Vasquez Rocks

Today I'm back to old ways, not just painting a landscape but also allowing colours to mix on the paper and in the palette rather than just painting in monotone glazes.  I'd forgotten how much fun this could be and how much less time it takes.  For subject matter, I googled around and found Vasquez rocks in Southern California.  These may possibly have featured in three episodes of Star Trek TOS: Friday's Child, Shore Leave and Arena.

I went with a warm green colour scheme, choosing cerulean blue and raw sienna for their earthiness and granulation and Winsor red because it seemed to form a more appropriate triad with those other two colours than the other candidate reds.  I also used burnt sienna and viridian to bring in some interesting tones (notably darks) and hematite violet genuine to get some rocky texture.  I'm sure people also remember that the hematite violet needs to be used up before I can start using the potters pink.  With burnt sienna being a warm red and viridian being a green, these still leave the painting in the key of warm green.

After putting down a rough pencil outline without a grid, I rubbed a candle along the foreground to get some texture and then I was ready to go.  I wet the sky area and dropped in cerulean blue in places.  It started granulating straight away and also leaving big white cloudy shapes.  I added some of the red int9 the sky in the top right to help balance the painting and some of the red and raw sienna down near the horizon for a bit of variety.

The rest of the painting was a case of  starting with an underpainting and then adding layer after layer of whatever colours I thought might look good.  Throughout all of this I was paying attention to the need to have shadows in the right places.  Maybe too much attention: I probably should have waited until much later before darkening those areas.  The big shadowy area ended up causing me lots of problems tha5 could easily have been avoided but I got there in the end.

The top facing sides of my rocks were looking darker than I'd have liked, so I applied the titanium white trick, painting some of the white, diluting it in the paper and then dabbing it off.  This technique worked well today.  And that was me done.

I've ended up with what can only be described as an interesting painting.  Because there are interesting colours in the rocks (especially in the shadows) and in the sky.  Compositionally it works well with its balance, its focal point, the pathway to the focal point and the strong upward sloping diagonals.  This one's up for sale.

The Buttery, Christ's College

Today I'm back to painting after a few days off getting my feet under the table in a correspondence chess tournament.  And I'm back with another of those indoor landscapes.  This is The Buttery, the student bar in my Cambridge college.  It seems they have a TV up on the wall these days, which I'm not sure I approve of.  Something they are doing differently these days that I do approve of is that when it's not open as a bar, the Buttery doubles up as a coffee shop.  That sounds good.

It's a three layer notan painting with my amber colour scheme, so transparent yellow, Winsor red and French ultramarine.  Being made up of a yellow, a red and a blue, this also counts as being in a colour key – it's triadic right today.

One of the things I did differently today was to add multiple layers of masking fluid.  The first was used to reserve whites (with large areas being reserved by outlining and putting a cross in the middle).  After the yellow went down, I used masking fluid to reserve any yellow areas.  And then I reserved oranges after the red went down.  You can see from looking at the final painting how important it was to reserve the yellows and oranges with so many tiny shapes in those colours.  The other thing I kind of did differently was to try extra hard to keep the second (red) layer quite light so that the medium tones come out orange rather than in the red that I'd have got from applying the semi transparent Winsor red too thickly.

And it all came out OK, even if it's not personally one of my favourites.  Just like the room in New Court, it has a Charles Burns feel to it.  It's up for sale.

Hale And Pace

Today I've been painting Hale and Pace, a comedy double act from the 1980s and 90s.  Sometimes you see a photo and you just have to turn it into a painting.

After using the red, amber and green colour schemes from my conventional palette yesterday, and having used the supergranulators a bit too often recently, this was always going to be in my blue notan scheme.  So the first layer was cerulean blue, the second French ultramarine and the third quinacridone magenta.  There was a bit too much white background for my liking, so I made it orange instead, orange being the complementary colour of blue.  I used quinacridone magenta in there for consistency with the two figures and combined this with transparent yellow to get the most neutral looking orange possible.  I also added in some French ultramarine in places for variety and dabbed at the while background with kitchen paper to keep it quite light so that it didn't compete with the figures.

In planning the painting with the Notanizer app, I set the sliders to what I thought might make an interesting painting but that risked making both guys look like pandas.  So I can't complain when that's what actually happened.  Things looked even worse at one point, so I adjusted the sliders to allow me to add more darks, which made things slightly better.  Not that the darks make much difference, being hardly distinguishable from the medium tones, something I noted after the Warren Haynes painting.  I should really have learned my lesson.

I think it's pretty clear who these two are supposed to be but it's not great. Norman on the right has a decent likeness but the shape of Gareth's head seems wrong.  And his hand hasn't really come through and there are those eyes in both of them.

It all looks pretty amateurish really.  This one won't be going up for sale.

