greys and flesh tones at times to mix things up.  I also used the blender pen to try to soften some of the edges.

It became pretty clear as I was doing all this that this painting was going to be a write off, so I switched to an experimental mindset and tried to see how far I could push things, ending up with something very gothic looking.  I've ended up using far too much of the dark blue colour.  That letter Y on my right cheek is far too pronounced and would have been better in a middle blue, which would have blended better into a light blue behind it than the dark blue can blend into the middle.  And to keep everything in formation, that means that all values should have been brought down a notch.  Maybe I should even have used dark blue rather than black.

All of which means that I won't be submitting a self portrait in markers to PAOTY.  I'll be coming up with a watercolour version instead, even if it takes me two or three attempts to get it right.  Today's portrait, though, was still a useful loosener.  The likeness is there, especially around the eyes.  And there's a big early warning there about not being too heavy handed with the darker shapes that I see in my face.

New Court In Fineliner And Artgraf

I was hunting around on YouTube the other day for demonstrations of people using Artgraf blocks.  What I really wanted to see was people drawing with the blocks and then wetting the marks afterwards, like I do.  And you know what?  I couldn't find anything.  Everyone seems to be happy just using the blocks like watercolour pans.  So I thought I'd have a go myself – it's something I'd not tried until now.

It seems to be mainly urban sketchers painting this way and they like to play it loose, like I do with my dash & splash paintings.  So I chose an ugly concrete structure in Christ’s College and put down outlines with fineliners.  The combination of concrete and already having outlines down on the paper meant that I could be pretty free and easy with both the choice of colours and not having to colour shapes exactly to the edges.  I also liked all the shadows on view and thought that by including these shadows I'd make the painting look brighter.

Anyway, to start with I put down a pencil grid and then put down accurate pencil outlines using a ruler.  This took ages but I could still have spent three times and long on it: after a while I started putting down lines and shapes by triangulation rather than by measuring them out accurately.

After that came the inking stage.  I started with quite. Fine pen, going over all outlines.  I them moved on to thicker pens to put in the more important edges and those that were closest to the viewer.  I used a brush pen to add shadows along the bottom of handrails and in those vents things and then some ugly looking drippy marks down the fronts of some of the concrete slabs.  Finally I added some random textural spits to the concrete using pens of all sorts of different thicknesses.  Once this was all done, I rubbed out all the pencil, which isn't something I normally get to do and which felt liberating.

One thing that doing a painting this way has in common with my usual technique with the Artgraf blocks is that there's a lot of serious work to get through at the start followed by an all too short fun stage.  Because adding colour to this one was much quicker than pitting down the pencils and inks.

I"d already decided that the best colours for a neutral concretely look were blue, sanguine and ochre, so they were the main colours today and this is in the key of orange cool.  Looking at other orange cool paintings, this definitely sits in that room with them.  Magenta, yellow, sepia dark brown and black were also used in places.  After seeing some Artgraf demonstrations I kept my colours really watery and even wet the paper before applying them.  The sky and trees came out perfectly first time using my main three primaries and a tiny bit of sepia in the trees.  I then moved on to the concrete, starting with variegated neutral mixes of my main three primaries.  I spattered on some primaries afterwards, earlier than normal but this meant they just blended in and made the concrete look even more interesting.  Next I mixed a dark neutral colour for the shadows and the windows and applied this.

And then I moved on to finishing touches.  By putting on such a thin first layer, I'd allowed myself the luxury of being able to add more layers.  So I added another couple of layers to the shadows, including dark brown and later black in my mixes.  I needed the shadows to be dark.  I added more layers to the concrete wherever the first layer was looking too light.  And for the windows, I went with a light neutral colour but dropped in all the primaries (including magenta and yellow) to make things interesting.

Finally I spattered on some magenta, blue and yellow.  And that was me done.

This was an interesting exercise.  I'd forgotten how much fun it could be painting on top of fineliner outlines and not having to worry about filling in shapes accurately.  This was actually more fun than my dash and splashes because this hot pressed paper is better than the hot pressed that I'd been using for those paintings.  As for using the Artgrafs as pans, I didn't find them that different to watercolours.  Being a scientist at heart, I think I need to use watercolours with markers on this paper to have something to properly compare to.

What about the final result though?  I think it's fine.  The sky and trees are great and I like the weird colours appearing in the concrete and in the windows.  Looking at some of those brush marks in the concrete at the bottom, there's energy and freedom and that's not just because I'm not colouring up to the edges.  If anything, what I'm least happy about is the linework: I'm wondering whether I should have kept the lines thinner so that they support the colours rather than compete against them.  Maybe next time.

This was sold to a friend who made my day by pointing out that this looks like a platoon of tanks.

Chris Robinson

This is Chris Robinson, vocalist and occasional harmonica or guitar player in The Chris Robinson Brotherhood and The Black Crowes and master of dad dancing.  He's taken me three days on and off: December is just one of those months.  After a bit of cropping I found a good pose with Chris in the bottom left, letting all the space above and to the right of him just vibrate with the groove.

