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.