Joe Walsh

Today's painting is a portrait of Joe Walsh of The Eagles, someone who in his heyday was probably even more fun at parties than Frank Bough.  Because my source photo was made up of so few simple shapes, Joe was always a prime candidate for a triple portrait.

I went for a traffic light portrait, so the first layer of colour was transparent yellow on the left and in the middle and rose dore on the right. Then the second layer was cerulean blue in the left and Winsor red in the middle and on the right.  And the third layer was French ultra fine in all three portraits.

As usual, there was some tinkering at the end, trying to find a likeness.  For ideas about where to tinker, I went to my value plan on the Notanizer app and slid the controls up and down.  These would add or take way washes in various places and I'd adjust my existing washes wherever I thought cha fez would improve the likeness.  I wasn't a slave to the app: the app was an assistant and I made the final choices.  The golden rule when searching for a likeness, though, is that wherever I make a change to one painting, I make the same change to the other two.

As well as searching for a likeness, I looked for differences between my three portraits and made corrections.  And I put a dark French ultramarine shape and to the left of Joe's head in all three portraits to separate him from the background.

Finally I spattered the second layer colours in the empty triangle in the bottom left and French ultramarine in the empty triangle and in the background behind Joe's heads.  And that was me done.

It's a decent job, this one.  The likeness is there but it's not a photographic likeness (and I can't believe that I'm already aspiring to photographic likenesses).  And although the three portraits are very similar, there are tiny differences between them that suggest these are portraits painted at three different times with Joe in three different moods.  Joe's up for sale.

"The most terrifying thing that ever happened to me was that Keith Moon decided he liked me."

Frank Bough

Of all the celebrities ever to have been disgraced after being caught in a tabloid sting, Frank Bough is the most likely to raise a smile and the least likely to generate a clamour angry pitchforkers.  He would be there presenting Grandstand at lunchtime every Saturday, oozing charm, sophistication and gravitas and looking in complete control.  When it emerged that he would be doing this with only four hours sleep after pulling an all nighter at cocaine-fuelled, cross dressing sex parties with prostitutes, it made his skills look even more impressive if anything.  A level of professionalism that the rest of us can only aspire to.

I've punted Frank using the Notanizer app and the tundra colours.  So after putting a pencil outline and some masking fluid, that was a layer of tundra pink followed by a layer of tundra blue and then a layer of tundra violet.  I added a second layer of the violet in an attempt to make it darker and sprinkled some salt into it just for fun.  I then fiddled about with those three colours at the end trying to improve the likeness but without any luck, and spattered over all five tundra colours in the background.  And that was me done.

It's clear that this is Frank but there are some problems there.  The mouth's not right, with too many dark colours.  And some of the edges in the face are a bit too sharp.  On the other hand, screw your eyes up and it's definitely him.  This one's not going in the shop window but that's mainly because nobody's likely to want Frank's portrait on their wall.

Maybe I need to start weaning myself off the Notanizer app.  This won't happen straight away as I already have a traffic light painting pencilled out for tomorrow.

Inktense Pencil Squad Tinkering

I'm taking a day off from painting, so here's a post with some swatching.

I saw that Jacksons were doing deals this week on inktense pencils, so I jumped in and did something I keep thinking about but have never gotten around to until now.  I tinkered with the makeup of my inktense pencil collection.

Out went:

- tangerine, chilli red, poppy red and Shiraz, all of which have lightfastness issues.  I'm especially sad to see the back of the Shiraz, which I really liked.  Red is definitely a common theme when it comes to lightfastness issues with inktense pencils.

- white, which I've never found a use for.  Maybe it would have worked on coloured paper?

- the outliner, which I don't see the point of.  Normal pencils do just as good a job on outlining but are much easier to rub out.  I've heard the outliner is good for line and wash paintings but I'd rather use fine liner pens for them.

In their places came:

- orange sorbet

- wild flame

- paprika

- Persian red

- saddle brown

- sepia ink

I've swatched out all 24 colours in my new squad.  The orange looks like a like for like substitution (with a big improvement in lightfastness).  I'm glad to see I still have a proper red in the Persian after losing the poppy and chilli reds.  I'll miss the Shiraz but paprika and wild flame look like they could add flesh tones to my arsenal, something I've not had before or even realised that I didn't have, such is my attitude to colour matching.  And the white and fine liner have been replaced by two more dark colours that look interesting.  In particular the sepia could make some great, old fashioned looking, monotone paintings.

I'm looking forward to my next inktense session.

M2 Medway Crossing Under Three Different Skies

So here’s the thing.  I need to put my Landscape Artist Of The Year entry together by around the end of April.  My best landscape over the last twelve months, Kingsferry Bridge Under Three Different Skies, would have been the main submission in my entry butches been sold and currently sits proudly on the wall of a dentist's waiting room on the Isle Of Sheppey.

So I thought I'd have a go at coming up with something similar.  The subject has to be a bridge and today it's the bridge where the M2 crosses the River Medway.  Just as before, I used masking tape to divide things up before doing any painting. I was careful in composing this one not to have any vertical struts under the bridge overlapping the white bands.