Fleabag

A lot of my recent watercolour portraits seem to have been painted from a distance, including bodies, hands and things like that.  I wanted to go back to basics today and concentrate on the face.  So I picked a photo of Phoebe Waller–Bridge that looked like it might still be interesting after being cropped.  I particularly liked how the eyes and mouth stood out so much that it seemed there was nothing else in the face.  With the face being quite simple, I thought I'd make this one a triple portrait.

I've gone for three layer notan portraits using my traffic light colour schemes, as I've been using the supergranulators a bit too often recently.  So so the three layers are:

– on the left, transparent yellow, cerulean blue and French ultramarine

– in the middle, transparent yellow, Winsor red and French ultramarine

– on the right, rose dore, Winsor red and French ultramarine

I also spattered the second and third layer colours in the otherwise empty bottom left corner.

I guess the one thing I did differently to normal was that I didn't reserve all the white areas.  I reserved tiny white highlights in the eyes in all three portraits and all the big white areas on the left with masking fluid.  But for the other two portraits I didn't reserve the big white shapes, instead just being careful to leave them empty when painting on the first layer of colour.  For the one in the right I even wet the areas I wanted to painting rose dore before adding the paint: this gave my white shapes soft edges.

I have a friend who I think looks a bit like Fleabag.  After the first two layers were down, this was looking more like her than like the true subject but the third layer did help bring things back.  The final version has a little bit of my friend still there but is mainly Fleabag.  I'm calling this one Fleabag rather than Phoebe Waller–Bridge because, well, that's who I've painted.  Anyway, this one feels like a winner and it's going up for sale.

Inside New Court, Christ's College

I needed to paint something other than portraits and, while looking around my Cambridge college's website, hit upon the idea of painting the inside of a room.  This is one of the rooms in New Court, a building I thought I'd painted a couple of times but that it turns out I've painted five times before!  I'm not sure whether this counts as a landscape or whether it's just a still life.  I think it has definite still life vibes.  I've also identified a couple more college rooms that I might paint another time.

I've used the Notanizer app again.  This is the first time I've used it for anything other than a portrait.  Paintings of rooms look very different in notan to portraits.  The shapes are smaller and more intricate.  Some of the plans I've seen of rooms remind me a lot of Charles Burns' graphic novels.

With these notan paintings, the values do all the work of "getting the likeness".  With the colours not needing to be realistic, I can just use them to set the mood.  I decided quickly that I'd be using supergranulators as their texture is well suited to a building that's predominantly made of concrete.  I went for the tundra colours again (for the third successive painting) not only because they suited the cold brutalistic architecture but also because I thought cool blues and purples in the darker areas might make the lighter while and pink areas look warmer – I'd picked out a source photo with a lot of sunlight coming through the window.

I followed the usual procedure.  Pencil outline and reserved whites, a layer of tundra pink, a layer of tundra blue and a layer of the tundra violet.

Tundra violet gave me big problems today.  After I put the first layer down, the mars brown in it was coming through really strongly as it dried.  In retrospect, I think this is just due to the brown and the blue in the mix drying at different rates and that the brown notes would have disappeared if I'd left well alone.  But instead I panicked and kept charging in more colour and dropping in bits of water, just to try to make it do something different.  It just made the brown notes stronger and created cauliflowers.  Whenever I tried to paint over the top, the browns and cauliflowers kept reappearing without me doing any tinkering.  Eventually, I hit upon the idea of wetting all the darks and lifting paint and drying with kitchen paper.  Then I went over the top of the resulting mess with more of the tundra violet.  I don't know what has happened but I've ended up with a dark, opaque, boring colour.  Maybe I've damaged the sizing on the paper.  But it's better than what I had before.

I also did a little bit of tinkering, adding some more blue and pink and white gouache in an attempt to make some of the shapes clearer.  I think that's more important in a detailed painting like this than in a portrait.  In some places I've only hinted at shapes by using a very watered down pink: it's like a fifth value in a four value painting.

There are some bits about this one that I like.  There's the negatively painted chair in front of the mirror and the hot sun on the desk.  That tundra violet drags everything down a bit for me but this painting got great feedback on Facebook, so it's going up for sale.

Three-One!

Something about that Joe Jordan painting yesterday put me in a nostalgic mood and wanting to keep going back to the 1978 World Cup.  And the obvious next portrait subject was Archie Gemmill, scorer of my favourite ever World Cup goal, putting Scotland 3-1 up against the Netherlands in a game  they had to win by three goals to go through to the next round.  This is Archie's understated goal celebration.

This being Scotland, I've gone for the tundra supergranulators again.  And just like last time, the figure is in three layers using the Notanizer app in the design.  So the first layer after reserving the white highlights was tundra pink, then tundra blue, then tundra violet.

