Amy Winehouse

I heard some of the late Amy Winehouse's music the other day.  I'm guessing it must have been a question on either Only Connect or University Challenge as I don’t listen to the radio or watch much TV.  But it was hearing this music that made me add her to my waiting list of portrait subjects.

I wanted to paint Amy in three layers and the last layer definitely needed to look black, so that narrowed down the possibilities.  I saw that my first colour would be covering a lot of the painting in its own so picked my red colour scheme as its first colour felt like the best option out of all the first colours on the shortlist.  So the colours were rose dore in the first layer, Winsor red in the second and French ultramarine in the third.  As you'll hear below, hematite violet genuine and white gouache also ended up making appearances.

As usual I put down a pencil outline using a grid, then reserved the whites with masking fluid and put on the three layers, waiting for everything to dry between layers.  I had three photos that I put through the Art Assist app, one with a 6*8 grid, one with a 3*4 grid and one with no grid.  It was only when I was partway through the painting that I realised that the value plans for the three paintings were different and that I'd been mixing them up.  From that point onwards I tried to work smarter, picking out the best elements from the three different plans while searching for a likeness.  When I saw that one of the plans included highlights in the eyes I added these with white gouache.

To make the final layer interesting, I added a layer of hematite violet on top of the French ultramarine before it dried, then charged in some dryish random spots of French ultramarine and hematite violet and sprinkled on some salt.  It's made that layer less uniform than it might have been otherwise and resulted in an interesting light bit in Amy's hair above her left eye.  And I do want to use up all the hematite violet in my palette as I have a tube of potters' pink ready to replace it as my oddball granulating mixer colour.

For finishing touches I spattered on some Winsor red and French ultramarine in the background and tried to get a better likeness by using French ultramarine to make some of the third layer shapes bigger in places.  And that was me done.

As for the final painting, it's definitely Amy, although the likeness is more evident from a distance than it is close up.  There may be a bit of vulnerability in there that I've captured too.  And the black colour resulting from the three layers and the introduction of hematite violet and salt to the final layer is just right.  Amy's up for sale.

And if I might be permitted a bit of shockjocking, I don't think anyone can call themselves an artist if they've never painted Amy Winehouse.  I'm just glad I meet that criterion now.

More Coloured Pencil Solvent Testing

After yesterday's late night fun, I kicked off today with three more experiments with coloured pencil solvents.

First, I had an overnight thought about the way Neil McCarthy came out quite granulated after being blended.  Could this have been because I was using cold pressed watercolour paper, which is a bit grainy?  Would the solvents work better on something smoother like hot pressed watercolour paper or cartridge paper?  When I first started with the coloured pencils, I was using cartridge paper but found it a bit too thin for my liking so moved on to the Seawhite Of Brighton watercolour paper.  So I looked through my supplies and found some old swatches on cartridge paper.  These are from when I first started out with 36 colours.  I have 60 colours now, so no longer use these swatches.  Take a look at this:

I don't have a photo of the original swatches so this will have to do.  The top row was blended using a blender pen and the second row using the blending medium.  The bottom two rows have been left untouched so you can see the difference.  The blending pen has worked brilliantly, making the pencils look very much look like paint.  The blending medium has less of an effect, leading to something that's somewhere between pencils and granulating watercolour.  It may even grey the colours slightly, although they're starting to look. Better as they dry.  Not displeasing.

Something that I said I wanted to do last night was to try out the blender medium on a smoother, less scratchy coloured pencil painting.  So that's where I went next, starting from that coloured pencil painting of Jen H with the oversized left hand.  Here's what happened:

The before painting is on the left, after on the right.  I used the blender pen in Jen's lower right arm and the blender medium everywhere else.  The pen again looks slightly more effective than the medium, at least on this watercolour paper.  But both solvents definitely work better on a smooth painting than on a scratchy one.  That's the big conclusion.

Which all begs the question, how would the solvents work on a smooth painting on smooth paper.  Sell, I did three coloured pencil paintings on cartridge paper before moving on to watercolour paper.  And I decided that the Sam Allardyce portrait was the one that had the most potential to benefit from blending.  So I went for it:

I used the blender pen on Sam's eyes, ear, nostrils and mouth and the blending medium everywhere else.  Except on his shirt and tie, which I forgot about.  Let's talk about the blender pens first.  They worked brilliantly again.  Whether I'll ever use them for a whole painting, I don’t know.  I don't know whether the lens themselves have enough capacity, let alone whether I have the patience to use them over large areas.  The medium also does something again.  It works better over the smoothest areas and those with more colour on the paper: the bright bit in Sam's forehead is the highlight in more ways than one.  I also like what it's  done to Sam's jacket, though, making the colour more intense while still looking like coloured pencil.

So here are my thoughts:

- blending works better on cartridge paper

- blending works better when there's more colour in the paper

- blending works better on less scratchy paintings

- I'm not going to apply blender to any of my coloured pencil paintings that are in watercolour paper

- I'm not so thrilled with the results that I'm going to invest in some thick cartridge paper for my coloured pencils

- I will, though, do a couple of coloured paintings on the thinner cartridge paper that I already have and blend them and one of these will probably only use the blender pens

- I'll also experiment on hot pressed watercolour paper (that's the smoothest there is)

- if these experiments on smoother paper work, then I'll invest in more medium and/or blender pens, otherwise I'll stick to using coloured pencils for grainy looking paintings on cold pressed watercolour paper.

And one more thought.  I'm having to keep a window open while this solvent dries.  If blended coloured pencil paintings become a thing, they (like charcoal paintings) will become a summer job.

And with that, I'm hanging up my lab coat and planning the next watercolour painting

Testing Coloured Pencil Solvent On Neil McCarthy

It's been a day for experimentation today.  After reading the Alyona Nickelsen book, I thought I really should give solvents a go with coloured pencils.  But rather than using the powder she's so keen on, which would have meant me also having to buy aerosol fixatives and working outside, I thought I'd try some other ideas.  So I bought some coloured pencil blender pens and a small bottle of pencil blending medium.  To test them out, I picked out what's probably my worst coloured pencil painting to date, the portrait of Neil McCarthy.

I started with the pens, blending over the eyes, eyebrows and mouth.  I guess there's a little blending there but it's hard to see with it being over such small areas.  So I moved in to the rest of the face, starting in the top left of the forehead.  And I got bored pretty quickly, so moved on to the solvent.  I started applying it with a small brush but again got bored and moved on to something bigger.  And I eventually covered the trace, then the shirt, hair and background.

And the results?  Well, something has changed.  I guess it's looking more like paint and less like coloured pencil but the change isn't as big as I was hoping for.  If anything, the granulation I can see in the new version makes this look like it was painted using the Artgraf blocks.  Some of the brightest, yellow bits in Neil's face still look too bright - there's not been much reversion to the mean in the values.

So not a resounding success, but does that mean I was doing something wrong?  Was I working too fast?  With too big a brush?  With too much solvent in the brush?  Too little?  Or was my starting painting just a bit too "scratchy" for the solvent?  And what about the pens?  Judging by the top left corner, they may be better at blending the colour than the solvent was.  Or, again, is that just down to the pens working on a smaller scale?

So many questions.  I'm going to have to keep exploring.  Maybe with another old painting.  Or maybe on a new painting, although if it looks brilliant before any blending I'm leaving it as it is!