The colour scheme is the same as before, with skies inspired by photos taken by old friends Howard and Cathy.  So:

– the left panel is in the key of orange cool, with cerulean blue, Winsor blue (green shade), rose dore and Indian yellow

- the middle panel is in the key of green cool, with Mayan blue genuine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow

- the panel in the right is in the key of triadic right, with French ultramarine, Winsor red and raw sienna

I started by going through one panel at a time, putting in the skies, the background Rochester and Borstal cityscape, the water and banks and the foreground road and grasses.  My plan at this early stage was for the bridge to be the only element in the painting to be lowed to break out of panels, so the tape stayed down.  I decided to let the paintings overflow, though into the otherwise wasted areas outside the main rectangle of tape, and I think this worked.  At this point I removed the tape and then stopped for the day, having made a late start.

Today's main job was to paint in the bridge.  This took three layers of paint because I wanted the shadows everywhere to be really dark.  I also glazed over all the grassy bits because they weren't green enough in my eyes.  For the closest green areas, I put in some really dry blue paint in places (making sure it was the right blue in each panel) and swept it upwards and outwards to create grassy shapes.  I let the grasses grow into the white bands because (seriously) grass is nature and nature doesn't respect artificial boundaries like white bands.  And for similar reasons, I put some birds in the sky that also ignored the white bands.

I fiddled around a bit with the water in the left panel, eventually settling for something vaguely mirroring the sky but with a dirty hint of green to it.  It still doesn’t look quite right to me, probably because the paint is too thick, making it clash a bit against the purple water in the adjacent panel.

Otherwise, though, I'm liking this one.  The sun and birds in the sky in the right panel look good.  And I have to keep reminding myself the looseness and lack of detail in Rochester and Strood in the background is exactly what's needed for a painting like this.  This one's going up for sale but I may well hold it back until after I know I definitely won't need it for LAOTY.

Brian Clough's Finger

I thought I'd have a go at painting Brian Clough today.  It was always going to happen at some point.  I had a choice between source photos and went for the one with him pointing his finger at some "young man".

I went notan style again and used the Shire colours, along with the other two greens in my supergranulating palette and a bit of white gouache at the end.  So after putting down a pencil outline and reserving the whites. I put down a first layer of Shire yellow with Shire olive charged in in places and spattered both these colours over the background.  Then the second layer was Shire blue with Shire green charged in.  And the final layer was Shire grey with Forest brown and green apatite genuine charged in.

I did a lot of fiddling with the painting afterwards, searching for a likeness.  I tried adding more of the Shire yellow over the white areas in a few places.  Also more of the Shire blue over the Shire yellow and more of the Shire grey over the Shire blue.  I even found myself creating more highlights with the white gouache.  But I just couldn't get that likeness.  Phil Daniels kept wanting his portrait painted.  Oh, and because I'd been a bit premature removing the masking fluid, there were a few smudges in places and I covered these with white gouache.

What I've ended up with is a really bad painting, and one that will be going in the reject pile.  It's not just the lack of a likeness: it's that you can clearly see where I've messed around with the white gouache, making the highlights bigger.  I'm going to have another go at Brian at some point using that other source photo that was on my shortlist.

Still, to end on a positive, that hand looks great with a lost edge along the top of the finger.

Ardbeg Distillery

I'm back to painting distilleries.  Today it's the Ardbeg Distillery on the island of Islay.  I've deviated a bit from my normal rule here as I didn't sample the Ardbeg last night but I did enjoy one on Friday night and may well treat myself to another tonight.

The three colours today are cerulean blue, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta, the three colours in my blue notan colour scheme but this painting didn't follow my notan rules everywhere.  Let's go through the five major shape masses in turn.

I thought I'd give hot pressed (i.e. extra smooth) paper a go today, to see whether it might help me get down building shapes more accurately.  An interesting experience.  If anything, I found it harder to "control the bead" on this paper and felt that my outlines were less accurate than normal.  After putting down a pencil outline, I prepped the paper a bit by dragging a candle lightly across the water and diagonally down the rocks.

The Notan app was telling me to leave the sky white but with these three colours being great for skies, I couldn't resist adding some colour there.  I started with cerulean blue, leaving some white spaces, then dropped the other two colours in together in places.  I dabbed at it all with kitchen paper to keep it light.

There were no hills behind the distillery in my source photo so I've exercised artistic license to add them in here.  I thought the painting needed the extra depth that hills would give.  The main colour there is cerulean blue, in a much darker concentration; than the sky, and I added some watery washes in the other two colours later for a bit of variety.

The buildings are where I stuck most closely to the recommendations of the used the notanizer app.  I use masking fluid to get the letters in the wall working reasonably accurately.  This meant masking over er some buts where drainpipes were supposed to be, so I added these later after the masking fluid came off.

I had fun with the rocks.  I started with cerulean blue all over, as recommended by the app, and then French ultramarine over most of that area, as also recommended.  Bu5 I tried ti breathe texture at this stage using stabby brush strokes.  For the third layer, the app only recommended the odd bit of the red here and there but I added more, again trying to create texture.  I also racked things up with some granulation medium and salt.

