Alan Shearer

Lots of stuff going on at the moment so I thought I'd be better off just going for a quick inktense pencil painting today and give the sepia pencil it’s first proper workout.  Looking through all the portraits in my ideas pile, the one that looked like it might work nest in monotone was one of Alan Shearer, so he got the nod today.

So I put down a pencil outline, coloured all the dark areas in sepia, wet the pigment, let it dry and rubbed out all the pencil marks.  Here's what I ended up with:

I was pretty disappointed: maybe it's the sepia colour, maybe it was me app,sing too much pigment or maybe it was to do with painting large areas but everything looked too streaky for my liking.  It was all a bit ugly.

So I added some more colour.  First some Iris blue over all the background darks and over background middle tones recommended by the Notanizer app.  Then wild flame over all the darks and middle tones on the face.  Things still weren't quite right, so I got the app to recommend to me some light areas and I went over these and some of the middle tones with sun yellow.  And that was me done.

I guess there's a likeness of sorts there.  And a great likeness in the right eye.  But it's far from perfect and a bit of a comedown after the last two paintings.  It's not going in the shop window.

Tomorrow might be a day off, with. BT engineer coming round at some point to sort out the wifi.  That sort of thing trashes my day.