Ginger

A late start today because I've been reading Daniella Brambilla's book on figure drawing (review coming soon).  Daniella did, though, give me an idea that I wanted to try out today.  It was a combination of gesture drawing and contour drawing.  Today's model is Ginger, making her debut and I used the Artgraf blocks..  And this is very much an experiment - I went into this one expecting to fail but hoping to learn something.

So the idea of this one is to first put down a really fast gesture drawing.  We're talking spending 10-15 seconds on it and that time disappears telly quickly.  I cheated slightly by marking down the edges of a 3*5 grid to help me get things roughly right but otherwise this first step was just thrown down with little thought.  I probably took more like a minute in the gesture drawing because I came back adding blues and yellows over the light and shadowy side of the sanguine drawing that I started with.

The second step is to take time over doing a contour drawing over the same piece of paper.  Again I cheated not just by having the grid as a reference but also by looking at the paper far more often than I should have done.  And once the contour drawing was down, I couldn’t resist dragging some random primary colours all over the background.

And then I dipped a brush in water and used it to wet all the marks and to bring out the colours.  It looks as if I've probably put down too much colour in the figure (as usual) and that the very light layer that I put on the background  might have looked better on the figure.  Oh well.

I wasn't happy about the lack of three dimensionality in the painting, so I did two bits of tinkering.  First I used white gouache to paint some highlights on the figure.  These contrasted a bit too much with the Artgraf colours, so I wet them and dabbed them with kitchen paper; they look better now.  And to give the highlights something dark to stand against, I darkened the background on the right and lightened it on the left with more primary colour marks.  But to dilute the new background colours, I dabbed the marks with wet kitchen paper rather than using a brush and I quite like the effect.  And that was me done.

The idea behind the gesture/contour drawing combination was to bring out some energy and movement and that seems to have worked.  There's definitely something there in the angle of the shoulders.  Maybe there would have been even more energy if I'd not cheated in places.  Otherwise, though, this isn't great.  Definitely not worth putting in the shop window.  There are some lessons there for me (not for the first time) about how little dry Artgraf colour I need to put on the paper.  So the experiment worked and I learned something.  Tomorrow will be another day.

Nurse Mildred Ratched

This is Nurse Ratched, famously played by Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in a performance that won her the Best Actress Oscar in 1977.  Nurse Ratched just does her job but somehow seems to bring out in all of us a hatred of authority, a hatred that only really appears when someone in authority shows no empathy towards others.  It was a majestic performance and worthy of a painting.

This is a triple three layer traffic light painting, so:

- identical value plans were created for all three portraits using the Art Assist App

- the outlines were drawn in pencil using a grid

- making fluid was used to reserve whites

- the first layer of colour was in transparent yellow on the left and in the middle and rise dore on the right

- the second layer was cerulean blue on the left and Winsor red in the middle and on the right

- the third layer was French ultramarine in all three cases

At the end I spattered on some French ultramarine and after going for a long walk, removed all the masking fluid and made some very small changes in places.  And that was me done.

This isn't my greatest ever triple portrait but it's good enough to go up for sale.  The left and right portraits seem to have the best likeness, the middle one maybe looking slightly long in the face.  None of them make me feel angry, though, so I've definitely missed something.

I've not much more to say than that.  Maybe I should take a couple of days off and leave the energy to build up.

Warren Haynes In Watercolour

The closing date for Portrait Artist Of The Year is on 5 February, ten days away.  I've already submitted my entry but this is the time of her when I should be filling my blog with the sort paintings that judges will be looking for when they come calling.  And that means watercolour portraits.  I want to put a few more triple portraits up there but was pushed for time today so just went for a single three layer portrait.  For subject matter, I went for Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule and once of The Allman Brothers Band.  I've had  go at Warren before, in coloured pencil, and failed miserably, so I have unfinished business here.

I went for my blue three layer colour scheme today because (i) it's the one of the four schemes using my regular palette that doesn't feature in the three-scheme traffic light set that is going to see a lot of action, so is going to look a bit underused, and (ii) Warren can play the blues.  So that's cerulean blue in the first layer, French ultramarine in the second and quinacridone magenta in the third.  You'll see later that white gouache joins the team too.

Most of the painting followed the usual process.  A pencil outline using a grid, whites reserved with masking fluid, left to dry, first layer down, left to dry, second layer down, left to dry, third layer down.  With the blues in the first two layers both being big time granulations, I encouraged granulation in those first two layers by dropping in water, dryish paint and granulation medium.  The granulation medium caused the paper to bow a bit, so I need to be more careful in future; maybe the down the edges with making tape.  Oh, and I spattered a bit of the magenta over the background just for kicks.

Once those three layers were down, I could see two problems with my blue three layer scheme.  One was that my preferred masking fluid is a very similar colour to the cerulean blue in the first layer, so it was difficult to see where there was masking fluid that needed to be removed at the end.  The second was that the French ultramarine is a little too dark to work as a second layer: it's hard to distinguish between the medium and dark ares in my final painting.  Maybe the blue three layer scheme will be saved up for paintings where only blue will do.

I did more tinkering at the end of this process than usual.  For a start I noticed that some of my light and medium shoes were too small, so I made them bigger by adding cerulean blue and French ultramarine.  I also wasn't happy with how the fret bars on the guitar didn't show up well against the neck.  So I deviated from my usual strategy trusting the process and the Art Assist App.  I reached for the white gouache and went over the fret bars.  And, because this change on its own brought too much attention to the fret bars, I also added some strings, highlights on tuning knobs, some hairs on Warren's head and the guitar strap.  In retrospect the guitar strap was taking things a bit too far and should have been left as cerulean blue or left out of the painting completely.

Still, I’ve managed a decent likeness of Warren this time round.  While I'm not happy with the guitar strap, similarity of the two darkest values or (I guess) the accidental strip of red on the face from some premature masking fluid rubbing, these aren't things that jump out of a painting that's very much focused on the face.

Warren's up for sale.

Kingsferry Bridge Under Three Different Skies

It's a watercolour landscape day today.  I've been saving up some photos with amazing looking skies that have been posted on Facebook by a couple of friends and was finally in the mood today to turn them into a painting.

For a random subject to put in front of the sky, I decided to go for Kingsferry Bridge which connects the Isle of Sheppey to the rest of Kent.  For years it was the only connection but now there's a huge multi lane dual carriageway bridge next to it.  This older bridge appears in an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and the bit between the towers can be lifted up to let tall boats through.

Compositionally, my original plan was to come up with four separate landscape format paintings showing the bridge from four different angles, something I did years ago with The Angel Of The North.  But on today's four mile walk I decided instead to go for one view divided up into panels with different skies in each.  I considered dividing the paper into quarters with an X and having one sky on the left, one on the right and a third at the top and bottom.  And I considered dividing a page (in landscape or portrait format) into three or four vertical panels.  In the end I settled for landscape format and three vertical panels.