The water started with lots of ceruean blue, then a bit of ultramarine and a bit of the magenta, all wit/ the edge if quite a dry brush.  I tinkered a bit, adding water, making things run together and losing the brushmarks.  So when it was dry, I added more brushmarks with the ultramarine and the magenta.  And I mixed those two colours together to get a violet and used this to paint in reflections.

And that was me done.  I never really know whether other people will like my paintings but I get a funny feeling that they'll like this one more than I do.  I'm putting this one in the shop window but also looking at it and thinking I could have done much better.

Cammie II

After two days out on the road with the watercolours, today's weather forecast was more than welcome and I've been painting in ten studio while the rain has been coming down.  I went for the inktense pencils today as I didn't want to spend too long painting and quite fancied putting my feet up and reading a book.

Today's model is Cammie, making her second appearance.  I repeated an earlier colour scheme, putting indigo down in the darkest places and then bright blue and poppy red in the medium toned areas, trying to vary the colour around to make things interesting.

Cammie came out OK but I think I prefer the way I used these colours for Miriam, where I used the blue for most of the mid tones and only added a little of the red in a few places afterwards: in this one the blue and red have ended up sharing equal billing.

Still, Cammie's definitely worth a place in the shop window.  I especially like the hair today.  It was the main reason I chose the source photo that I did and it s good to see it playing a starring role.

Towards Leysdown-On-Sea

The weather forecast was for quite a mild day with no rain, so I packed up for another plein air trip.  Today I felt like a trip to the seaside and it was only during the journey when I had to make a choice that I got into the A249 to Sheppey.  I ended up in Leysdown-On-Sea, somewhere where I went painting a couple of years ago.  Lat time I ended North along the cost.  I thought I'd look somewhere different, so headed South.  I ended up in what felt like a shanty town.  The way I jumped when I heard a plastic cup bouncing along the dirt in the wind told me that all wasn't right.  I felt like an intruder and turned back quickly.  I ended up in a similar place to where  I painted before but looking in the opposite direction, back towards Leysdown.

It was so cold out there today that I was always going to pint this one with the tundra supergranulators.  With these colours, it's not generally possible to replicate the colours I see in front of me, so they also loosened me up something I knew I needed to do after yesterday's effort.  The other lesson from yesterday was that I needed to do some value planning but I forgot again.  Still, at least I took  are if one of my two big plein air issues.

I started by putting down a pencil outline, trying to get the horizon about one third of the way up the paper and the row of white gabled houses roughly one third of the way in from the right.  I didn't get either quite right but they'll do.  I reserved some whites in the buildings, white foam in the sea and a post and a sign in the sea and then spattered over some spots in the foreground.

And after that I just kept adding whatever colours either appeared in front of my eyes or just felt right.  The sky, as usual, is made up of the blue, the violet and the pink.  It's darker than I wanted it to be and I tried lifting colour out but with no luck.  Somehow it's easier to get skies right in the studio.  Everywhere else, though, I used all five tundra colours.  I resisted the urge to make the sea heavy on the blue, the sand heavy in brown and the grass heavy on green.  For the sea in particular I could see lots of green on the day, especially near the horizon.  It took me ages to get the grass to something I was happy with but eventually I put on some blue and, bang, there were the grassy mounds in three dimensions. Amazing.

Once most of the painting was complete, I removed the masking fluid and painted in the post and the sign, using a bit of cadmium yellow but dropping in some tundra colours to calm it down.  I added more colour to the buildings in the distance, including the windows but trying to keep everything loose and out of focus.  And I added some foreground grasses with the Merlin brush.

The temperature had been getting gradually colder and it was at around this point that a few drips of rain came down, so I quickly packed up and came home.  I was out painting for about two hours today,  compared to, what, three and a half, maybe four hours at Rochester.  Maybe it was the looseness making me work faster, or maybe it was because there were far fewer people around.  I much prefer busier plein air settings.  If anything, it makes me work slower and that's best for the painting.

Anyway, once I was home, I added some people and birds, made one side of the posts in the sea darker and tried to rescue one of the buildings in the distance by putting some white gouache on it.  It looks better after the rescue  but still not quite right.  And I added in more grasses, this time individual strands using a small pointy brush rather than multiple strands with the bushy Merlin brush.  And that was me done.

I think this is better than yesterday's plein air effort.  It's a painting that tries to convey the mood rather than one that tries to record the scene.  Highlights for me are the beach and the grass.  The colours in them both (especially that blue in the grass) and the way the two merge seamlessly together.  A big win.  I also like the row of houses with peaked gables.  The dark in the middle of the distant buildings is a bit jarring and the sea doesn't look like a very sea colour but these feel pretty minor.  This one's up for sale.

Rochester Castle From The Cathedral

For the first time in 2024, the weather forecast was warm enough and dry enough for me to venture out painting.  Like a very bad penalty taker I drove down to the A2 not knowing whether I was going to go left towards Rochester or right towards the coast.  At the last minute I decided to turn left, so headed into Rochester and to the castle.  I have, of course, painted Rochester Castle before.