This time, though, I did something different for the background.  The app was suggesting the there were four different values in the background and I didn't fancy following its plan with three layers of colour, so instead went for a wet into wet approach.  I used all five tundra colours for this, so that was tundra orange and tundra green as well as the three colours on the figure.  This was partly modified by green being a football-related colour and orange being the colour of the Dutch national team.  I didn't attempt to follow the values in the source photo but instead put colours where they looked good, contrasting against the values on adjacent bits of the figure wherever I could.  I sprinkled on a little salt and, because it looked as if I might have the background too dark, gently removed some of the paint with a paper towel.

Once everything had dried and I'd removed all the masking fluid, I tinkered a little in places, attempting to improve things by seeking a likeness, adding some more highlights and trying to make Archie's fist look more like a fist.

I ended up with something that I wasn't 100% satisfied with but it grew on me over the next couple of days and I ended up putting it in the shop window.  The best bit about this one (apart from that amazing background) is how the neck of the shirt is too big - that definitely has some Archie Gemmill 1978 vibes to it.

Joe Jordan

Today I have been mostly painting a portrait of Joe Jordan.  As he's wearing a Scotland shirt it seemed appropriate to paint this one with three layers of the tundra supergranulators.  I used the Notanizer app to help me do this one and found a way to make things easier, so I'm going to go through this one step by step.

- First I found a portrait to use as subject matter and cropped it down to 4x6 proportions.  With this I could fit it into the paper while leaving half an inch at the top and bottom that could be hidden behind a mount.  There will be bits on the left and right that are hidden too, but it was important for me to not end up with the top of the head or the shirt badges hidden.

- I put the photo into the Notanizer app and moved the sliders around until I was happy with the resulting four value plan.  I took a note of where the sliders finished up.  They were at 5, 36 and 64  on a scale that went from 0 to 100.

- I put a 4*6 grid of squares over the paper, used this to put down a pencil drawing, then rubbed out all the grid lines.

-  Then the painting started properly with me reserving all the white highlighted areas with masking fluid.  Well, most of them.  For the two big white shapes on the sleeves, I just reserves the outlines, then put masking fluid crosses in the middle of them to remind me not to fill them in.  Now, I could have used my four value plan to help me identify those white res, but I didn't do this be a use I've found an easier way.  I got the Notanizer to give me a two value plan but put the slider at (checks notes from earlier) 64.  This left all my whites white but made all the other values the same colour.  Much easier to use.  I also spattered on some stars or flying sweat drips in the background in the top half of the painting.

- Then the first layer went down.  Tundra pink over all the light, medium and dark areas.  This is the easiest task in the process as it means paint down everywhere except in the reserved white areas.  To make things interesting, I lightly sprayed the paint with water and charged in some dryer paint in places.

- After that was dry I added the second layer: tundra blue over all the medium and dark areas.  And to kelp me do this I got the Notanizer to do me a three value plan with the sliders at 36 and 64 so that the medium and dark areas looked the same and I didn't need to remember to paint on both.  This second layer is always the longest stage in the process and one that demands a lot of care.  It's the make or break stage.  And, again, I sprayed on some water and charged in dry paint.

- And for the final stage I painted tundra violet over all the darkest areas.  I sprayed water over and charged dry paint into Joe's shirt shirt, the only big dark shape.

- And after that, just two more jobs.  The first is to wait a long time before removing the masking fluid.  A little bit of impatience here and you can end up smearing dark paint over some of those white areas.  And the final job is to look at the end product and decide whether to make my tiny adjustments by any more of the medium or dark value colours to improve the likeness.  And I didn’t think I needed to do that today.  So that was me done.

I'm really happy with the final result today.  I've caught all the joy of scoring a goal.  The joy that means you can't stop smiling, even when you're missing teeth.  I've also managed to get the supergranulators snapping, crackling and popping in both the  background and on Joe's shirt, something I wish I could do more often.  Joe's up for sale.

Jennifer Evie II

I've been on the inktense pencils today as I wasn't feeling in the mood for watercolour.  I picked out this pose by Jennifer Evie; it's her second appearance as a model on this blog.  I was brave and picked a pose that included a face and a foreshortened arm but, as you can see, cropped out those tricky bits later to end up with something vaguely presentable.

For colours, I repeated a combination that I used once before: bark, baked earth, mustard and leaf green with some bits of iris blue added in places for some extra interest.  But the blue didn't really come through this time.  I must have only put it down in places where there was already mustard, so it only turned the yellows to greens, leaving me with quite a boring brown and green painting.

So I added a second layer of colour, with the iris blue again but also some poppy red to contrast against the greens.  I tried generally to put the red on the left and blue on the right to get some sort of temperature gradient going.  At the same time I trued darkening the hair and some of the shadows with more of the bark colour.  The red and blue definitely worked but I still wasn't happy with my dark areas.