I had to do a lot of planning before getting started, having to pick three skies and the colours to use in them.  I wanted to go for simple red/yellow/blue palettes, with different colours in each panel if possible.  With three transparent or semi–transparent yellows, three reds and four blues to choose from, I looked for and found a way to use all of them, meaning thatching of the panels has two blues in it.  So the plan was:

– On the left, a sky based on a photo taken by Howard Moore in Petworth in the USA.  Rose dore and Indian yellow would give me those yellows and oranges in the sky and a cool blue would work for the blue sky and to turn the other colours to a good grey for the clouds.  I used both cerulean blue and Winsor blue green shade in this one.  Which means this panel is in the key of orange cool.

In the middle is a sky based on a photo taken by Cathy Stone in Buckinghamshire, one she described as not the most friendly she'd ever seen.  Quinacridone magenta and Mayan blue genuine would give the range of purples I needed, with the Mayan blue also containing ground up stones that might make the sky look even rougher and less friendly.  There's no yellow in the sky but transparent yellow makes decent enough neutrals with that red and blue.  So this panel is in the key of green cool.

And on the right is another of Cathy's Buckinghamshire skies.  I’ve used French ultramarine, Winsor red and raw sienna, so this is in the key of triadic right.  It gave me the reds and oranges I needed but not the best purple.  It works for me though.

For the painting itself I started by putting down making tape, not just to separate the panels but also to leave white borders round them that will still be visible when the painting's framed.  Once the tape was down I gridded up and drew on the outline of the bridge.  I'd planned ahead to make sure everything would look OK and that I didn’t for example, have the edge of a tower lining up with the edge of the tape.

After everything was prepared, I painted in the skies and water reflections.  I didn't use masking fluid to reserve the bridge shapes – if paint spilled over into then, I just lifted as much of it off as I could with kitchen paper.  The third sky was the one I had most trouble with, having to work hard with granulation medium, ox gall liquid and a water spray to get the red to mix with the blue and the yellow.  It looked never looked right and I eventually gave up, only to find that it looked great once I'd allowed it to dry.

Then it was time to paint the bridge.  I decided I didn't want the bridge to be constrained by panels so I removed all the making tape first, then drew in all the bridge shapes that had been masked out.  I painted the bridge in three layers: yellow, then red, then blue.  But this wasn't a three layer glaze job.  I kept adding layers while the paint underneath was still wet.  With so few of these colours being stainers, the idea of glazing didn't make much sense to me.  I tried to blend one colour scheme into the next in the white bits between panels.  In places where I was using the same colouring overlapping shapes I would paint each shape separately to draw out the difference between them.  Somehow the application of three fairly uniform layers of colour managed to create quite a variegated colour in all three panels.

Finally, there was some tinkering.  I added some really dark colours to the bridge in places to create a shadowy effect.  I corrected some of the wobbly straight lines down the edge of the towers by adding straight brush strokes, often in yellow down the left and blue down the right.  I added some traffic to the bridge, smaller than it should be to make the bridge look bigger and put in the fence barrier.  I tinkered with some of the shadows and reflections in the water.  And finally I added some birds in the top right.  And that was me done.

This came out much better than I thought it was going to at one point.  The colours in the skies are great, not because they're realistic or anything like that but just because they're pleasing to the eye.  There's also an interesting arch effect with the clouds on the left and the colour bands on the right pointing up towards to the top of the towers.  The weakest bit of the painting is below the bridge but the arch effect and the low viewpoint (with the towers getting narrower nearer the top) both drag the viewers' eyes upwards.  And the panel effect works.  I like this one.

It was sold in double quick time to a local dentist who's going to put it up on the wall of his practice on The Island.  And I've just seen where he lives.  He lives in my official hotspot.  His neighbours in the left have one of my paintings in their wall.  His neighbours on the right have one of my paintings on their wall.  The woman opposite has one of my paintings on the wall.  And (get this) the people he bought the house off also have one of my paintings on their wall.  Of the house itself.

Ronnie Wood

After John Lydon went so well the other day, I thought I'd have another go with the oil pastels.  And because John came out looking old and battle scarred, I thought my style might work with one of the Rolling Stones.  I decided to go for Ronnie Wood as his distinctive facial planes looked like they might be fun to paint.

It's hard to describe how I paint in oil pastels because there's no real process.  Once a pencil outline's down, I move around randomly from shape to shape, tending to put down at least three colours everywhere and to mix them on the paper wither with my fingers with a rubber thing on a stick.  Colour-wise I try to match values but I also drop in colours that I can see in my source or colours that I just feel like adding.  Today you might have spotted that I fancied using a bit of green in the skin tones.

I think I spent too long on the painting today.  The likeness was looking really good early on but I kept trying to improve it.  Part of my problem was that I couldn't decide whether I wanted visible pastel marks in the face or to have it all smoothed out.  So I'd put in more colour, decide I wanted it smoothed out, then change my mind and add on more colour, etc.   Eventually I worked out that I was just creating mud and decided to stop.  There was still a little bit of corrective work to be done afterwards, reducing the amount of hair on the left by adding more sky colours and smoothing them over the hair and adding black around Ronnie's hair and chin to get the shape of his head right.  And that was me done.

I like the hair in this one, especially around the edges where I put down hair marks in all sorts of bright colours and then filled the gaps between them with black.  And I like Ronnie's t-shirt, which I spent a lot of time drawing in pencil to start with but which gradually loosened up after that.  Ronnie himself is recognisable.  There's a definite likeness there but he doesn't look like the Ronnie in my source photo.  I may have made him a bit younger.

Anyway, Ronnie's up for sale.

Colored Pencil Painting Portraits, Alyona Nickelsen - Book Review

Time for another book review and today it's this one by Alyona Nickelsen.  It's a 184 page paperback.  I'll say right from the off that this isn't a well written book.  Stuff was presented to the readers in the wrong order, often out of context or with important questions remaining unanswered.  It wouldn’t make any sense for me to go through this book chapter by chapter without you knowing what the overall story was, so I'm going to tell you that up front.  Then maybe you'll appreciate what a mess this book was.

The cover of the book promises a "revolutionary method" for coloured pencil portraits.  I'm guessing (because Alyona never actually comes out and says it) that this method is all about doing portraits in multiple layers, with the layers separated by coatings of textured fixative.  Textured fixative leaves behind a surface that is, well, textured and suitable for drawing on in coloured pencil.  If you're wondering what this methodology can do that you couldn’t do just by applying layer after layer of pencil, I reckon there are three things.  First, layer after layer of coloured pencil will eventually fill up the tooth of the paper whereas every time you spray on textured fixative it creates the capacity for more colour.  So with textured fixative you can add many more layers.  Second, two layers of colour separated by fixative actually look as different to one colour applied on top of the other as a watercolour layer glazed over another colour would look different to the two colours mixed together.  Third, and I'm less sure about this one, if you use powdered blended to blend the colours in one layer you need something on top to fix it down so it doesn't blow away.  Don't quote me on that third one though - it's just an impression I get rather than something I've read or heard.  And that's what the book is about.  Alyona should really have come out and said this in the first chapter.

Anyway, chapter-wise, we have:

- about 25 pages of introduction and the coloured pencil revolution

- about 15 pages on the rules of the game

- about 10 pages on working the medium

- about 20 pages on controlling colour

- about 15 pages on portrait fact and fiction

- about 50 pages on practising the essentials

- about 35 pages on keeping friends and clients happy

- about 10 pages of afterwords, index and an appendix

Yeah, that roughly balances.  Let's go through them.