Once I was parked, I strolled round looking for a good spot to set up and view to paint.  I settled on a little alcove in the well of the cathedral that would keep me out if the way of pedestrians and that had a view of the wall of the castle at the top of a grassy bank, with a mini tower in it with an interesting curved, sweepy outline and with the min tower and some trees poking over the top.  Before getting started, I wandered into the High Street to grab a coffee to bring back to my painting spot.   I had plenty of conversations with passing pedestrians during the day and with loads of pupils from Gad's Hill School who were queueing up for a school trip around the cathedral.

There's always something I forget to pack.  Today I found myself wishing I'd brought along some salt and more kitchen roll than the two sheets that I'd packed.  Maybe next time.  I deliberately didn't bring the iPad or a ruler, so there was no opportunity for me to sketch using a grid or to plan using the Notanizer app or by just cropping photos.  There was no cheating today.

For colours, I picked a triad of cerulean blue, raw sienna and rose dore.  Cerulean blue suited the sky on the day.  I picked a warm red so that my blue and red would make a neutral colour rather than a purple.  And looking through the swatches of my three different yellows with that blue and red, I thought the combination with raw sienna made up a palette that best suited the subject in the day.  So this is in the key of green warm and, looking at previous green warm paintings, this is a pretty typical green warm painting.  I also used hematite violet genuine to get a bitty texture in the walls and white gouache cadmium red and cadmium yellow for some finishing spatters.

This one was painted in a number of layers but I wouldn’t call them glazes as each layer was a mixture of colours and I wasn’t deliberately using staining colours or trying not to disturbing that was already on the paper.  So, after reserving whites for the flag and flagpole, and spattering some masking fluid over the foreground, I started applying the layers:

In the first layer.  I put down the sky, mainly in the blue but also with some red and a tiny bit of the yellow in places.  For the rest of the painting (castle and grass) I put down fairly random colours as an underpainting, trying vaguely to make shadowy areas darker and grass greener.  The sky was left unchanged after this first layer,

For the second layer, I painted hematite violet genuine over all the castle walls to get some bitty texture and whichever colours felt right for the grass.  The castle walls are generally sensibly planned and the grassy shapes loose and random.

For the third layer, I wanted to start to unify all the castle wall shapes, so mixed up a neutral from my three primaries and applied this, being careful for the first time to get accurate (ish) outlines around the castle.  I didn't variegate the colour randomly everywhere, instead variegating it whenever I got to a different shape - you can see how the castle wall is a slightly different colour to the main tower.  For the grass, I again applied all the primaries loosely, going for whatever colours looked right. There's no hematite violet in the grass.

The fourth layer was the important one.  Light and shadows.  I added some thick, bright raw sienna to the most well lit bits of the castle and painted a neutral mix of the blue and red wherever I wanted shadows.    I wet the shadow edges wherever I wanted them to be soft.  Again, I added impressionistic colours to the grass - it was also at this stage that I started adding grassy marks in red and yellow with the Merlin brush.

The fifth and final layer was the finishing touches.  Windows in the castle, the odd stone or brick in the walls, trees behind the wall and through the hole in the wall, spattered opaque colours in the foreground, painting in the flag and pole after removing masking fluid.  And after removing all the masking fluid spatters in the foreground, that was me done and off to the Deaf Cat for a coffee and to chill out with the kindle.

Let me say first that this one's good enough to go up for sale.  There are a few things, though, that I'm wishing I'd done differently.  Don't read any further if you don't want all your illusions shattered.

- I found the mixes of blue and red (with or without yellow) to be a bit grey, chalky, opaque and boring.  I picked a blue and red that wouldn't make a violet and ended up regretting this decision.  With quinacridone magenta as my red, I could have had much more colourful shadows, they’d have been cooler too, making the rest of the painting look warmer.

- Using white gouache to add some highlights to the castle walls would have made the scene look brighter than using thick raw sienna in the sunniest spots.

- After doing so many watercolours recently with the blues doing all the work and the colours setting the mood, I dropped back into old habits today, working with no value plan, making colours do all the work and trying too hard to replicate the colours I could see in front of me.  This might be a common theme with my plein air paintings and is something l really have to work on.  It's the reason why my studio paintings are always better than my plein airs.

- In particular, the main tower is too similar in colour to be walls.  If I could have made it more blue and a lighter value, the painting would have looked better.

- On a similar theme, I didn’t vary colours within shapes as much as I could have done.  Those walls would have looked so much better with weird red ares in them.   It would have been interesting to drop in some viridian green too.

- It's not clear whether the min tower or the mini tower in the wall is the main subject.  They're painted in too similar a level of detail.  The flag, in particular, looks too accurately painted.

The better I get at painting, the more critical I get about my results.  Sometimes I wish I could just be cocky and think everything I came up with was great.

Ponte Delle Tette, Venice

I started this coloured pencil painting yesterday and finished it today.  It's a bridge in Venice and one that gets its name from how prostitutes used to advertise their services by hanging their breasts out of all the windows overlooking the bridge.

