13 September 1999

After yesterday’s news that I won’t be wildcarding it at LAOTY and the arrival of two new Artgraf colours, today was always going to be an Artgraf portrait day. It’s only my second one of these, Duane Allman being the first. Today’s subject was going to be John Koenig, played by Martin Landau in Space 1999. My source photo had Doctor Helena Russell played by Martin’s wife Barbara Bain in the background. It was only as I was putting down the pencil outline that I also decided to include Doctor Russell, and why a great decision that turned out to be.

A bit of pre-painting experimentation revealed yellow, red and green to be a great combination for a posterised painting. Definitely better than the red/green/brown combinations that I’d been considering. I also found that the mixed colours in the medium and dark areas looked better if I started from the darkest layer rather than the lightest. This is the other way around to how I’ve done all my other posterised paintings and felt as natural as driving on the other side of the road.

So first I put down green in all the darkest areas:

Then the idea was to put down red in all the medium and dark areas, although I might have missed some places:

And finally yellow in all the light, medium and dark ares, although I missed some greens, reds and green and reds:

And finally I added water, finding all the places where I’d not made marks where I should have done. I was careful with my brush marks to allow adjacent shapes to run into each other while not brushing one shape over the top of another which I know from experience causes problems. I did a little tinkering in a couple of places, using the blocks as pans, to improve likenesses. And that was me done.

And you know what? This came out pretty well. It’s not as good as some of my watercolour portraits but we’re talking different media. The likenesses here are pretty good, especially Doctor Russell, which I find mad given how few brush marks there are in her face. This one’s going up for sale. And with the better of the two likenesses being the one in the background, I’m going to just name it after the date the moon was blown out of Earth’s orbit.