The Coloured Pencil Revolution

I've already pointed out that we're missing some important stuff here.  There's nothing there to tell us what the whole book's about.  No indication of what this revolutionary method actually is.

There's a lot of guff comparing coloured pencils to oil painting, sounding like an attempt to justify coloured pencil painting as proper artwork.  People buying this book already want to paint in coloured pencil, so aren't the ones that need to be won over.  What a waste of space.

And then we get on to equipment and materials.  There's stuff about what paper to use.  Later in the book we're told that sanded paper works best with the techniques here but this doesn't get mentioned here.  We're told about fixatives but not why.  We're told about liquid blenders, powdered blenders, titanium white powder but not why.  Liquid blenders don't even get used in the rest of the book so why are they here at all?  There's discussion of studios and lighting which I admit I've not seen in other books but, really, this opening chapter is atrocious.

Rules Of The Game

OK.  This is the important chapter.  It talks about old oil painters and how they’d paint in five layers: the imprimatura, the underpainting, the veiling or dead layer, the colour layers and the highlights.  This is the technique Alyona is trying to teach us but you wouldn't know it.  It seems to be written with oil paintings in mind, although on a second reading there are subtle hints that it also applies to coloured pencils.  It's the way it's worded.  Artists do this, artists do that.  As if this is a long established technique and not the revolutionary technique for coloured pencils that we’re promised.  And the first of those layers barely features in the rest of the book and there's no mention of the fixative that would need to go on between layers in a coloured pencil painting.  This is another really badly written chapter.  If Alyona is telling us this is what she wants is to do with coloured pencil then she should say so.  I'm wondering now whether she's a poor teacher as well as a poor writer.

Working The Medium

We're getting closer to the point of the book.  We're told about the advantages of drawing on rough surfaces and a bit about using solvents and texture fixative.  I don't know why solvents get mentioned at all as they don't have a role to play in this revolutionary technique.  Powdered blender, which does have an important role to play, barely gets a mention and my question about whether it needs to be fixed to prevent it blowing away doesn't get answered.

Controlling Colour

A well written chapter at last, covering things like colour mixing and colour intensity (called saturation in other places but let's not get picky).  But there's also some interesting stuff on opacity and transparency including where on a painting to use opaque and transparent layers of colour and how to make coloured pencil transparent or opaque.  Yeah, credit where credit's due, a decent chapter.

Portrait Fact And Fiction

Now we're finally on to portraits.  I wouldn’t mind but I've still not been told what this revolutionary method is.  This is a chapter on portrait composition.   Not the usual stuff about focal points and the rule of thirds but some ideas on pose, lighting and attitude.  I've nothing much to say about this chapter.

Practising The Essentials

We start with a few general tips, of which I found the stuff on skin tones most useful.  After that, we're on to facial elements.  We're given some tips on each element and a series of demonstrations that, while complete portraits in some cases, are focussed on those particular elements.  So we have two demos on skin, three on hair, three on eyes, two on the mouth, one on the nose, one on nose and chin, two on ears, two on hands and one on a foot.  I make that seventeen.  These are proper demonstrations rather than paint-along-with-me exercises.  And it's only in reading through this chapter, and seeing how all these demos have an underpainting layer, textured fixative, a veiling or dead layer, textured fixative, coloured layers (maybe separated by textured fixative ) and final fixative that I actually understood what the revolutionary technique was.

Keeping Friends And Clients Happy

The final chapter has a bit of advice on commissions and is then followed by five demonstrations of complete portraits.  Before the demonstrations we're told what gear Alyona uses in these demos.  It's the same gear that she was using in the previous chapter (I was making a mental note) and it's the gear that she should have been discussing and recommending in that chapter at the beginning of the book.  I can't believe what a jumble this book is.  Oh, and although these demos are worded as demos, Alyona tells us at some point that we should be trying to replicate them ourselves.  Were we supposed to be doing that in the last chapter too?  Did I miss something?  I don’t really care to be honest.  I didn't learn much from these five demos: the more interesting bits were at the start of each one where Alyona discussed the subject and the style of portrait she wanted to create.

Afterword And Appendix

I've just seen this quote in the afterword and I'm staggered.  "My goal in writing this book was to put together a comprehensive work that makes the case for colored pencil to be considered a serious art medium with significant potential, using the portrait genre as an example."  Take note people.  Alyona's goal wasn't to make you a better coloured pencil portrait artist: it was to get more respect for coloured pencil. It just says it all.

Oh, and there's an appendix that gives traffic light ratings to how well eight different blenders work with twelve different makes of coloured pencil on two different types of surface.  The two surface types are absorbent cotton-based  and non-absorbent textured supports.  Where does the non-cotton watercolour paper from Seawhites of Brighton fit in?  I have no idea.  And these eight different blenders.  How many of them are used in the demos?  None.  The only blender used in the demos is powdered blender and that doesn't get a mention!

Before we get to the rating, what do I think about the very badly described revolutionary method for coloured pencil portraits?  Well, the proof will be in the pudding.  But to give the methodology a go I would need to buy some textured fixative, some final fixative, some powdered blender and applicators for the blender.  I think we're talking £60-70.  I could give these all a go on Seawhite paper but there would be risks involved as the fixatives go quite hard and could crack if I bent the paper.  So I might have to invest in sanded paper but that’s about £6 a sheet!  It would be an expensive business following the techniques in this book.  Not only that but would I enjoy it?  In the opening pages Alyona talks about how one of the great things about coloured pencil is that it's clean.  I'm not sure that would still be the case if I were spraying fixative everywhere and having to hoover up powdered blender off the floor.  Still it would make the studio look nice at Christmas.  The time spent waiting for fixative to dry would also detract from the fun.  So I'm still in two minds about whether to try out these techniques.  I might experiment with using an alcohol marker blender though.

The rating?  Well it's not getting three+ palettes.  Anything with three palettes goes down as a book recommendation from me and there's no way on earth that I'd recommend as badly written a book as this, even if the techniques do turn out to be revolutionary.  On the other hand, do I regret reading it?  Not really.  I'm glad that I know about these techniques, even if I have no immediate plans to use them.  I think I'm talking myself into giving this one two palettes but that's through gritted teeth.  I hated this book with a passion.  If anyone ever writes a better book on the same technique, this rating will be dropping to one palette.

🎨🎨

John Lydon In Oil Pastel

It was a tough call over who to paint today.  ChatGPT wasn't able to come up with any celebrities I'd ever heard of whose birthday it was today.  Eventually I thought I’d asking for a random British celebrity born on 20 January.  It came up with (and I shit you not) "comedian and actor Gary Barlow".  I did come up with n interesting idea for a water portrait of Gary but decided at the last minute that I needed to do something with oil pastels, so saved Grey for a other day and decided to paint John Lydon.  It's not his birthday but I quite fancied painting him in oil pastels.

For the pose I picked the same pose as I'd already used for a watercolour as it had good light and dark areas.  And I just enjoyed myself for about three hours.  I started with a pencil sketch using a grid and painted in the eyes, nostrils and mouth line first to give me something to hang everything else off.  I was really pleased with the eyes: they made the painting look human right from the beginning.

You're probably wondering why I told the Gary Barlow story at the beginning.  It's because as I progressed through the painting it kept wanting to look like Gary nd I would have to keep dragging it back towards John.  A very weird experience.