I started by putting down a pencil drawing and impressing a few lines on it with a pointy stick.  Then, as is usual with my coloured pencil paintings, I just putting layer after layer of colour, as lightly as possible but gradually needing to apply more pressure as the grooves in the paper filled with pigment.  The colours that I put on were a mixture of local colour, colours reflecting light and shadow, impressionistic colours that I could see in the source photo, impressionistic colours that I couldn't see in the source photo and unifying warm glazes (including Venetian red).  Once I felt that the paper was close to being filled to capacity, I burnished the painting all over with the white pencil.

Throughout the painting I was trying to keep the background buildings loose and unfocused, as I would have done with watercolour.  After I'd added the burnishing layer, I decided to make the painting a little more watercoloury by painting on a layer of coloured pencil blending medium.  It helped that it was quite warm today so I could keep a window open.  And that was me done.

I ended up with a painting that's not too bad and worth putting up for sale.  But it's not a personal favourite.  It feels a bit washed out to me and I'm thinking that this is because there aren't any really dark areas in it.  Maybe I should stick to source material with big black areas that I can colour in layers of red, blue and green.  They're not only more satisfying to paint, they also look better, at least to my eyes.  I'm also thinking that I should have put a few layers of light greys on the lighter concrete bits rather than adding so many impressionistic colours.  And the water might be a bit too green, even for Venice.

A Clockwork Orange

Another watercolour today.  This is based on a publicity shot for A Clockwork Orange, a famous 1971 Stanley Kubrick film.  With the white face and glass of milk and the dark eye makeup and hat, this was begging to be put through the Notanizer app and painted in three glazes, so that's what I've done today.

With orange in the name of the film, I thought I should paint this using my amber colour scheme.  So the highlights were left white and I painted over layers of transparent yellow, Winsor red and French ultramarine in the areas recommended by the app.

I did do some fiddling to the end today though.  I noticed some pencil lines within the white shapes that I didn't want to rub out and forget because I thought they were important in separating different highlighted areas.  So I added some more of the yellow in those places.  It’s separating the thumb from the milk and the neck from the chin and there's a curved line above and to the right of the mouth.  I think they all add something rather than taking something away.

The other bit of fiddling I did was with the blue.  After I added the blue layer, my darks were looking too brown for my liking and I wanted them to look more blue, or at least black.  So I added another layer of the blue.  In a couple of places, I left the original third layer untouched without the extra blue, to help distinguish between adjacent dark ares - you can see brown areas on the shirt and hand and on the top of the glass where I've done this.  And on a whim, I dropped granulation medium into this final blue layer  and, worried that it might cause cauliflowers, put on some more pieces of the ridged cardboard box that I used for the Avengers paintings and weighted it down for a couple of hours.  And that was me done.

I'm happy with this one.  It would be easy for that huge dark area to look dull and boring but the granulation medium and ridged texture have done a great job there in making it non uniform, even if it's obvious that I'm using a number of separate bits of box rather than one big sheet.  And I've managed to capture the sense of menace, which is the most important thing.  This one's up for sale.

Third Court Room, Christ's College

Back to Christ's College tidy for another indoor landscape.  This is a room in Third Court, probably in Y staircase.  My third year room was in W staircase, just like this one but a mirror image.  Looking towards the mantelpiece, the windows would have been on the right rather than the left, looming out over the Fellows' Garden.  The views from my room that year were amazing.  The door in the top right here (top left in my room) is to a wardrobe; the door to the room is in the bottom right on the same wall.

For colours I picked my green triple glazing scheme, so a first layer of transparent yellow, a second of cerulean blue and a third of French ultramarine.  There's some white gouache there too, on the arm of the chair in the bottom left corner that I painted over in yellow by mistake, even painting over the masking fluid cross that was there to remind me not to paint over it.

It's come out OK, this one.  Not one of my very best but a solid seven out of ten.  It sold quickly, though, to a fellow Christ's alumnus.

Colours On The Path, Queendown Warren

Once again I'm letting the iPad tell me what to paint.  Today it was telling me to paint a landscape using the Artgraf blocks but to put down dry marks and wet them.  I'd only ever painted one landscape before in Artgrafs and that was using them like watercolour pans, so this was going to be a new experience.

As subject matter, this was never going to involve buildings as the Artgraf blocks are too big and clumsy to come up with detail.  So it was going to be a countryside landscape.  Faced with a choice between a shady tree walk and rolling  hills, I went for the trees, thinking that I might be able to get some interesting color in the shadows and on the tree trunks.  This might have been a mistake in retrospect.

My pencil outline was minimal, being not much more than the outline of the path.  After that, I put on a little colour, then wet it.  I remembered to keep the dry marks pretty light, and things came out looking too light:

So I added more colour, trying to make the tree trunks darker and more colourful, trying to make the shadows darker (to make the day look brighter) and trying to put in more leaves to cover up most of the sky.  With the medium being quite opaque, I thought multiple layers of leaves in the top half of the painting might work out OK.  But things just ended up looking worse.  So I kept adding more layers.  I struggled to get the yellow to be opaque enough to cover what was underneath it and ended up having to use the black watercolour block in an attempt to rescue things by just having a dark canopy.  And having to do that is a sure sign that the painting has failed..

Yes.  This is a big flop.  I should have just gone for rolling hills with a distant tree line: that would have suited the Artgrafs better.  I want to forget today ever happened.