So I added a third layer of colour.  This time I added charcoal grey to the shadows and to the hair.  This improved things slightly.  In particular it gave me some interesting granulation effects on places.  Adding a fourth layer would probably have been pushing things too far with the intense pencils which, in my experience, work best with just a single wetting.  So that was me done.  Here's what I ended up with before the cropping:

I'm sure you can see that the face and the foreshortened arm haven't worked.  A lot of the dark colours that I added in the second and third layers were all about darkening the right forearm and covering a lot of the face in shadow but there's only so much I can do.  So I've cropped out the worst bits of this one before I post it up on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads.  While the cropped version looks a lot better, I don't think it's good enough to go up for sale.

Paul With Markers

I've been out most of the day but came back to see some Facebook banter from old Christ's boy Paul wondering whether he could get me to send him the portrait I did as an exercise a few years ago.  Sure, I can do that.  Anyone whose portrait I paint can have it for free.  But that portrait was only in pencil in a really cheap sketch book.  Hardly worth the stamp.  So I thought I'd attempt Paul again using markers, not only so he'll not be disappointed when the post arrives but also to show how far I've come since 2021.

I used a new app to help me do this one.  It's the Notanizer app and I've seen it recommended by Mitch Albala, which immediately grabs my attention.  And this is a proper app, not just an internet link, so it's something I could use where there's no internet reception.  It can divide paintings up into two, three or four sets of value shapes and there are sliding buttons that you can use to set exactly where one value ends and another starts.  Moving those sliders around is a lot easier than adjusting photos using brightness and contrast knobs and then pushing them through the Art Assist App again to see how the value plans change.  Actually you can choose to have value plans based on more than four values, but you only get the sliding buttons when you want 2-4 values.

Anyway, for this one I picked four values and moved the sliders round until I got to what looked like an interesting value plan.  Then I used the same colours as I did for Steven Bartlett, so that was putty on all the light, medium and dark values.  Then soft peach on the mediums and darks and putty on the darks.

I'm happy with this one and I hope Paul will be too.  One interesting thing about it is that the marks with the putty marker show up on his forehead and give him a wooden appearance.  But the best thing about it is that the distribution and proportions of lights, mediums and darks is spot on: those sliding buttons in the Notanizer app are going to make a big difference to my three layer paintings.

Gregg Allman In Coloured Pencil

Time for something new.  This has been brewing away in my mind for a couple of weeks and I finally decided to give it a go.  It's my first ever coloured pencil painting using a coloured pencil blender pen.  It's also on hot pressed watercolour paper, another first for me with, coloured pencils anyway.   My suspicion has been that the blending will work better on the smoother paper – up to now most if my coloured pencil paintings have been on cold pressed watercolour paper.

For subject matter I went for Gregg Allman.  I’ve had a go at Gregg before, both on his own with the markers and with the rest of the band in inktense pencils but felt that he deserved a better, more serious portrait.

This one took me three days.  I guess I could have finished it in two but coloured pencils are hard work and I didn’t want to pick up a repetitive strain injury.  To help me through this, I had lots of Grateful Dead playing in the background.  Sometimes with coloured pencils you're filling out large areas with one pencil and minimal pressure.  You need to be able to get in the zone and let the mind drift.  This might not be a Grateful Dead portrait but it needed some Dead to help its creation.

For the black areas I used my usual combination of Delft blue, dark red, dark pthalo green and helio blue reddish but added in a bit of black towards the end.

For the hair I marked in some grooves with a pointy stick before starting.  And then coloured it in with lots of different colours in individual strokes following the hairs.  A few times I also tried negative painting where the hairs joined the skull, putting dark colours in the shadows between them.

For the skin tones, I used lots of layers with different ideas.  Some layers were all about darkening shadows.  Some were about brightening the highlights.  Some were all about warming up or cooling down different bits of the face.  Some were about adding colours that looked good.  And some were about adding a plain layer of a single flesh tone just to keep dragging things back to normal.

And after all the pencil marks were down I took a deep breath and went over them all with the blender pen.  Here's what the painting looked like before and after the blending:

Before considering the merits of the final painting, I need to evaluate the impact of the hot pressed paper and of the blender pens.

First up, the paper.  Yes, I like the results.  I still have the slightly out of focus look that I get with cold pressed paper.  The main difference I noticed was that the paper seemed to have more capacity for colour than the cold pressed, which I wasn't expecting.  And it's slightly less tiring using the pencils on smoother paper.  I may well switch to hot pressed paper at some point.  But I need to buy that paper in a pad rather than using a block.  Blocks cost more because they're glued down on all four sides to prevent the paper buckling when wet, so don't make sense with coloured pencils.