Once I was happy with about 95% of the painting, I looked really closely at it and at the source photo for small ways to improve the likeness.  The three most serious changes I made were to raise John's right eyebrow a bit, lower the left eyebrow, move the irises in his eyeballs slightly to our left (undoing some of the great work on the eyes from earlier) and moving the contour down the left of John's face inwards in some places and outwards in others.  And that was me done.

Looking at the final result, I've ended up with John and not Gary, which is good.  My colours are impressionistic but a bit more realistic than in some of my other portraits (and I'm not talking about the three layer portraits here).  Despite using the same source photo, I've picked out a different side of John to before, showing some of the ravages of old age and less of the cynicism of middle age.  I like this one.  John's up for sale.

Nevermore

Today would have been Edgar Allen Poe's 215th birthday.  I know this because I asked ChatGPT to name me a random celebrity born in January 19th.  Before I'd even got out of bed I'd decided that today's painting would be a portrait of EAP framed by a raven in honour of one of his greatest creations, a poem that inspired an Alan Parsons Project track.  During my morning walk I decided that this would be a three layer portrait using my blue colour scheme and that I'd put in a sky as a background.

So.  Colours.  This is my blue three layer colour scheme, so cerulean blue goes down first, followed by French ultramarine and then quinacridone magenta.  I have to be careful with the third layer because the French ultramarine in the second layer isn't a staining colour, so might get loosened and lifted if I'm too vigorous.  I wanted to introduce a yellow too, to use to distinguish the foreground from the background and avoid having the raven floating in mid air.  I chose raw sienna because I didn't want too saturated a yellow and because my notes from earlier paintings suggest raw sienna when combined with quinacridone magenta and either of those blues makes for quite a chilly feeling painting.

There are four elements to the painting:

- The sky was just the two blues put fairly randomly into wet paper, leaving white gaps for clouds.  I could have used some of the red in places but it looked too good with just the blues: I wasn't going to change that.

- All four colours are used in the foreground, fairly randomly except that I've tried to make the shadowy area a bit darker.  I must have put in three or four layers before getting to the dark value I was looking for.

- The EAP portrait is the standard three layer portrait with hints from the Artist Assist App.

- The raven is also in three layers: cerulean blue, then French ultramarine, then quinacridone magenta but there was other stuff going on too.  Before the first layer went down I spattered over some masking fluid for a starry background (and removed any spatters that went over the rest of the painting).  More masking fluid went down after the cerulean blue layer to reserve the eye, a line on the beak and some shapes around the feathery bits.  I use a light blue coloured masking fluid so I can see it against a white background; when there's cerulean blue behind it, it's difficult to tell whether I've actually removed the masking fluid.  Oh well.  What else?  Well I dripped in some granulation medium, water and dry paint after each layer, hoping to get similar effects to what I did with Jimi Hendrix.  And in the third layer, I had to leave an empty space round EAP for the second layer to show up behind his head: I used a bit of water to soften the inner edge of the ring of magenta that I put around him.

And, after leaving everything to dry no removing the masking fluid, that was me done.

And I have to say I'm really pleased with this one.  Everything came out according to plan and the sky background is off the charts.  It was also a great decision to indicate the eye and the beak rather than just leaving the raven as a silhouette.  The portrait itself was quite small and fiddly but came out looking great.  I was wondering at one point whether I should have made the portrait bigger by just going for the head rather than head and shoulders but, no, head and shoulders worked.  EAP is up for sale.

Out On Queendown Warren

A tale of two paintings today.  It wasn’t supposed to come out like this but I've ended up with one in the background and one on the foreground.  But let's go back to the start.

I saw an interesting understated sunset on Queendown Warren a few days ago that I'd decided to incorporate into a painting and on today's walk I chose the scene that I'd put the sunset behind.  For colours I picked cerulean blue and rose dire because I'd seen them in the sunset, Indian yellow because it was warm and wouldn’t make garish greens with the cool cerulean blue.  So the painting started in the key of orange cool, a great autumnal key.  I also gave burnt sienna a significant role, calming down all those bright primaries.  Later, I'd also use acrylic inks and some opaque watercolours.

I started off with a great underpainting using my four colours and dropping on a bit of granulation medium in places.  I went over the whole painting.  Not just the sky but also the hillsides.  The far hillside felt a little dark so I dabbed off some colour to create a bit of fog on the lower slopes.  The nearer hill ended up quite light: its colours and values would have looked great on the further hill.

Next came the trees.  I started at the bottom and held adding more, thinner branches.  I used all four colours, fairly randomly and allowing them to mix on the paper.  At the extreme ends of the branches I tried stabbing on paint with the Merlin brush.  It didn't look perfect but after I added lots of cross cross marks all over the tree with the sharp corner of a cut up credit card, things looked much better.

For the foreground, my plan was to drop on acrylic inks and granulation medium and let them move around and add texture.  It had been a long time, though, since I used the inks and I was a bit overenthusiastic.  I used a blue, a red, sepia and a couple of greens and ended up with more ink showing than watercolour.  I should have only used a little bit of one or two colours: just enough for some texture.  And only then after adding another layer of watercolour to my underpainting.

Oh well.  For a rescue job, I first added a unifying layer of watercolour over the hill, using all my four main colours.  I managed to leave an unpainted path down the left side of the painting, which was something, but I still wasn't there.  I decided I needed some tussocks of grass on the hillside and started by painting these on with my four original colours.  But these were too transparent and didn't show up.  So I added more tussocks in opaque colours: cadmium yellow, cadmium red, sepia and white gouache.  That was a marginal improvement but the grasses were standing out too much against the rest of the hillside.  So I added some spatters to the hill in the red, yellow and white.  And when this looked a little over the top I dabbed at a few of them with kitchen paper.

And that's when I stopped.  Any more tinkering and things would definitely have gotten worse.

I started off by saying this was a tale of two paintings but while I've been writing this painting has grown on me.  It helps that the opaque red and yellow are both warm, just like the transparent red and yellow that I started with, so everything is still in the key of orange cool.  Yeah, this is acceptable.  It's going up for sale.  I probably won't be using the a relic inks again in a hurry though.

The Dragons Den Collection

And here it is: the complete collection of dragons.

As expected, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  These look great and the collection is up for sale. It's a shame that Sara's painting isn't more orange and the Neviller's more pink, as originally intended in both cases, but I'm still more than happy.

It's been an interesting experiment, applying the three layer technique (using the Art assist App) to marker portraits, with all the portraits looking a bit like photos from a distance.  On the other hand, I don't see myself repeating this technique with markers.  It involves putting down big shapes of colour and the markers don't like this: they prefer small shapes and quick marks.  Even the markers that didn't die on me were struggling.  This feature of the markers is useful to know as I might otherwise have tried out portraits on bigger pads than the 5.5x8 inch ones that I've been using so far.  I know now that these markers wouldn't have the stamina to work on bigger paintings.  It¡s not that they run out quickly: it's just that they need to stop and recharge.

Here are links to the six subpaintings:

- Deborah Meaden

- Peter Jones

- Touker Suleyman

- Sara Davies

- Steven Bartlett

- Gary Neville

Aaaaagggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Don't tell me that you didn't see this one coming.  On this week's Dragons Den there will be a sixth dragon and six is a much better number for a collection of portraits than five.  So here's the sixth dragon, Gary Neville.  If you don’t understand the name of this painting, ask a football fan.