Katlyn

I asked the iPad again for a painting idea and it suggested I paint a figure in oil pastels, so that's what I've done today.  This is Katlyn, making her debut on this blog.

I put down a pencil outline using a grid for minimal assistance.  Then I dotted in lots of dark spots in the most shadowy areas and lighter spots in the lighter areas, choosing whatever colours just felt right.  And then I smoothed all the spots out with my finger and with one of the pointy rubber sticks.  That was the planned bit of the process.

The rest was tinkering.  Whenever there was too much of a colour in one area (and in this case it was too much red in Katlyn's left arm) I would add that colour in other places or add other colours where that first colour was too dominant.  I would use dark colours darken areas that I wanted to be more shadowy and lighten areas with white that I wanted to be lighter.  All the time, smoothing in the added colours with my fingers and sculpting the body.

Later on, I added a background by rubbing lightly with the sides of red, yellow and white pastels and smoothing it all out with a finger, this time wrapped in kitchen paper as it wasn't so important for me to feel connected to the marks.  And that was me done.

It's a kind of average oil pastel figure drawing for me.  Not my best and not my worst.  There are some great finger marks in there that would have Tai Shan Schierenberg drooling.  The hand behind the back isn't great, though, and I wasn't ever happy with the neck area.  Still, I'm putting this one up for sale.

Cornelius

Ok so, as I said last time, I asked the spreadsheet on the iPad what to paint next it told me to paint a portrait using the Shire supergranulators and to do it in a more conventional style rather than the multiple layer glazes that I've been applying with advice from the Notanizer app.  For subject matter, I looked through my folder of photos for potential portraits and decided this one of Cornelius from the 1968 Planet Of The Apes film might work with the Shire colours.  It’s definitely Cornelius from the film and not Galen from the TV series - I checked.  Cornelius has been sitting in the waiting room since January when a former work colleague commented that my portrait of Ronnie Wood looked like Roddy McDowall in Planet Of The Apes.  Cheers Joe.

Cornelius is in Shire colours, as requested, and those Shire colours are joined, as usual, by their four hangers on: burnt sienna, cerulean blue, green apatite genuine and forest brown.

After putting down a pencil outline, I reserved some whites in the eyes and ears, some scribbled white highlights in the hair and spattered on some masking fluid in the background for stars, not that the background ended up as a night sky.

And then I just had fun painting.  I started with the dark shadows in the eyes, nose and mouth just to give me reference points for the rest of the painting.  As for the rest, well, the background is made up of burnt sienna, cerulean blue and Shire grey and was patted dry with kitchen paper to keep it light.  For the face there's Shire yellow everywhere and shadowy bits in Shire blue, green and olive in addition to the darks I started with.  The hair and torso, being dark, are mainly made up of a number of layers of green apatite genuine and of forest green with other colours charged in, most notably burnt sienna.  I probably put in one layer too many here and started getting cauliflowers.  When this happened, I stopped to let everything dry then added a single glaze of green apatite genuine and burnt sienna over the whole dark shape to bring it all together.

Once the masking fluid came off, I thought my highlights looked a bit too bright, so I glazed over all the hair and torso in Shire yellow and dabbed off some paint around the highlights in the hair.  I also added a little Shire yellow to the visible eyeball.  And that was me done.

There's a lot to like about this one.  The likeness is there - especially encouraging when I wasn't using the Notanizer app.  I know I've got the likeness because I'm expecting that nose to start twitching.  And the green colours worked out well, vindicating my choice of subject.  I'm less keen on the highlights, which look a bit scribbly, but they're not the sort of issue people pick up on unless they're looking for problems.  Cornelius is definitely worth putting up for sale.

Random Painting Idea Generator

I might have retired as an actuary but you can't keep me away from spreadsheets.  On my walk today, rather than thinking about what painting I could do next, I found myself designing a spreadsheet that would generate random ideas for paintings.  Not what subject to paint but whether to paint a landscape, a portrait, a figure or an abstract.  What medium to use.  And, if using watercolours, what style and colours to incorporate.  And I've been busy today building the spreadsheet.

What you see at the top of the post is the main page of the spreadsheet, recommending that I do a landscape watercolour painting using those three colours.  The lucky number in the table isn't used in any formulae anywhere.  It's just that the spreadsheet app on my iPad doesn't have a Calc button, so the only way I can get it to resample random numbers and come up with a new recommendation is to edit any cell on the spreadsheet, so that lucky number is a button to press to recalculate the spreadsheet.  Make sense?  Let's move on to how it all works.

First the spreadsheet chooses a medium: for me to use.  It has a choice of seven media and I can specify the probabilities of each medium being chosen.  I even have different probabilities depending on the time of year.  Charcoal is better when the weather's warm and I can spray on fixative outside; oil pastels are better when it's cold and they don't melt.

Once the spreadsheet has chosen a medium, it goes on to choose whether I should be painting a landscape, portrait, figure or abstract.  I've specified probabilities that depend on the choice of medium.