And then therefore the blender pens.  I can see that they blend the colours while also making them darker and looking more like paint than pencils.  And they seem to work better on the smoother paper.  But I bought three pens for £15 and two of them are almost completely trashed after this painting, so they're an expensive way to blend.  Maybe bottled solvents make more sense, with the pens only being used for fine detail.  I'll try this out in the summer when I can go outside with the solvent.  But using only blender pens, while interesting, won't become a regular thing.

And as a painting I think this one works.  It’s definitely Gregg and I've managed to catch a weariness in the eyes.  This colours in the hair are bring things to life and the black, red and yellow shapes in the background are interesting.  Gregg's up for sale.

The Man That Mildred Married

After a day off I was back today with the oil pastels.  For a subject I picked out comedy actor Brian Murphy.

As usual I put down a pencil outline using a grid, then put some colour in the eyes, nostrils and mouth.  And then I just enjoyed myself, putting in the face whatever colours either felt right or that I could see in the source photo, occasionally adding white to lighten things and eventually stopping when the paper couldn't take any more colour.  Then I added some quite simple clothes and background.  And that was me done.

But things went strangely.  Early on this looked like Brian but the longer I went on, the more heroic he started to look.  And the more I tried to bring back Brian's likeness, the more he started looking like Paul Newman.  Or is it James Coburn 8n Pat Garret And Billy The Kid?

Despite not getting a likeness of my intended subject, this looks good and is going up for sale. It looks like a human being with a personality.  And despite me using all sorts of weird colours, I've ended up with what looks like flesh tones.  Oh, and I like the shirt and the background wall and doorknob.

Gary Moore

After managing to capture the face that Warren Haynes pulls when he hits a high note, I thought I'd thought I'd try a repeat performance by painting the only guitarist that can pull better faces than Warren and that's the late Gary Moore.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then you might want to check out this performance.

For colours, I picked the Shire supergranulators.  A green theme seems befitting for someone born in Belfast.  This was a three layer painting and

– the first layer was a random set of marks in Shire yellow and Shire olive, covering all the paper except the reserved white highlights

– the second layer was Shire blue with Shire green charged in in places

– after using so much Shire blue in the second layer, I was worried that the value differential from a third layer of green apatite genuine and forest brown might not be big enough, so I painted the third layer in Shire grey instead but still charged in both greens in places.

While the third layer was wet. I added more Shire grey down Gary's left side (our right) in an attempt to harden some edges and to make him stand out just a little bit against background.  And just as the paint was beginning to shine I sprinkled on a tiny bit of salt in the top half of the background.  I had intended to spatter on some masking fluid at the beginning to look like flying beads of sweat but forgot, so put in the salt to try to get something going on around Gary's head.

Once everything was dry, I removed the masking fluid and did a little bit of tinkering.  In particular I added in Gary's right eye, which the Artist Assist App had wanted me to leave out.  And that was me done.

And let me tell you I'm really happy with this one.  I have the likeness and the colours have left this one looking like an old neglected photo in the bottom of a drawer.  But, best of all, I can feel the note that Gary's playing.  It's not just the face he's pulling but the way he's leaning back and cocking his head to one side.  Today would be a very good day for the PAOTY judges to come calling.

Introducing Potters' Pink To The Team

It’s been a couple of years since I picked up three Daniel Smith Primatek colours for Christmas and I'm ready now to discuss their future.

First up, Mayan blue genuine is a great cool, granulating blue and has earned a place in my main palette of 18 colours.

Then there's green apatite genuine.  It's an interesting colour, granulating and separating into different colours.  It's like a Schmincke supergranulator.  In fact it fits better with them than in my main palette.  So I've replaced it in  my main palette with Payne's grey.  My Mijello palette has 14 rectangular wells and four triangular ones in the corners.  I can now have the four opaque colours (cadmium yellow, sepia and Payne's grey) in those triangular wells, which feels neat and tidy to me.  And the green apatite genuine now sits in my supergranulating palette.  Along with forest brown it provides the dark greens that the generally light valued Shire supergranulators are so desperately lacking.  Green apatite genuine has a future.

Which brings me on to hematite violet genuine.  It's still there in my palette but will run out at some point, and that's when I'll be replacing it with Potters' pink.  It's almost a like for like substitution, with both having a bit of red to them but neither being super warm.  And for both of them their main purpose in life is to impart a bit of granulation and texture to other colours.  But the pink is a lot cheaper, so will be joining the team at some point.

In fact I've already bought a tube of potters' pink and was in the mood this afternoon for some swatching, so I've been taking a look at how it mixes with all the other 17 colours it will be sharing a palette with.

First up, I swatched the pink on its own:

I don't know why I did this really, as it's not a colour that I'm expecting to ever use on its own.  Still, you can already see that it likes to granulate.  This was all done on the back of a rough textured sheet of watercolour paper.