The colour scheme for this one was always going to be based around red.  I wanted to use rose pink as the first colour but the marker died really quickly and I wanted this collection finished before 8pm on Thursday night, so there wasn't time to order a replacement marker and I abandoned my first effort.  So I went for coral as the first colour.  It's the darkest of my flesh colours and had already been used for Steven Bartlett, so my plan to use eighteen different colours in six portraits with no colour used in more than one painting were scuppered.  The second layer was Ruby and the third was initially amethyst.  But when amethyst didn’t look that dark on the third layer I went over it with cold grey 4.  And, yes, that colour gap has already been used in the Touker painting.

Still, it's a decent final portrait.  There's maybe a little bit of Ryan Giggs to it, but there's a lot more of Gary there.

Are You On TikTok?

And here's the fifth dragon in the den, Steven Bartlett.  He's been given the flesh colour scheme, with the layers being putty, then soft peach, then coral.  As the most human of the dragons, I thought he deserved the most human looking colours.

I allowed the pencil lines to show through a bit more on this one, just for the hell of it.  They look weird close up but are invisible from a distance.  Actually, this must be the most Art Assist App portrait out of all of them so far (including all those watercolours) in that it looks like a photo from a distance but like a load of random marks close up.  And the give portraits are looking really good together.

Those of you who predicted "Are You On TikTok?" as the name of the final portrait in the collection and are just reaching for that chocolate biscuit as a reward, hold your fire.  I didn't say I'd finished.

Reyt Oop My Street

The next dragon on the seat is Sara Davies.  For a first layer I used bright orange, then henna, then cool grey 5.  I was looking for an orange/brown look to this one but the orange came out really pink today and I've no idea why.

I think it was because of all this pink that the white highlights looked a bit too stark.  I deviated from my three colour plan by going over the white bits with almond and the blender in an attempt to calm them down.

Just as with all the other paintings in this collection I tinkered a little at the end trying to get my shapes closer to those recommended by the app.  One thing I'm noticing in making these changes is that I have a tendency in my fist set of marks to make the outside of people's cheeks chubbier and jowlier than they should be.  But at least with darker colours in the background this is easy to correct.

Deborah Meaden is still my favourite in this set.  Sara would have looked much better had my orange marker actually given me some orange shapes.

Touker Time!

Today's dragon is Touker Suleyman, a big favourite of mine.

He's been given the grey colour scheme with cold grey 1, cold grey 4 and black.  The cold grey 1 was already on its last legs but even if in peak condition would probably have been too light so I went over all the cold grey 1 with cold grey 2 and things ended up looking so much better.  I also had to reach for the white gel pen after screwing up and not leaving a white highlight on Touker's chin.  I also added white gel pen marks on to of some of the white highlights I'd left in his glasses, just so the chin highlight wasn’t alone.

I thought Touker would be the mist difficult dragon to draw but he was ridiculously easy and a lot of fun.  Maybe he's like this in real life too, much more fun than people think.

Anyway, if I try to ignore the gel pen marks, I'm liking this one.  There's a likeness there.  Not perfect and I could probably do better with a bit of work but this isn't about perfection: it's about seeing where the Artist Assist App can get me.  And these six portraits together are going to be better than the sum of the parts.

I made a late start today (housework day) and haven't been for my walk yet, so this may turn out to be a one portrait day.

Painting Watercolour Outdoors, Geoff Hunt – Book Review

Time for another book review.  This one's only been in the shops for a couple of months.  It's a 128 page paperback on plein air watercolour.  The Ron Stocke book on plein air watercolour turned out to be not very plein air focused.  Can this one do any better?

Let's look at the contents page and have a quick flick through.  And, you know what, I'm already feeling good about this one.  It took me a while to work out why but I think I know now.  It’s because it's published by Crowood.  They just always seem to publish good bocks that are packed with lots of text and very little filler.  Anyway, the contents.  We have about 40 pages of introduction and discussion of materials.  Then about 15 pages finding a subject, 15 on techniques, 20 on the weather and 35 on what I'd call timing.  Briefly, what those respective parts of the book cover are:

– Why plein air painting is so great.  What are the problems associated with it.  What gear to take with you on a painting outing – a very different angle on materials to other books that talk about the author's favourite colours, paper, brushes, etc.  We all have the gear already; this is about what to take with us and what to leave at home.

– How to choose what to paint once you're out there.  With some tips on composition.

– Techniques–wise, there are some high level ideas on different possible approaches, nothing groundbreaking.  It’s probably worth stating at this point that there are seven short (five–ish step) demonstrations scattered throughout the book, all based around a process of drawing, wet into wet underpainting and a couple of layers of detailed work.

– When we get to the weather, the book talks about the sun, the rain, the wind and overcast days but also covers tides and the pros and cons of plein air painting during the four different seasons.

– And we close with a couple of chapters talking about time.  Why plein air paintings need to be finished quickly and how you might change your approach to painting from the one you use in the studio.

One thing that should be very clear from all the above is that this is very much a book about plein air painting.  It does what it says on the tin.  There might be the odd tip in there that would be useful to a studio artist but there aren’t many and they're absolutely not the main focus of the book.  There's plenty of Geoff's art throughout the book and it's not just there for show and inspiration.  Every painting has a bit of text next to it with a plein air tip or story next to it, which is refreshing.  What I liked least about the book were the seven demos.  Although they were all plein air paintings and included the odd little snippet relating to them being painted outdoors, they didn't seem as plein air focused as the rest of the book.  And the techniques issued in them were a bit repetitive.  If the seven demos were replaced with seven photos of the completed works and a plein air related caption (just as in the rest of the book) I would have been happier.

I didn't feel that I learned much from this book, having already been out painting a few times but the book was still useful to me in that it confirmed things I was already thinking.  So it wasn't lazy of me to pick a view on my first LAOTY wildcard appearance that I could paint from under a tree.  And it's not just me that thinks that an outdoor watercolour kit can't fit in a swimming bag.  All these people that talk about the advantage of watercolour being that there's no kit to carry around.  Do they never take water with them?  Or paper?  Or an easel?  I was finding myself enjoying reading this book, just for Geoff's humility and honesty.  He doesn't pretend that plein air watercolour is easy.  It's hard work, and harder work than other authors make it out to be.

OK.  After getting all that off my chest, I'm ready to give my final score.  It's great to see a book out there on a subject that is long overdue some coverage.  Just as with most Crowood books, there's not much filler in there and lots of advice.  The problem is that this book only reinforced what I'd already learned the hard way rather than teaching me much new stuff.  I guess, though, that for anyone new to plein air watercolour, Geoff's tips might save them a few teething problems.  So this one won't be getting four or five palettes.  I’m the other hand, I think this one's well worth the money and worthy of a place on even the most experienced artist's shelf, so it won't be getting one or two palettes.  Which, by a process of elimination leaves it with three palettes, which I must remind you all is a good score.

🎨🎨🎨

And That's Why I'm Going To Make You An Offer

Next up is Peter Jones.

I went for a blue colour scheme to match his whistle: blue pearl, then sky blue, then indigo blue.  The sky blue died while I was using it; once I became aware this was happening I made sure I used it Forst in all those areas where the indigo blue wasn't going to go over the top.