If the chosen medium was coloured pencil, Inktense pencil, oil pastel, charcoal or markers, we're done.  But for Artgraf blocks or watercolours, there's more to do.  Artgrafs are easier: the spreadsheet just needs to decide whether I should use them dry and add water to the marks or to just pretend they're watercolour pans.  Again, I can specify the probabilities.

And then there's watercolours, where the spreadsheet needs to recommend a style and a choice of colours.  I have separate pages of specified probabilities for landscapes, portraits, figures and abstracts.  Here's the probability input page for watercolour abstracts:

First of all, the spreadsheet is faced with a choice of styles:

- a single image where I mix colours either on the paper or in the palette

- a "climate change" painting.  This is one where I use all three supergranulator sets, using the tundra set in one side of the painting, the desert set on the other and the Shire set in the middle

- a single image using the Notanizer app, with up to three layers of colour applied in glazes

- a painting made up of three images, each using the Notanizer app and with paint applied in glazes

Then it chooses styles:

- for the basic single image, it first chooses whether I should use my conventional or supergranulator palette (with specified probabilities).  If it chooses the conventional palette, then it also chooses at random one of my four transparent blues, one of my three transparent reds and one of my three transparent yellows (in each of the three cases with equal probabilities for each colour).  If it chooses the supergranulator palette, it also chooses one of the three supergranulating sets (with specified probabilities).

- no colour choices are necessary for climate change paintings: they use all three supergranulator sets

- for the glazed single image, it first chooses whether I should use my conventional or supergranulator palette (with specified probabilities).  If it chooses the conventional palette, it chooses one of my four established triple glaze colour schemes (blue, green, amber and red themed, with specified probabilities).  If it chooses the supergranulator palette, it also chooses one of the three supergranulating sets (with specified probabilities).

- if it chooses the glazed, triple image it chooses between my two established triple image schemes (the traffic light scheme in my conventional palette or the one based on supergranulators, with specified probabilities).

And that's how it works.

I have a separate page of probabilities for portraits where I'm currently not allowing it to choose climate change paintings and have a bias towards glazed paintings using the Notanizer app:

And a separate page of probabilities for figures, where I'm open to some climate change or glazing ideas that I've not tried before:

And a page of probabilities for abstract paintings where I'm avoiding the glazing and climate changing ideas:

And that's how it works.  There's the flexibility there for me to go in and make changes to probabilities in future, something that's bound to happen.  The thing about actuarial models is that they always come with the flexibility to play a out with the underlying parameters.

I'm not sure whether I'll have time to paint over the weekend but I'm going to christen this spreadsheet by giving it a go and letting it choose my next painting.  Wish me luck, here we go…..

Hmmm….OK….a portrait without using the Notanizer app.  Will be interesting to do this and see whether I've progressed over the last couple of months.

The Avengers 1965-67

And here they are together, Steed and Mrs Peel.  They go quite brilliantly together and are up for sale as a pair.

Mrs Emma Peel

It was always going to happen.  Steed needed a partner.  I decided to go for Mrs Peel, a character that was sure to make a great painting.

After using two of my favourite three tundra colours yesterday, I made the other one the star today: tundra violet.  And I decided that one layer of paint would be enough.  But I couldn't resist dropping the other four tundra colours in wet into wet for a bit of variety.  Just like yesterday, I worked quickly, using the masking fluid to aid rapid painting and resetting anything that looked like it might be drying too quickly.

I weighed down ridged cardboard again while the painting dried.  The texture's come out pretty unevenly today, which I quite like.  It's good to have variety in colours and texture when only a single layer of paint is being applied.

I'm calling this one another success.  There's a lot of white space there on the paper but I think this makes things more interesting.  Mrs Peel is up for sale but as part of a two painting collection with Steed.

Major The Hon. John Wickham Gascoyne Beresford Steed

This one took me a couple of days but it was worth it.  I picked out John Steed as played by the late Patrick MacNee in The Avengers and The New Avengers as my subject because I wanted someone prim and proper, befitting the pinstriped texture I was hoping to create.

Pinstriped texture!  What pinstriped texture?  Well, I've had this box sitting round for a couple of weeks now:

I'm not sure what was originally in it.  Something for the wife I think.  Anyway, it's covered in these stripy ridges that are just begging to be used to add texture to a watercolour painting, so that's what I've been doing over the last couple of days.

This one is a two layer glazed painting: one layer of tundra pink over the medium and dark tones followed by a layer of tundra blue over the darks.  Why only two layers today?  Well, first because the third layer in my last three layer tundra painting came out looking muddy and second because with only two layers I was hoping to be able to create and see stripy textures in every layer: three layers might have been pushing it.

I started by putting down a pencil drawing using a grid.  Today, rather than drawing the portrait itself, I just drew the boundaries of the layer that I was going to be painting in pink.  I was happy that with those pink areas down on the paper I wouldn't have any problems working out where to paint the blue in the second layer.  I masked out any small highlights that I wanted to stay white and masked the boundaries of all the big pink shapes.  This might sound a bit excessive.  My reasoning was that I wanted to put all the pink down quickly so that it was still wet when I pressed down the textured surface: if I took my time getting the big shapes right, some of the paint might dry in places.  Anyway, once the masking was done, I put down the tundra pink in all the required areas.  If anything was even hinting at drying, I dropped in more of the pink, wet into wet.  If I waited until I was sure the paint was drying, there was a real danger of creating cauliflowers.  And once I was happy that all the pink areas were covered and that the paint was sufficiently wet everywhere, I put the ridged cardboard down on it, oriented horizontally, weighed it down with a pile of books and left it overnight.