Then I tried mixing the pink with my yellows:

In all four cases there's some colour separation going on, which augers well.  It's least visible in the raw sienna mix, probably because both colours there are less saturated, earthy colours.  And comparing these colours to the results of mixing yellows with hematite violet genuine, you can see the difference between how the pink generates colour separation whereas the violet leaves lots of tiny black specks in the mix.  Two different effects, neither one being "more right" than the other.

Then we come to the reds:

The colour separation doesn't show up much here, what with everything being similar in hue.  If anything, the cadmium red (because it granulates) and the quinacridone magenta (because it's a vaguely more distinct hue) work best with the pink.  Hematite violet worked better with the reds because the black particles showed up.  Maybe I just won't bother mixing potters' pink with reds.

Then the blues:

And there, my friends, you see potters' pink at its best.  Colour separation absolutely everywhere.  I expected the French ultramarine mix to look good as it's what tundra pink is based on but the cerulean blue and Winsor blue green shade mixes may be even better.  I've mixed up some quite grey looking shades but I guess I could use more blue in the mix to get something bluer with the colour separation still going on.  Whatever I decide to do, these just look amazing.

I could just stop there and be happy but let's look at the browns:

Not a great deal to see here.  Just like with the reds, the similarity in hues means that the colour separation doesn't show up much.  If anything, the mix with sepia looks like it has the most potential.  Looking back at the cadmium red, cadmium yellow and Payne's grey mixes, the opaque colours seem to have generally exceeded expectations.

And finally there's viridian, my only green:

I expected this mix to be a good one and it is.  Green and red are easy to tell apart if you're not colourblind and viridian is a big time granulator.  This one reminds me of desert green, which is a mixture of viridian with cadmium red.

So it's looking like potters' pink will be a great addition to the team if I mix it with greens, blues and maybe yellows.  It will give me interesting options.  But for now it remains on gardening leave, waiting for me to finish off the hematite violet genuine.

Tres Hombres

I wanted to have another go at painting ZZ Top after failing so badly a couple of days ago.  This time, though, it would be in watercolour and using the desert supergranulators, a set of colours befitting of a band from Texas.  No other colours were used other than the desert colours.

I started by putting down a drawing using a grid.  Then I added highlights.  As well as the recommended highlights I added some in the sunglasses, which I thought might work well.  Once the masking fluid was dry, I put in the first glaze.  It was mainly desert orange but I varied it with desert yellow in places, in particular anywhere in the faces where I thought the tones were a bit lighter.  I charged in the odd extra bit of colour or spotted in some water in places, just to get the supergranulators partying.  And once that was all dry, I put on the second glaze.  This was in tundra brown and I again tried to get it doing tricks by adding water and dry paint.  That was all by the book, I then started deviating.

While the second glaze was drying, I decided that this one would benefit from a bit of colour in the background.  So I wet the background and out in lots of random yellow and orange and a bit of brown.  For my brushstrokes I pushed the brush into the paper, getting the bristles to bend and splay out everywhere.  I tinkered for a while and, just as it seemed I'd been tinkering for too long and that cauliflowers were starting to appear, I dabbed the background all over with kitchen paper to dry it and to leave an interesting understated colour.

The third layer was mainly desert grey.  The band had some interesting patterns on their jackets in places which I tried to suggest in a number of ways, dripping in water to create cauliflowers, charging in tundra green and charging in tundra yellow.  Nothing worked to my satisfaction and I eventually decides to just leave the suggestion of a pattern by putting on more tundra grey and dabbing it off with kitchen paper to suggest the patterns.

For finishing touches, I looked for ways to add or remove paint to improve the likenesses and, once I was happy, spattered on a little desert grey and desert brown in the background.  And that was me done.

This one's a big improvement on two days ago and I like it.  There's a vague suggestion in the background colours that this is a desert scene, which I like, but the figures don’t look like they've been sculpted in sand, which would have been good.  What this does look like, though, is an old, faded black and white photo with all those sepia-like tones.  This one has atmosphere to it.  It's up for sale.

Freddie Mercury

Right.  That's enough of the Inktense pencils.  I need to get back to watercolour portraits to impress any passing Portrait Of The Year Judges.  I thought I’d have a crack at Freddie Mercury today - he's been waiting patiently for a while now.  Colour-wise, having used my red triad for Amy Winehouse, my amber triad for Jimi Hendrix and my blue triad for Warren Haynes, I thought my green triad deserved the chance of a full size portrait.  So this one has transparent yellow as a first layer, cerulean blue as a second and French ultramarine as a third.