I did do some fiddling at the end of this one but this was all about trying to replicate better the shapes that the Artist Assist App recommended rather than trying to improve on the app.

I don't think Peter came out as well as Deborah.  When I compare the two, he looks less like a photo and more like a cartoon.  Still, he's definitely good enough and I'm confident that the collection when viewed as a whole will feed energy to each other and look great.  But that will be a few days away.  I'm going to stop here for today and get back to reading my book.

Meanwhile Deborah Meaden Has Some Questions About The Company's Green Credentials

It was only a matter of time before I had a go at three layer portraits with computer assistance using markers.  I've identified six triplets of marker colours, eighteen different colours in all, that I could use to do a set of six portraits.  In all cases, I'm going to "trust the process", copy the computer's suggestions as well s I can and resist the temptation to improve the portraits by fiddling with the details.  If the markets work like the watercolours, then I should end up with six portraits that somehow look like photos.

Now, subject matter.  Dragons Den has been a possibility for a while, but the problem is that there are always five dragons and five is a bad number for marker collections as you don't get to see 5x1 multiple aperture frames in the shops.  If only they could bring in a sixth dragon just for one week, six portraits in a 2x3 grid would look great…

Anyway, first up is Deborah Meaden.  She's in a green colour scheme with layers of canary, then lime green, then forest green.  And this three layer computer–assisted approach is still working!the eyes in this are amazing.  That's Deborah, all right, and I'm scared.

Any you'll see that rather than naming these aftercare dragons, I'll be using quotations as names.  If you've worked out already what the name of the final portrait in the collection will be then you've earned yourself a chocolate biscuit.

Albert King

Today's painting is a long overdue subject and a less overdue experiment.  The subject is guitarist Albert King.  I've been making my way through loads of my favourite guitarists and Albert may be my number one.  It's only now that I'm starting to become competent at that I felt ready to give him a go.  And the overdue experimenters a triple triple glazed portrait supergranulators.  All my triple triple glazed portraits so far have used my conventional colours.  My Saturn painting doesn't really count as a portrait.

I started by putting down pencil outlines using a grid.  I picked a source photo of Albert with his famous flying V guitar, Lucy, planning on letting Lucy overlap any portraits behind her.  In retrospect this was a bad decision as it meant that the heads on these portraits were small, making them too fiddly to extract a likeness.  Oh well.

Colour–wise, you'll have worked this out already but the bottom layer was tundra pink in the left, Shire yellow and Shire olive in the middle and desert orange and desert yellow on the right.  Then the second layer was tundra blue on the left, Shire green and Shire blue in the middle and desert brown on the right.  And the final layer was tundra purple on the left, forest brown and green apatite genuine in the middle and desert grey and desert green on the right.  Whenever each layer went down, I tried to tease out the granulation by dotting in water, thicker paint and granulation medium.  I even threw on a bit of salt as the last layer was drying.

After each layer I put on some random brush marks behind the figures to contrast against the white shirt and this worker really well.  I'll definitely be doing that again.

But otherwise this is a bit of a flop and won't be going in the shop window.  This doesn't look like Albert.  It looks more like another guitarist called John McCoy (I had to look him up) or like Colonel Sanders.  I definitely beed to paint bigger head if I'm going to do more of these triple portraits.  Colour-wise I think I prefer the conventional colours to the supergranulators in these triple portraits.  I'll still do triple layer portraits with the supergranulators but might just save them for individual portraits.  Or should I give them one more go in a triple portrait but with bigger heads?  Leave it with me.

Drawing Architecture, Richard Taylor – Book Review

It's been a busy day as I've been making notes on this book that I finished reading yesterday and am now ready to write up a review.  Landscape Artist Of The Year always seems to be building focused, so I've been wanting for a while to read a book on painting buildings.  And, with the Jonathan Newey book being seemingly out of print, this seemed the best option on the market.  The pages I could preview on Amazon looked good with a bit of text and a drawing with lots of arrows pointing to different places with little tips.  This one is a 120 page paperback – maybe a little short but let's see what's in there.

So we have four chapters.  Roughly 20 pages on introduction and materials, 20 pages on "mechanics", 60 pages on specific types of building and 15 pages on "the bigger picture".  Let's go through chapter by chapter.

We start with materials.  The emphasis of this book is on drawing rather than painting (which I knew), so this is mainly about pencils and powdered graphite, although watercolour gets a mention too.  And there's talk of line and wash, where Richard prefers to use non–waterproof inks so he cam smudge and spread the lines.  That's a bit unusual.  But this chapter's not just about materials.  There are drawings and paintings throughout the chapter with arrows and tips.

We then get a chapter on "mechanics" which covers all sorts of stuff.  We get a brief introduction to one, two and three point perspective.  I didn't need lots of detail in this but beginners might need more than Richard discusses here and I'm sure there are books out there for them if that's the case.  There's also some stuff on composition including some interesting thoughts on what to do about foregrounds when it's the building in the middleground that's the focus.  And then, before we get onto buildings, there are tips on drawing bricks, stones, wood and tiles.  It's good, by the way, to see that Richard's most used colours in this book are raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber and French ultramarine, four of my first choice squad.  Less good is how he gets the browns mixed up in places, putting the wrong labels on swatches.

We then get to to the big chapter on buildings.  It's divided into five subchapters on rural buildings, urban buildings, classical architecture, public buildings and street architecture.  Richard talks through all the different sorts of buildings, giving lots of tips in both the main body of the text and on arrows pointing to his buildings.  And this is where I started switching off.  This chapter would be fine if I kept getting fed new tips but it seems that there is a bottom to Richard's tip bucket because after a while the same old tips kept coming back. There's only so many times I can be told to not treat the application of paint as a colouring in exercise, to get the shadows round doors and windows right and to put both dark shapes and reflections in windows.  I guess there are still lots of drawings to look at but they all tend to be in the same three or four styles.

And finally there's a chapter on "the big picture", which I thought was going to be one of those "bringing it all together" chapters that teach the reader nothing.  But, no, it turned out to be about bigger pictures!  Tips on how to combine together lots of photos into one big photo to paint, which was interesting.

I can't help feeling a bit short changed at the end.  The book is only 120 pages long and, with so much repetition, felt more like three copies of a 40 page book or four copies of a 30 pager.  There are some useful tips and it got me thinking in places, but it did feel like a tin of chocolates that was only half full with lots of cardboard filling up the rest of the space.  I'm an experienced artist but even if I was a beginner I'd probably feel a little cheated.  While I wouldn't buy this one again if my studio burnt down, it's not so bad that I feel angry and conned. So that makes it worth two palettes.

🎨🎨

Fire

Today it's a portrait of Jimi Hendrix.  You can tell that I've used the Artist Assist App again just by looking at this one.  I was planning to do a triple portrait but the plan that the app came up with was so complicated that I decided I'd be better off doing just the single portrait.  I decided on the transparent yellow / Winsor red / French ultramarine triple glaze combination not just because Jimi was wearing an orange shirt in my source photo but also to reflect the fire in his guitar playing.  Also reflecting the fire are the spatters of primary colour, the big dry splat in the bottom right and the name of the painting, a Hendrix track because I’ve already created a painting called Jimi Hendrix.