Then this morning, this is what I found underneath it all:

And that, my friends, is what I call a successful experiment.  The tundra pink is variegated, bluer in some places and pinker in others.  But that texture!  Horizontal lines clearly visible everywhere and looking a bit like computer code.  It even reminds me of this Tom Jones album cover.  I seriously considered just removing the masking fluid and stopping here but decided to carry on.  I thought a second layer could seriously improve what was already a pretty good likeness.

So I carried on with the second layer: tundra blue.  I started with a few bits of masking fluid where I needed to reserve small, medium tone, pink shapes.  Once this was dry I again worked quickly, keeping everything wet, while also trying not to disturb the (non–staining) first layer of paint.  I considered orienting the stripes in the second layer with a gentle upward slope, parallel to the tilt in Steed's hat, but decided in the end to go for vertical stripes.  So, just as before, I put the ridged cardboard onto the wet paint and weighed it down.

And after five or six hours, I took everything away to find one of my greatest ever paintings underneath.  Not only do the stripes show up in the blue layer, but the pink stripes are still visible everywhere, even where there's blue over the top and I've ended up with a criss crossed pattern.

My original plan was to wet all the background, fill it with watery tundra orange and tundra green, cover it with bubble wrap and weigh it all down overnight but I changed my mind.  There's a lot of white left untouched on the paper but it doesn't feel wrong and I do like the lost edges on the hand: people can picture much more realistic hands in their heads than I can paint on paper.

So there you go.  A big success.  Where next?  More Avengers?  Stripy textures with different colour schemes?  Stripy textures at different angles?  Stripy textures combined with bubble wrap textures?  Stripy textures on landscapes?  All sorts of possibilities have opened up.

Oh, and Steed's obviously up for sale but only as part of The Avengers 1965-67 Collection.

Heading Home, Queendown Warren

I wanted to try something different today.  I've had a go at doing a conventional landscape painting in three glazes using the Notanizer app.  The app gives me great results for portraits and for what I've been calling indoor landscapes but what about the wide open country?  I picked a view on Queendown Warren that I go past on my daily four mile walk on those days when my walk doesn't have to include a visit to the local farm shop.

For the colours I picked the Shire supergranulators and supplemented them with their five best friends: green apatite genuine, forest brown, cerulean blue, burnt sienna and cadmium yellow.  Ten colours in all, which is a lot for me.

So the process today was to:

-  put down a rough pencil outline without using a grid (but with some tiny pencil marks around the outside of the paper where the ends of the grid lines would have been)

- gently rub a candle along the foreground for some texture

- mark in some highlights, including the fence posts, and spatter on some more masking fluid in the foreground and middleground and in the big tree

- although the Notanizer was telling me to leave it white, wet the sky area, apply cerulean blue leaving white clouds and add Shire grey wet into wet for some dark clouds

- paint over all the light, medium and dark areas with a glaze of Shire yellow, Shire green and Shire olive, varying the colours; add burnt sienna in places to keep the greens under control

- use masking fluid to reserve any small light valued shapes

- paint over all the medium and dark areas with Shire grey and Shire blue, varying the colours and dropping in the odd bit of burnt sienna

- paint over all the dark areas with green apatite genuine and forest brown.

One thing you might have spotted that I did differently today was that I included Shire green in the first glaze rather than the second.  I'm still not sure which level suits it best.  To be honest I'd be happy with just Shire yellow in the first layer and Shire blue and Shire grey in the second: the green and olive don’t exactly sing the loudest here.

Anyway, that should have been it but I found myself doing some tinkering:

– I added lots of grassy tufts in forest green, green apatite genuine, burnt sienna and Shire grey.  This was definitely required, even if it was just to ground the fence.

– some of the white highlights on the path were looking too bright, so I muddied some cerulean blue with burnt sienna and put this over the whites to look like sky reflections

– I added some birds – they always look good

– I added some cadmium yellow marks to the big tree on the left to help it stand out against the row of trees to its right

 – and, yes, that big row of trees.  I tinkered a bit too much there, trying to get lots of different colours working wet into wet and only succeeded in creating cauliflowers.  You can see how the trees are all darkest at the edges where all the water I added kept pushing all the pigment particles outwards.

There's a huge lesson for me here.  If I'm to do these three layer glazed paintings, I need to give up the idea of creating wet into wet effects in any of those layers.  This is what made a mess of that row of trees.  This probably means that I shouldn't be using the three layer glazed method for conventional landscapes as subjects like that are always screaming for some wet into wet action and for the paint to create its own patterns.  For portraits and indoor landscapes, though, where I need to be more control and won't be wetting into wet, the three layer glazes are still looking like the way to go.

While I'm less than happy with that row of trees, this is going up for sale because local paintings tend to be popular.