At the beginning when I was reserving the whites with masking fluid, I also spattered over some masking fluid for a starry background.  Later on, with both of the blue layers, I tried to stimulate some granulation by charging dry colour into areas that were already wet.  And I did a little bit of dabbing with kitchen paper on the final layer to create even more texture.  There was a bit of fiddling at the end, painting in some second or third layer shapes that I’d missed and tinkering around looking for a likeness.  In particular I tried to bring out Freddie’s hair with some very dry French ultramarine rather than just leaving it to merge with the background.  And that was me done.

While I remember, grids are great for getting the outlines down, especially when I also do loads of measuring.  I'm convinced I could never have done this freehand after discovering that the bottom of Freddie's nose is barely a quarter of the way down his face!  Measure, measure, measure!

Anyway, the final result is OK.  Definitely Freddie and there's the power there in the pose that I was hoping to be able to recreate but the mouth and his left hand are both a bit messy.  And with so much of the yellow in the first layer showing, he has a bit of a Homer Simpson vibe going on.  It's something for me to watch out for in future if doing a three layer portrait based on a source photo that has a lot of light tone (one layer of colour, not the not white highlights with no colour) in the skin.  On the other hand I think the green background's great.  The variety and texture is probably down to the second and third colours both being big time granulators.  Freddie's up for sale.

<Edit: someone on LinkedIn pointed out that Freddie's neck looks too wide.  I agree - it's obvious now it's been pointed out.  But if I changed it by laying on more blue the alteration would stick out a mile, so I'm leaving this as it is.>

ZZ Top

Today's was a bit of  flop.  I wanted to have another go at a three layer Inktense pencil band portrait and decided to have a go at ZZ Top.  I wanted to use different colours to yesterday with a more fleshy looking first colour and, after a bit of experimentation, found that tangerine, poppy red and leaf green made for an interesting threesome.

But they turned out not to be.  Here's what they ended up looking like:

The darkest colour must be the ugliest, muddiest looking brown I've ever seen.  And everything is looking too red.  It's just horrible.  So I attempted a rescue job.  What I did was to:

- go over the darks in bark, in an attempt to just get a dark colour that was a lot less red.  Maybe I should have use indigo instead.  And when I put in this dark colour I ignored all the patterns on the jackets where I'd tried to leave the red showing and just painted over them.  I also tried to give the impression with my brushstrokes of arms being there.

- go over the middle values with Shiraz, just to make them stand out a bit better from the light values

- all and wet a few random background marks in sun yellow, poppy red, bright blue and mustard just to get some different colours in there.

And after all that it's better but still a flop.  I might have to just stick to yesterday's triad of colours if I want to do this again.  And steer away from source photos with big, dark shapes. If there's anything positive about this one it's the reflections in the sunglasses.  And I guess the likenesses are ok too.

Human Figure Drawing, Daniela Brambilla - Book Review

On to the last of my Christmas books.  I've been looking forward to this one as it's an absolute monster.  It's nit just hardback, it's not just 256 pages long.  It's also a little bit taller and wider than all my other books.  And the paper inside it is matte rather than glossy.  This book has gravitas and it feels important even before looking inside.

I'm going to start with a huge criticism.  The back of the book says that it "aims to teach the secrets of drawing the human figure" and that it's aimed at "those who want to draw as well as those who are already proficient".  I really hope that it was the publisher that wrote this and not the author because it's blatantly untrue.  This isn't a book that teaches: it's a book that provides some tips to and sets a few exercises for experienced artists.  If you're not an experienced artist, walk away now.  You need to have read either Betty Edwards or Bert Dodson and followed it up with Chris Legaspi, Steve Huston or something similar.

The book has eighteen chapters on:

- gesture drawing

- contour drawing

- combining the two

- lines of force

- proportions

- filling out shapes from inside with scribbles

- negative drawing

- drawing from memory

- balance

- trying out other media

- light and shadow

- drawing with multiple values

- composition, viewing angle, etc

- what to say

- character

- age and what makes different people different

- sketchbooks

- using imagination to make things more interesting

It's a pretty comprehensive list of chapters.  Some of these chapters have similar names to those in the Bert Buchman book, and I'm going to compare and contrast the two books later in this review.  I've written down on the list what the chapters are about rather than Daniela's chapter names,  I have to point out an issue I have with one of them.  The chapter that's on doing drawings with multiple values is titled "chiaroscuro" but my understanding of chiaroscuro is that it's about contrasting light and dark areas against each other - something vaguely similar but not the same.

As for content in the individual chapters, most of it was ideas for exercises, with the odd useful tip thrown in.  At the end of each chapter there's a bullet point list of exercises.  But my problem is the lack of teaching in the book.  There's no description, for example of what gesture drawing is (read Betty Edwards) or what lines of force are (I think this may be about imagining the backbone, hipline and shoulder line as making up a bendy capital I, which I read in another book at some point).  Contour drawing is glossed over too: Charles Reid gives the best explanations of this in all his books.  There are a lot of pictures in this book but with no attaching to text to tell us whether, let alone where, they fit with the test of the story.  And I'm not a fan of Daniela's writing style.  It's a bit too waffly and I less for my liking and her paragraphs are so long that they go over multiple pages, meaning that many readers will skip some of the illustrations.