The other thing, besides the spatters, I did differently today to normal was to attempt to make the colour layers uneven.  After each layer went down, and while it was still wet, I dripped on some granulation medium and charged in stronger versions of the paint that was wet.  It wasn't until the blue ultramarine layer went on that the results appeared: French ultramarine is a granulating pigment anyway but the results here are amazing.

Not everything went perfectly though.  I made at least three mistakes:

– On Jimi's right lapel, there's a bit where I didn’t put down red but should have done, especially as I needed to put blue on top of that.  I got a bit lazy here and put the blue down anyway, then the red on top of that.  You can see it looks a little bit different.

– The right side of Jimi's mouth (our left) wasn't out far enough.  So I put in a bit more blue to extend it out to under Jimi's iris.

– I started putting on blue paint before the red was completely dry.  Or when it was dry everywhere except in Jimi¡s neck.  So two blue shapes, one at the top of his neck and one at the bottom, diffused into the middle of his neck to make  one big shape.  I tried to dab off the offending blue, but most of Jimi's neck is now a muddy colour rather than having a big orangey shape in the middle.

To be honest, though, the results aren’t that bad.  You'd have to know that something was wrong to notice that it was wrong.

Overall I'm happy with this one.  These triple glazed paintings are designed to work at a distance and, from a distance, the likeness is definitely there.  Add in all the fire and energy and, yes, this is one of my favourites.

Big Sam In Charcoal

This is one I've been planning for a while.  Ever since I read the Nathan Fowkes book, I've been meaning to do a charcoal portrait.  And as this was my first ever charcoal portrait I thought I'd go for my second favourite portrait subject (after myself) and that was Sam Allardyce.

It's hard to go wrong with a Big Sam portrait and on all my previous attempts I've managed to put down a good freehand outline.  Today, though, I kind of used a grid.  Only kind of because rather than marking out the whole grid I only marked the cross points at which four squares meet.  I was marking out and putting down outlines with an orange coloured pencil, one of the recommendations in Nathan's book.

The big recommendation I got from Nathan's book was to start with big first order shapes, so to start by giving Sam's head the sort of shading needed for a giant egg before thinking about dents for eyes and a sticky out bit for a nose, etc.  I didn't do this but at least started out with second order shapes and ignored third order or smaller.  So I used the big watercolour blocks to put down all the biggest blues without worrying about all the details in the facial features.  It took me a long time to get to something I was happy with, putting down layer after layer and  hoovering up all the dust in between.  But as things started to come together it dawned on me that this is probably what we're supposed to do with charcoal.  Put down layer after layer and watch things slowly come together.  Things are starting to chime.

Once that was all down, I moved on to third order stuff.  I used the charcoal pencils to put down lots of details in the eyes, nose, mouth and ears and to draw in a few individual hairs.  I also used the charcoal blocks a bit more to refine my second order stuff whenever the third order stuff on top of it made it look wrong.

At some point during the third order drawing I noticed that something seemed off and decided that I needed to move Sam's mouth upwards a little bit.  Even then, things weren’t right and I found myself having to widen Sam's mouth on his right, our left.  It's interesting that these corrections don't really show up in the final painting – charcoal can be very forgiving.

Right at the very end, one of Sam's jowls didn't look right.  I managed to correct this without using charcoal - just a sweep of the finger was enough to correct it.

I learned some big lessons today.  I now understand that charcoal paintings are bout applying far more layers that I ever do with other media.  I now know that charcoal great for portraits.  I know it's very forgiving if I have to correct errors,  I’ve experienced the switch between drawing second order shoes with blocks and third and fourth order shoes with charcoal pencils.  And finally I've come to the conclusion that charcoal is a summer medium.  I have to regularly head outside to wash my hands and I should be fixing the colours outside with a spray when I'm done.  These things don't really happen when it's snowing outside.  Still, charcoal will dovetail nicely with oil pastels, which are too soft and melty to be used in the summer.  So that's a result.

As for the portrait, I can see a likeness there, although there's also a bit of Guus Hiddink coming through.  And it's annoying how the highlighted bit below Sam's right eye looks like part of an oversized eye.  It's possible that this feels more Sam to me than to other people because I'm noticing a weird thing about portraiture and it's that the better you get, the more you look deep into the subject and the more you feel a connection.  I'm 100% feeling Big Sam coming through.

Ross Kemp: Go With Your Gut

Since Pigpen went so well, I’ve been wondering whether I could fit a triple triple glazed portrait into the four hours that artists are allowed in Portrait Artist Of The Year because if I can get these to work properly in the allocated timescale, I'd have a ready made plan for PAOTY if I made it onto the show.  And no spoiler warnings are necessary: I'm not there yet, the closing date still being more than three weeks away.

For the subject I picked out Ross Kemp.  I've already done quite a facetious portrait of this TV legend and thought I should have a go at doing him properly.  So not just because his lack of hair makes him easier to paint.  If that was the only reason, I'd be spending most of my time painting still lives of potatoes.

I again put down pencil outlines using a grid and concentrating on facial features rather than on the value shapes that the Artist Assist App was recommending.  And I used the same colours as for Pigpen.  Excuse me while I copy and paste…  For the first layer I used transparent yellow on the left and in the middle and rose dore on the right.  Then it was cerulean blue in the left and Winsor red in the middle and on the right.  And finally French ultramarine as the third layer in all three sub-portraits.  Because there's both a warm and a cool blue in there, I can't classify this under a single colour key.  One thing I did differently to the Pigpen painting, though, was that I added a spatter of French ultramarine at the end.  I just felt like it.

So with nothing much to say about the techniques, let's talk about the painting and the lessons learned.

– First things first.  From start to finish this took three hours, not including finding the source photo, adjusting brightness and putting it through the Art Assist App.  So something like this would definitely be doable on PAOTY, especially when there’s a one hour break in addition toothed four hours when I could potentially still be painting.

– It was only when I finished this one that I realised I'd committed a major screwup.  Because Ross was looking to the right in my source photo, I've put the biggest portrait on the left of the painting – if I'd put the big portrait on the right, the viewers' eyes would have been drawn out of the painting.  And because I was half on autopilot, I worked from cool colours on the left to warm on the right, just like I did for Pigpen.  This was just dumb.  The warm colours needed to be in the biggest portrait because warm colours come forward and cool ones recede.  Oh well.

– I’m thinking that rather than drawing in features with pencil I should try drawing in the recommended value shapes, especially the darkest shapes.  This would make it much easier for me to painting the shapes and achieve a likeness.  Speaking of which…

- The likenesses aren't quite there today.  The big portrait is OK I guess, definitely recognisable.  And I've captured the smirk and the way his eyes re looking upwards.  But the likeness starts to drop off in the other two, mainly because I wasn't sure exactly where to put my middle and dark shapes.  If I screw up my eyes the middle Ross might be passable but the one on the right looks more like the other potato brother from Eastenders.

– The blue spatters are interesting.  Sometimes a painting will need them; sometimes it won't.  It's something worth keeping in my back pocket ready for action if required.

Overall, I reckon Ross is worth a place in the shop window.  The name of the painting includes my favourite catchphrase of his and needed to be more than just Ross Kemp, that name already being taken by my earlier effort.