To start things off, I put down a pencil outline with a grid and scratched in a few hairs with a pointy stick.

For the background, I just laid on my usual black with laters of delft blue, dark pthalo green, dark red and helix blue reddish, then a second layer of each in the same order.  After that, I added a layer of mixed reds, yellows and oranges, then one more layer each of one of the blues and dark red.  At this point the tooth of the paper was starting to feel full, so I moved on to Chris and his clothes.  I used similar colours in the microphone and stand.

And for Chris and his clothes I just used whichever colours either I could see in my source photo or which just felt good.  Don't ask me to remember which : I just played fast and loose.  I'm wondering whether I should have stopped earlier before going overboard with colours.  Here's what I had at one point before releasing the handbrake:

Chris was wearing a white hat, shirt and jacket in the source photo and I think I've caught that here.  Whether the multicoloured tapestry of sound that I ended up with is an improvement on this or a worsening I don't know.  I expect different people will have different opinions.

The likeness wasn't quite right and still isn't.  I did try tinkering, searching for a likeness.  One thing in particular I remember doing was trying to raise Chris' right eyebrow higher.  I’m not sure this really worked: you can see a shadow above the eye where the brow was before.  There's also a line under the eye that's a bit too sharp for my liking.

After tinkering came the burnishing stage.  The black background was just flattened with a paper stump while everything else was burnished with the white pencil in an attempt to tone down the impressionistic colours.  And then that was me done.

So the likeness isn't quite right.  OK.  I must have captured something, though, as I can see his brother Rich Robinson in places.  I've mentioned the impressionistic colours and that they might be a good or a bad thing.  But let¡s put all that to one side and talk about what's good here.  And that's the initial drawing: the hand and the angle of the head both came out well.  And both of these contribute to the feeling in the final painting, which I think is its best attribute.  This one's full of emotion.  Chris is somehow both in control of the audience and showing humility to some greater being out there.  Or maybe he's just completely into the moment and the music.  Or am I just saying that I've caught his aura?

On balance, I do like this one.  It's up for sale.

H2 2023 Poll Results

Well, I've had 17 responses to the latest poll and I think responses have dried up.  I'll leave it open, along with all my previous polls but I'm going to post up the results here.  To say the results were unexpected would be an understatement.  I'm shocked by some of these scores and can see there's a huge difference between the paintings that I rate highly and those that other people like.  Painting for fun and painting to sell require me to approach painting in two very different ways.  But here we go…

These paintings got no votes:

Obviously, no complaints from me.  If I was a big fan of these I'd have voted for them.

Then these all got just the one vote:

The Corbomite Manouver Collection (top right) was presented as a single work.  A few portraits of guitarists here; people unsurprisingly aren't keen on portraits of people they've never heard of.  I really, really like my BB King (bottom right) though.  And I thought bottom left was one of my better figures.

Two votes for all of these:

It came as a big shock to me seeing The Good, The Bad And The Ugly coming out this low: I thought they were going to be right up near the top.  And Sir Bobby Charlton was another surprise, getting two votes despite a lack of likeness.

These all got three votes:

The Mukurob (bottom right) and John Lydon (top right) are other two that surprised me.  Especially John, being a decent likeness of someone that people might recognise in the street.

On four votes are these paintings:

Not much to say about these except that, after seeing results from surveys, United Underworld is scoring strongly for a collection of marker drawings and the three in top left are scoring highly for figures, so maybe my figures and my use of markers are getting better over time?

Where are we now?  Oh yeah, which paintings got five votes?

Another high scoring figure.  Good to see the Dads Army Collection scoring highly: they're the top scoring portraits (not a surprise).  I like the Mukurob (bottom right) too but prefer the one that only got three votes.  And as for the one in bottom left, I'm staggered.  I don't like those foreground rocks and considered leaving this one out of the survey.  Just shows what I know.

I really have no idea what's going on now.  Six votes for these:

Happy to see all of these scoring so highly.  Thea in top left is the top scoring figure this time round.

Not many left now.  These all scored seven votes:

The bottom two, in coloured pencil and charcoal, are the highest scoring non–watercolours.  All four seem to me to be fighting over their weight.  I think I just underrate my landscapes; other people like them more than I do.

A little jump to nine votes:

That church at the bottom was one that I expected to see right up near the top; the distillery less so.  But it's a landscape and landscapes score votes.

And that leaves just these three bad boys, all scoring ten votes:

There's one there of Hartlip Church, which always scores highly in these polls, so no surprises there.  And then we have two more landscapes, both of them looking fairly innocuous.  In both of them the sky looks to me like the best feature, so maybe that's what got them this high.  Who knows?

So, yes, overall a set of results that's full of surprises.  If anything, the message coming through is that people prefer my landscapes to my portraits, figures and crazy paintings.  It's hard, though to tell what distinguishes the higher scoring landscapes from the lower scoring ones.  It all remains one big mystery.

Thanks to everyone that voted.  Plenty there for me to think about.