So, yes, it's not a book that attempts to teach the reader anything.  And the pictures are disconnected from the text.  Some of the pictures are useful, illustrating things that Daniela doesn't explain, but you have to work hard looking at them and trying to work out whether they're actually linked to what's going on in the main body of text.

I see this book as a book of exercises.  I've seen that there's an exercise book by Betty Edwards that people can buy to go with her Drawing On The Right Side Of the Brain book.  I've never looked inside it but understand that it's all just exercises and that all the teaching is in the main book.  It would be a mistake for someone to go out looking for the main book and come back with the exercise book: on its own it would be useless.  I think this book is like that exercise book of Betty's.

This book also reminds me of the Bill Buchman book.  Both are books with exercises to try after reading books on drawing and figure drawing.  Of the two, I prefer Bill's.  It's an easier read, easier to follow and includes text with all the illustrations whether they represent demos or completed paintings.  But the exercises in the two books go down two very different roads: Daniela's work is much more conventional and Bill's more abstract.  Another reason why I prefer Bill's but that last reason is a personal preference, whereas my other reasons are all about Bill's book being better.  After reading Daniela's book, I'm feeling a greater appreciation for Bill's and am pushing its rating up from three palettes to four.

So this one's badly written, has lies on the back cover and doesn't really teach the reader anything (I've not even made any notes on it).  But it's not a complete disaster.  An experienced artist wanting to fine tune some aspect of their figure drawing could dip into the relevant chapter(s) and find some exercises (and the odd tip) to improve his skills.  For me at the moment, that might mean the chapters on gesture drawing and on combing gesture and contour drawing.  Although I'd probably go for the Buchman book first.

I'm finding myself starting to go round in circles, so I'll cut to the chase.  This book does serve a purpose, for an artist at a particular level looking for ideas for exercises to improve his skills in different aspects of figure drawing.  I personally prefer Buchman.  Others won't.  This is looking like a two paletter.  It won't get many rereads from me unless I become more conventional or need more ideas to supplement Bill's but I can see how it would be useful to others, so it's not making me angry.  It does come with a warning, though, that it's only for experienced artists who already know what things like gesture and contour drawing mean.

⚠️ Warning!      🎨🎨      Danger! ⚠️

Rush

A new month and new boundaries to push, new ideas to explore.  I've been having all this fun with the Artist Assist App but have only so far used its three layer recommendations for watercolours.  What's to stop me using them with inktense pencils?  Inktense pencils are transparent and big time stainers, so surely the three layer technique should work with these?

I started today with some quick experiments on the back of a failed watercolour, testing out a few possible colour triads and comparing the results of wetting each layer individually to only applying water after all three colours were down.  I came to the conclusion that sherbert lemon, poppy red and violet would make. good combination and that I was better off only wetting the marks after all three colours were down.

And then I for to work.  I picked a photo of Rush, a band that I've drawn before in markers, deliberately choosing one with a white background so that I didn't need to paint it all in.  I marked out a grid, drew in pencil outlines, rubbed out the grid lines, softened all the other lines and reached for the inktense pencils.  I put down yellow on all the light, middle and dark res, then the red on the middle and darks and the violet on the darks.  And when I was finally happy, I wet all the pencil marks, one band member at a time no starting in each case with the dark areas before moving in to the middles and the lights.  I tinkered a little in places where I thought I needed some more marks, then left everything to dry and rubbed off any remaining pencil marks.  And that was me done.

And, let me tell you, that was a fun experience.  It was a much faster project than I was expecting, with hardly any time spent waiting for things to dry.  I found it much easier to stick to the Art Assist app with the inktense pencils than with watercolour: I felt in control, at least while putting down the inktense pencil marks.  And the best think about inktense pencils is that I can rub off all my pencil outlines at the end.  On the one hand I was sad to remove so many details that I'd spent time drawing in.  But on the other hand everything looks cleaner no so much is left to the viewer's imagination.

Likeness-wise, it's a reversal of last time around with Alex Lifeson on the right being the best likeness, Geddy Lee on the left being the worst and the key Neil Peart in the middle being, well, in the middle.  I'm amazed by Alex in particular and about how a likeness can be created from so few marks.

And as a whole, the painting works for me.  I can feel the personalities there and all that white and missing detail make the band look as if they're in the spotlight.  This painting (and the idea of using the Artist Assist app with inktense pencils) was a big success.  This one's up for sale.